Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Periods' are largely an invention of the historians. The poets themselves are not conscious of living in any period and refuse to conform to the scheme.
Will you come with me to the mountains? It will hurt at first, until your feet are hardened. Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?
In the midst of a world of light and love, of song and feast and dance, [Lucifer] could find nothing to think of more interesting than his own prestige.
We poison the wine as He decants it into us; murder a melody He would play with us as the instrument...Hence all sin, whatever else it is, is sacrilege.
His soul is in his stories. I once asked him who inspired him to create his characters, and his answer was no one. That all his characters were himself.
Write," he said. "I'll write to you as soon as I get there," answered Julian. "No. Not to me. Write books. Not letters. Write them for me, for Penelope.
You come from the city and think small means simple when all it realy means is complicated in a smaller place. Which sometimes adds to the complication.
But this is a story, and in a story there is always someone beautiful enough." - 'The Girl with Two Skins' from A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects
And if they thought her aimless, if they thought her a bit mad, let them. It meant they left her alone. Marya was not aimless, anyway. She was thinking.
People tell stories and it's up to those who listen whether to believe or not." "Shouldn't the storyteller believe it." "The storyteller should tell it.
You want to hate somebody, if you can, just to keep your powers of discrimination bright, and to save yourself from becoming a mere mush of good-nature.
Old maids like the houseless and unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in the world: the demand disturbs the happy and the rich.
I am for anything that makes teens visible in an honest way... in other words, anything that represents them the way they are, positively or negatively.
When I start a new novel and find myself diverted by domestic activities, many of which I genuinely enjoy, I panic that I will never write another word.
Book clubs, both online and in person, have become a large percentage of the reading public, and many of them won't consider reading books in hardcover.
Parents are like God because you wanna know they're out there, and you want them to think well of you, but you really only call when you need something.
The evil queen was stupid to play Snow White's game. There's an age where a woman has to move on to another kind of power. Money, for example. Or a gun.
We thought all this teaching was to make us smart. What it did was make us stupid. With all the little facts we learned, we never had the time to think.
My goal is more to be remembered. They'll remember this thing and like it in the future. The trick is to stay remembered long enough for that to happen.
In my family, we can't just sit and be together. We have to be shelling peas or husking corn or something. A larger task. Some way of being with people.
in dreams it is often the case that the greatest extravagances seem bereft of their power to astonish and the most improbable chimeras seem commonplace.
Paule Marshall does not let the black women in her fiction lose. While they lose friends, lovers, husbands, homes, or jobs, they always find themselves.
I'd read a lot of thrillers about politicians and presidents, but never one where you flip the stereotypes and make good people bad and bad people good.
An editor is an accomplice, looking in from the outside. That objective view is essential. We don't write in a vacuum, and we don't publish in a vacuum.
And when he catches me looking at him, he gives me this incredibly sweet, calm smile, and I think that we've got our lives ahead of us, our whole lives.
I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed.
I find people who prejudge reality TV to be annoying. Art comes from anywhere. Culture can ooze out of any crack. Prejudging is the death of creativity.
Given the infinite number of coincidences that could happen, very few ever actually do. The universe exists in a coincidence-hating state of anti-fluke.
Mediums change you by their very existence. They do this on fundamental levels because they force you to favour certain parts of your brain over others.
If there is an abiding theme in 'The Pursuit of Happiness,' it is the idea that you come into the world already shaped by other people's past histories.
When a man tells you what people are saying about you, tell him what people are saying about him; that will immediately take his mind off your troubles.
She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.
When we are young... we often experience things in the present with a nostalgia-in-advance, but we seldom guess what we will truly prize years from now.
Originally I was opposed to gay assimilation and targeted gay marriage as just another effort on the part of gays to resemble their straight neighbours.
I'm not such a fan of imagination. If you're alive to details, they oftentimes suggest a richer or deeper imaginative line than you would have imagined.
If you want to be respected by others, the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.
Thus, as a result of heightened consciousness, a man feels as if it's all right if he's bad as long as he knows it- as though that were any consolation.
Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.
A good work can be communicated across languages ... [provided one does not] fall into the trap of narrow-minded nationalistic or chauvinistic thinking.
I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.
Anger seek it prey,-- Something to tear with sharp-edged tooth and claw, Like not to go off hungry, leaving Love To feast on milk and honeycomb at will.
In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.
It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand.
The Penguin books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.
We may be together for another six months—a year—there’s no knowing. At the end we’re certain to be apart. Do you realize how utterly alone we shall be?
I am surrounded by flatterers and fools. It can drive a man to madness,.. . Half of them don’t dare tell me the truth, and the other half can’t find it.
A lord may love the men that he commands, but he cannot be a friend to them. One day he may need to sit in judgement on them, or send them forth to die.
Tolkien made the wrong choice when he brought Gandalf back. Screw Gandalf. He had a great death and the characters should have had to go on without him.
Something about the howling of a wolf took a man right out of his here and now and left him in a dark forest of the mind, running naked before the pack.
Let his sword break and his shield shatter, Sansa thought coldly as she shoved out through the doors, let his courage fail him and every man desert him.