Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I wish I had the courage not to fight and doubt everything... I wish, just once, I could say, 'This. This is good enough. Just because I choose it.
There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them. The regular way is just to watch the world do it. Just read the newspaper.
He can’t ground her if he’s already killed her,” I pointed out when Juliana quoted this to me. “Well, he can, but it wouldn’t have the same impact.
I've always been a Civil War buff. In fact, the ships that always fascinated me the most were the ironclads, because they were the start of an era.
The nice clean intimacy which we now so admire between the sexes is sterilizing. It makes neuters. Later on, no deep, magical sex-life is possible.
I always hoped that I would settle down with someone. Marriage, I could really give two shits about, as an institution, but it makes things easier.
I am endlessly busy, bringing up five young kids, and trying to keep up with the three older ones. I still spend most of my life driving car pools.
Fiction is sort of a way to set the record straight, and let people at least believe that justice can be achieved and the right outcomes can occur.
Small mistakes tend to lead to large ones. Ours is a lifetime appoinment, and all you have is your reputation. Once it's gone, it doesn't comeback.
...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.
The fun of reading as "an exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human beings to talk to each other about stuff we can't normally talk about."
The city had defeated her, just like they said it would. Like some overcrowded party, no one had noticed her arrival, and would notice if she left.
The freedom of women was achieved by two things: One, the Pill. Two... by labour-saving devices like the washing machine. By science, not feminism.
He regards boredom, I observe, as the One and Mighty Enemy of his soul. And will succeed in conquering it, I am sure—if he survives the experience.
Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being's eyes.
Characters in a book are very much like personalities divvied up within a family. In the end, it all averages out to a sort of overall averageness.
I've always thought that you live in the present, you live in a specific present. You are writing, present tense, so write in the present as it is.
I'm always looking for complicated characters in fiction about whom I can feel a dozen feelings at once - in the space of a single paragraph, even.
I think I like 'em better like that...divinely dull...just the quiet bearers of their own beauty, like the priestesses in a Panathenaic procession.
The grave is, I suspect, the sole commonwealth which attains that dead flat of social equality that life in its every principle so heartily abhors.
Every decision is liberating, even if it leads to disaster. Otherwise, why do so many people walk upright and with open eyes into their misfortune?
Madam your wife and I didn't hit it off the only time I ever saw her. I won't say she was silly, but I think one of us was silly, and it wasn't me.
A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away.
The maimed bodies aren't the worst. That's the easy way to hate war. The safe way. I - hate it just as much for the maimed souls that stay at home.
I believe in a Republic of Merit in which water is allowed to find its own level, where voters, like drivers, are tested before being turned loose.
In U.S. discourse, immigrants are mostly represented as less than human, a policy problem, or as just that, a category, and categories are prisons.
An artist must know the reality he is depicting in its minutest detail. In my opinion we have only one shining example of that - Count Leo Tolstoy.
Even as I approach the gambling hall, as soon as I hear, two rooms away, the jingle of money poured out on the table, I almost go into convulsions.
For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.
Both looked back then on the wild revelry...and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude.
And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.
I found it better for my soul to be humble before the mysteries o' God's dealings, and not be making a clatter about what I could never understand.
The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.
Human longings are perversely obstinate; and to the man whose mouth is watering for a peach, it is of no use to offer the largest vegetable marrow.
A man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
they say that time heals all things, they say you can always forget; but the smiles and the tears across the years they twist my heart strings yet!
I bet this is a brothel," she whispered to Gendry. "You don't even know what a brothel is." "I do so," she insisted. "It's like an inn, with girls.
Most people were startled to find out there were books that preceded Game Of Thrones. I'm a case of working forty years to be an overnight success.
I didn't even realize this at first, but there's almost no central character in any of my 24 books who doesn't have a dead mother or a lost parent.
I'm always astonished by a forest. It makes me realise that the fantasy of nature is much larger than my own fantasy. I still have things to learn.
She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it.
If mankind is naturally good, he is sure going against his nature more and more of the time. It sounds like a bad joke: the paranoids are after us.
The Marquesan girls dance all over; not only do their feet dance, but their arms, hands, fingers, ay, their very eyes seem to dance in their heads.
We are only what we are; not what we would be; nor every thing we hope for. We are but a step in a scale, that reaches further above us than below.
The grand points in human nature are the same to-day they were a thousand years ago. The only variability in them is in expression, not in feature.
In some things, we Americans leave to other countries the carrying out of the principle that stands at the head of our Declaration of Independence.
I have always written only for myself - to clarify things, to clarify things with myself, to understand in an inner way what is actually happening.
Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves.
Once she has committed sin, there is nothing left for the Protestant woman, whereas the Catholic Church, hope of forgiveness makes a woman sublime.