Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Whenever somebody comes up with a good idea, there's somebody else who has never had a good idea in his life who stands up and says, "Oh, you can't do that..."
The past is interesting to me because it's been dumbed down or flattened out, or academically nitpicked so you can't get any life out of it, you just get data.
Beginning 'Beloved' with numerals rather than spelled out numbers, it was my intention to give the house an identity separate from the street or even the city.
I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.
Before I chose Dauntless...I felt assured of my long lifespan, if nothing else. Now there are no reassurances except that where I go, I go because I choose to.
We believe that peace is hard-won, That sometimes it is necessary to fight for peace. But more than that, we believe that Justice is more important than peace.
We don't know what's happened out there since they put us in here, or how many generations have lived and died since they did.We could be the last people left.
Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.
Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss Poems that take a thousand years to die But ape the immortality of this Red label on a little butterfly .
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
Growing up is a ritual, more deadly than religion, more complicated than baseball, for there seem to be no rules. Everything is experienced for the first time.
So it is that the life force may take possession of a man-- so that in the end he may be possessed by something greater, no longer at all belonging to himself.
What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.
Buttercup's mother whirled on him. 'Did you forget to pay your taxes?' (This was after taxes. But everything is after taxes. Taxes were here even before stew.)
The whole drug war is nothing but a pretext to increase police power and personnel, and that, of course, is dead wrong. So many created imagined drug offenses.
I read and write for most of the day, but I do let myself be interrupted by real life. I enjoy going out with friends and try not to take myself too seriously.
That's the thing about fiction writers: what seems alarming or particular or perverse about them is simply the shape of their brain - they cannot be otherwise.
It seems to me that we often commit ourselves wholly to something while knowing almost nothing concrete about it. Another word for that, I suppose, is 'faith.'
Most successes are unhappy. That's why they are successes - they have to reassure themselves about themselves by achieving something that the world will notice.
Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes a person's noblest impulses.
When I was in the gulag I would sometimes even write on stone walls. I used to write on scraps of paper, then I memorised the contents and destroyed the scraps.
There is something predetermined in the mutual attraction between Germany and Russia. Otherwise, this attraction would not have survived two ghastly World Wars.
It'll be with me like it was with Uncle Ned's ole ox, I reckon; he kep' a-goin' an' a-goin' till he died a-standin' up, an' even then they had to push him over.
This kind of knowing you can never tell to anyone. If you want us to survive, you cannot trust a soul'... 'Not for any reason on this earth. You can never tell.
One of my favorites is "Time and Again" by Jack Finney. It takes place in Manhattan and goes back and forth between 1882 and the 1950s. It's really a cult book.
Thanks to our modern era, facts are incredibly easy to come by. A few web searches for your subject matter, and you have all the information you could dream of.
Your thin white face, chérie; he said, as if he saw it for the first time. Your thin white face, with its promise of debauchery only a connoisseur could detect.
...the moon that hung over the garden like some great priceless pearl, flawed and blemished with grey shadowy ridges as only a very great beauty can risk being.
Are you hero enough to unite yourself to one whom you know to be suspected and despised by all around you, and identify your interests and your honor with hers?
I am truly miserable - more so than I like to acknowledge to myself. Pride refuses to aid me. It has brought me into the scrape, and will not help me out of it.
Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic...but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.
I think it must be very hard to be one of the new young writers who are urged to put themselves forward when it may be the last thing on earth they'd be good at
He must have known me if he had seen me as he was wont to see me, for he was in the habit of flogging me constantly. Perhaps he did not recognize me by my face.
Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.
Every time I step onto an airplane, I turn to the right and take a good, hard stare into the maw of the engine. I don't know what I'm looking for. I just do it.
Corn syrup and added fats have been outed as major ingredients in fast food, but they hide out in packaged foods too, even presumed-innocent ones like crackers.
I didn't actually figure out how to get guidance, so I just decided to go to school at University of Southern California because they sent me a glossy brochure.
But to me, the most important page in my daughter's book is the last one - because it's blank. It says, "Your Hero's Photo Here," and, "Your Hero's Story Here."
Disappear Here. The syringe fills with blood. You're a beautiful boy and that's all that matters. Wonder if he's for sale. People are afraid to merge. To merge.
Love is energy: it can neither be created nor destroyed. It just is and always will be, giving meaning to life and direction to goodness... Love will never die.
I have heard of novels started in the middle, at the end, written in patches to be joined together later, but I have never felt the slightest desire to do this.
When God becomes a Man and lives as a creature among His own creatures in Palestine, then indeed His life is one of supreme self-sacrifice and leads to Calvary.
If religion does not make us better people, it will make us very much worse. And of all the bad men who have lived, the religious "bad man" is the worst of all.
Most of us, I suppose, have a secret country but for most of us it is only an imaginary country. Edmund and Lucy were luckier than other people in that respect.
I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment; the little daily dose.
I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do.
If we continue to make moral judgements (and whatever we say shall in fact continue) then we must believe that the conscience of man is not a product of nature.
Daughter of Eve from the far land of Spare Oom where eternal summer reigns around the bright city of War Drobe, how would it be if you came and had tea with me?
Some people probably think of the Resurrection as a desperate last moment expedient to save the Hero from a situation which had got out of the Author's control.
In order that we finite beings may apprehend the Emporer He translates His glory into multiple forms - into stars, woods, waters, beasts, and the bodies of men.