Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'd like to show how 'intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.
But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born.
I want you to be with me in the dark. To hold me. To keep loving me. To help me when I get scared. To come right to the edge and see what's there.
Banks introduced the installment plan. The disappearance of cash and the coming of the credit card changed the shape of life in the United States.
Maybe if I try hard enough, we'll fall into each other and become one single person and we can share our pain instead of carrying it by ourselves.
What exactly was the difference? he wondered to himself. And who decided which people wore the striped pajamas and which people wore the uniforms?
I sometimes go back to walk through the ghostly remains of Sutton Place where the rude, new buildings stand squarely in one another's river views.
So it happened at last: I was about to become a thief, a cheap milk-stealer. Here was your lash-in-the-pen genius, your one story-writer: a thief.
Being exposed to the enlisted Army was an eye-opener. I thought everyone was like me, but the enlisted Army is a constituency of the dispossessed.
The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was.
For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.
[T]o love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.
... there is wisdom in madness and strong probability of truth in all accusations, for people are complete, and everyone is capable of everything.
My love of books - not just of their tactile pleasures but of their astonishing variety - was born in a book-filled house; my father is a scholar.
In his voice resonated the timbre of a man who thinks he has convinced himself of an idea, but masks his own doubt by laboring to persuade others.
Miss Leefolt sigh, hang up the phone like she just don't know how her brain gone operate without Miss Hilly coming over to push the Think buttons.
If you go to Tokyo, I think it becomes very obvious that there's this almost seamless mixture of popular culture and Japanese traditional culture.
I think Yelena Akhtiorskaya is a genius. What she manages to do, linguistically and emotionally, in the span of a single sentence, is astonishing.
I enjoy bluegrass, folk, gospel, and classical. I don't listen to music when I write. I sometimes listen to music just before I sit down to write.
My freshman year in college, I got a job working security. This was a high-tech building in Santa Clara, engineers coming in and out all the time.
The first, indeed the only, requirement of a diet is that it should lose you weight without reducing your alcoholic intake by the smallest degree.
Mom and Dad were great, but being asked where I was going every time I left the house - or where I'd been every time I returned - got old quickly.
I'm not a person who would get up at 5 A.M. to write, but I could sacrifice my Friday night and just order in dinner, sit at home and get into it.
Who here wants to be a writer?' I asked. Everyone in the room raised his hand. 'Why the hell aren't you home writing?' I said, and left the stage.
The novel is a highly corrupt medium, after all - in the end the vast majority of them simply aren't that great, and are destined to be forgotten.
I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.
...the love, respect, and confidence of my children was the sweetest reward I could receive for my efforts to be the woman I would have them copy.
I think she is growing up, and so begins to dream dreams, and have hopes and fears and fidgets, without knowing why or being able to explain them.
The summer after I got divorced, my children asked to sleep in my bed again. It would be the first time we'd shared a bed since they were infants.
He felt that there is a loose balance of good and evil, and that the art of living consists in getting the greatest good out of the greatest evil.
Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.
It is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them.
The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.
faith, it seems to me, is not the holding of certain dogmas; it is simply openness and readiness of heart to believe any truth which God may show.
It's no use to worry about what people think. I never do. I used to. But when I saw that they'd really rather think wrong than right I gave it up.
No one wants to know how clever you are. They don't want an insight into your mind, thrilling as it might be. They want an insight into their own.
If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up.
By its existence, the Peace Movement denies that governments know best; it stands for a different order of priorities: the human race comes first.
From the earliest wars of men to our last heart-breaking worldwide effort, all we could do was kill ourselves. Now we are able to kill the future.
Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it.
One thing I incorporated in my novel 'The Poe Shadow' was the little-known fact that documents show Poe inherited a slave and decided to free him.
I just write what I want to read, and sometimes keeping it interesting means adding one more element that ends up adding another year to the work.
I know well enough that there have been dogs so loving that they have thrown themselves into the same grave with the dead bodies of their masters.
For the army is a school in which the miser becomes generous, and the generous prodigal; miserly soldiers are like monsters, but very rarely seen.
The bullet that has hit us Muslims today left the gun centuries ago when we let the clergy decide that knowledge and education were not important.
A vast deal of human sympathy runs along the electric line of needlework, stretching from the throne to the wicker chair of the humble seamstress.
Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one ... to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.
Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race.
What the short story needs above all is for one of the big publishers to get an equivalent series up and running and to support it and promote it.