Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I hate to be obvious," added the Scarecrow, "but you'd have saved yourself a heap of trouble if you weren't too cheap to invest in a leash, Dorothy.
We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.
The patience of poverty. In rice fields, backs bent forever. Amazing, man outoxens the oxen and still smiles. The mystery of India, say Indologists.
It's not necessary to tell all you know. It's not ladylike--in the second place, folks don't like to have somebody around knowin' more than they do.
If you should find yourself in a place that is indifferent to you and there is someone there that your spirit stretches to, then that person is kin.
What does one plant who plants a tree? One plants the friend of sun and sky; One plants the flag of breezes free; The shaft of beauty towering high.
It is upon record, that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right Whale was esteemed a great delicacy in France, and commanded large prices there.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke.
Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up.
Jealousy, an eminently credulous and suspicious passion, allows fancy the greatest possible play. But it does not bestow wit, it banishes all sense.
Everything is bilateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are binary. Janus is the myth of criticism and the symbol of genius. Only God is triangular!
Self-interest is an ineffable feeling which shall follow us into God's very presence since they say there is a hierarchy even among the Holy Saints.
Bankers are lynxes. To expect any gratitude from them is equivalent to attempting to move the wolves of the Ukraine to pity in the middle of winter.
A bibliomaniac is one to whom books are like bottles of whiskey to the inebriate, to whom anything that is between covers has an intoxicating savor.
She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore.
I think there is a natural thing that you feel when you've written something taboo because you just don't want to expose the people you're close to.
A picture was a motionless record of motion. An arrested representation of life. A picture was the kiss of death pretending to possess immutability.
She had once said that she believed the women's liberation movement of the sixties and seventies was actually a ploy by men to get women to do more.
To my child's eyes, which had seen nothing else, Shanghai was a waking dream where everything I could imagine had already been taken to its extreme.
Welcome to a new year at Hogwarts! Before we begin our banquet, I would like to say a few words. And here they are: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!
But who could bear to know which stars were already dead, she thought, blinking up at the night sky; could anybody stand to know that they all were?
There was a brief silence in which the distant echo of Hagrid smashing down a wooden front door seemed to reverberate through the intervening years.
The idea of Dumbledore's corpse frightened Harry much less than the possibility that he might have misunderstood the living Dumbledore's intentions.
Merlin's pants!" shrieked Hermione, jumping up and running from the room. "Merlin's pants?" repeated Ron, looking amused. "She must be really upset.
Sometimes when someone says something stupid, my friends and I just read the reviews out loud and collapse with laughter at the stupidity of it all.
Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.
The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.
Man's rise or fall, success or failure, happiness or unhappiness depends on his attitude ... a man's attitude will create the situation he imagines.
There's the world of the newspapers. They believe that what is happening is happening, which is so naïve. Because they're the first to turn on that.
My ideal is a book that is perfect on every page, that gives you tremendous aesthetic joy on every page. I suppose I am trying to write such a book.
I cannot think well of a man who sports with any woman's feelings; and there may often be a great deal more suffered than a stander-by can judge of.
Elizabeth had never been more at a loss to make her feelings appear what they were not. It was necessary to laugh, when she would rather have cried.
I encourage him to be in his garden as often as possible. Then he has to walk to Rosings nearly every day. ... I admit I encourage him in that also.
Teach us almighty father, to consider this solemn truth, as we should do, that we may feel the importance of every day, and every hour as it passes.
To yield readily--easily--to the persuasion of a friend is no merit.... To yield without conviction is no compliment to the understanding of either.
It was a gloomy prospect, and all that she could do was to throw a mist over it, and hope when the mist cleared away, she should see something else.
Women have no sense of the abstract-a woman admiring the sky is a woman caressing the sky. In a woman's mind beauty is something she needs to touch.
I should say, I don't write about myself or my life. So for me, in fiction, it's always been about what I can dream up, that feels far away from me.
I was raised in a Catholic family, spent twelve years in parochial schools, and had extremely fond memories of my interactions with Catholic clergy.
People often ask if my books should be read in any particular order, but they're all standalone novels, so picking up any one of them would be fine.
In the existence of our lives, there are many coincidences that bring people together, but there's only one person that will own your heart forever.
But you...are my sweetest gift. The life surprise that soothed all my ills and gave me my greatest joys. I feel so blessed you are mine. —Mama Ya-Ya
If you want to express yourself, you need the services of a lover or a psychiatrist; if you want to express a book, you might conceivably manage it.
I bought a packet of Trojan® Ultra Pleasure Extra Sensitive condoms: ‘No. 1 in AMERICA’. They smell nothing like a positive first sexual experience.
Everything we do is tinged with the knowledge that this may be the last time that we will do this, and that makes what we're doing incredibly sweet.
Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.
Love is cheap. You can buy it anywhere. Lives are cheap. It's money that's dear. You have to work days and sit up nights thinking how to make money.
Ask the dust on the road! Ask the Joshua trees standing alone where the Mojave begins. Ask them about Camilla Lopez, and they will whisper her name.
Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.