Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it you cannot complain.
When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, "Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure."
My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.
We must see what in the Israeli identity - in the Israeli - we can give to other people rather than speaking so often of taking, expanding territory.
As the music played over the speakers and the waterfall in the pool filled the silence around us, I knew that without a doubt I had just been ruined.
She wouldn't come back. She hated me. She hated Nan. She hated my mom. She hated her father. She wouldn't come back here... but God, I wanted her to.
She'd barely covered up her long, tan legs in a pair of shorts that made me want to go to church on Sunday just to thank God for creating her. - Beau
We were living in Denver, Colorado, and I was teaching high school. I asked the kids to write a short story, so I thought I should write some myself.
When the sea goes down, there will come from the mainland boats and men. And they will find ten dead bodies and an unsolved problem on Indian Island.
My first book was so horrible I have deleted all copies of it. Thankfully, it was before the Internet, so there are no lurking caches of it anywhere.
I need noise and interruptions and irritation: irritation and discomfort are a great starter. The loneliness of doing it any other way would kill me.
When I am writing, I focus one hundred percent on my writing. Then, by the time I'm half way through the book, I'm already thinking about the ending.
She felt as if the mosaic she had been assembling out of life's little shards got dumped to the ground, and there was no way to put it back together.
Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides.
To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass.
I sat down in the sand, breathless with shame and failure. God, I thought, some defender of the weak. Some freedom fighter: Joan of Arc in sunscreen.
There are some achievements which are never done in the presence of those who hear of them. Catching salmon is one, and working all night is another.
There's a tendency, especially among revolutionaries, to only show the good side of yourself and then when you come to power, the bad side comes out.
Oh, that river of wishes, the slippery crocodile dream of it, how it might have carried my body down through all the glittering sand bars to the sea.
At the national level, I don't know how to describe a threat to destroy Country A in order to punish Country B other than to call it state terrorism.
You have to realize that, when it comes to the South, we carry around a lot of baggage. The South lost the war, and I spent years denying my culture.
All men are mad in some way or the other, and inasmuch as you deal discreetly with your madmen, so deal with God's madmen too, the rest of the world.
It's because you're always fighting sentiment. You're fighting sentimentality all of the time because being a mother alerts you in such a primal way.
One thing is certain in life. Just when things are going well, soon afterward they are certain to go wrong. It's just the way things are meant to be.
A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed.
But I will not tell you how long or short the way will be; only that it lies across a river. But do not fear that, for I am the great Bridge Builder.
We need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.
But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want; they do not always like it.
Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back -- to be sucked back -- into it?
Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only "liked": it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive.
Dating is like pushing your tray along in a cafeteria. Nothing looks good, but you know you have to pick something by the time you reach the cashier.
Does the madman know he is mad? Or are the madmen those who insist o. Convincing him of his unreason in order to safeguard their own idea of reality?
I think that's great - I just try not to be one of those people. I find the more I think about it, the less free I feel when I write and when I work.
Contentment is mostly a matter of talking yourself into believing that God will not strike you too hard for leaning in the direction of your hungers.
Do you like him much?' I told you I liked him a little. Where is the use of caring for him so very much: he is full of faults.' Is he?' All boys are.
People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience.
In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display.
some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.
When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.
Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash.
How everything you ever love will reject you or die. Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you're proud of will end up as trash.
The bigger the mistake looks, the better chance I'll have to break out and live a real life. Our real discoveries come from chaos. - Brandy Alexander
In light this bright, after so long in the dark, everything we can see is only black and white. Only glaring shape-outlines we have to blink against.
I wouldn't get nearly as many books written if I lived in New York. The Columbia Gorge is fantastic. When the sun shines, I just want to be outdoors.
Girls, in particular, use storytelling to establish hierarchies, a pecking order. There is a sort of jockeying of who is in charge of shared history.
If you dwell in the darkness, you can see in the dark and look into the light. But in choosing the darkness, you know you are destined to walk alone.
Slavery was a violent, brutal, immoral system, and in accurately depicting how it worked, you have to include that, obviously. Or else you are lying.
People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.
Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion.