Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If only the sense of actuality can be lulled-and it sleeps for ever in most historians-there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.
Women ought to be free - as free as we are,' he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.
Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory.
I've always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to be faithful to my own experience.
Ordinary life bypassed me, but I also bypassed it. It couldn't have been any other way.Conventional life and conventional people are not for me.
There was I, devouring books and yet allowing a man who had never read a book to walk me home for a bit of harmless fumbling on the front steps.
Of course things you don't know about are always nicer'n things you do, same as the pertater on 'tother side of the plate is always the biggest.
I used to be able to write five pages a day, every day, no problem. Now a good day is five or four pages, and that's from 9:30 A.M. until 6 P.M.
They were steaming out of the station before Maia asked, 'Was it books in the trunk?' 'It was books, admitted Miss Minton. And Maia said, 'Good.
I wish the opera was every night. It is, of all entertainments, the sweetest and most delightful. Some of the songs seemed to melt my very soul.
Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder.
Oppressed people are treacherous for the simple reason that treachery is both a means of survival and a way to curry favor with one's oppressor.
For men who want to flee Family Man America and never come back, there is a guaranteed solution: homosexuality is the new French Foreign Legion.
If you're going to have a character appear in a story long enough to sell a newspaper, he'd better be real enough that you can smell his breath.
I had one of those farcical bar mitzvahs where they spell out the words phonetically on index cards, and you don't even know what you're saying.
My God, but what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmatic if for some reason these laws and two times two is four are not to my liking?
One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man's laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.
I have been tortured with longing to believe ... and the yearning grows stronger the more cogent the intellectual difficulties stand in the way.
The eyes mirror the heart of a person. An entire life can be seen through them. Love, sorrow, deceit, pain. If you look closely, it’s all there.
During the day, if I don't have any other commitments, I'm usually at my desk writing, revising, or researching anywhere from four to six hours.
With the beginning of life, comes the thirst for truth, whereas the ability to lie is gradually acquired in the process of trying to stay alive.
One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.
The wrong that rouses our angry passions finds only a medium in us; it passes through us like a vibration, and we inflict what we have suffered.
I could not without vile hypocrisy and a miserable truckling to the smile of the world ... profess to join in worship which I wholly disapprove.
If one harbours anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible.
A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.
A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack on morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise.
In my opinion nothing has contributed more to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country.
Politically, Swift was one of those people who are driven into a sort of perverse Toryism by the follies of the progressive party of the moment.
A very wise author once said that a writer writes for himself, and then publishes for money. I write for myself and publish just for the reader.
whatever our ignorance left to itself, and whatever the wounds that other human beings are, we ought to study ourselves with a sort of devotion.
When the passage "All men are born free and equal," when that passage was being written were not some of the signers legalised owners of slaves?
Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.
The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.
Life in clubs is no paltry sign of the times we live in. Here gentlemen gamble with others whom they would not dream of inviting to their homes.
It is a singular fact that most men of action incline to the theory of fatalism, while the greater part of men of thought believe in providence.
Grief ennobles the commonest people because it has its own essential grandeur. To shine with the luster of grief, a person need only be sincere.
I will devour you. I will lick your bones clean and crush them between my teeth. I will suck the marrow…” “That’s nice,” Kate said. “The shield.
The celebration of death is not a good thing. Fetishizing death isn't a good thing. You should be celebrating life and enjoying it and all that.
I've always got a book in my hands, a novel in my hands. The more I get into film, the more paranoid I get that I'm going to stop seeing things.
When you go away, you see where you come from in a different light. I see Scotland, and the rest of Britain, as much more exotic than I used to.
When you write fiction, you're like a bird making a nest. You remember every little story ever told you. It's funny how things come back to you.
It is better to be a self-made man,--filled up according to God's original pattern,--than to be half a man, made after some other man's pattern.
Ah! soul of mine! Ah! soul of mine! Thy sluggish senses are but bars That stand between thee and the stars, And shut thee from the world divine.
Snape's patronus was a doe,' said Harry, 'the same as my mother's because he loved her for nearly all of his life, from when they were children.
No, there is literally nothing on the business side that I wouldn't sacrifice in a heartbeat to have an extra couple of hours' writing. Nothing.
I think it's alarming that people believe that success enables one to forget how life felt before. As if one could simply exchange one's values.
I've been writing my entire life, and I'll always write. But at times I have told myself that I don't necessarily have to publish anything else.
I'm not anti-middle-class in the slightest. Look at me! I am very pro people putting time and money and effort into trying to improve the world.
When Vishous pushed open the door to the exam room, he got a gander at the kind of seating arrangement that made him think fondly of castration.