Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.
Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition.
In the end, for congenial sympathy, for poetry, for work, for original feeling and expression, for perfect companionship with one's friends--give me the country.
Most contemporary fiction sucks. It's intellectually dishonest, often morally dishonest. It's cheap and easy. It pretends to be deep but is really quite shallow.
I don't buy trends, because the pieces don't last and I wind up never wearing them. That's why I like to shop with my children; they'll always tell me the truth.
Footnote: 79) The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and -- delightfully -- it really is anchor-shaped, i.e. the same shape as anchors in tattoos.
You will say that I am old and mad, was what Michaelangelo wrote, but I answer that there is no better way of being sane and free from anxiety than by being mad.
I believe death is only a door. One closes, and another opens. If I were to imagine heaven, I would imagine a door opening. And he would be waiting for me there.
As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.
If the human condition were the periodic table, maybe love would be hydrogen at No. 1. Death would be helium at No. 2. Power, I reckon, would be where oxygen is.
Sir. My lord. Master Roydon." The young man blurted out most available titles except for "Your Majesty" and "Prince of Darkness." These were implied nonetheless.
I love being outdoors and being with animals, and when you're on a horse, you have to leave your anxieties and worries behind in the barn. It's very therapeutic.
Personally, it's a comfort and happiness to know that my work is taken seriously and is not marginalised and put in a box of ethnic immigrant writing in America.
There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.
Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well-you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me.
I don't have any special passion for politics, it being a never-ending merry-go-round of bosses big and small, all generally mediocre. I actually find it boring.
Writing on the beach is not what it's cracked up to be. The sand blows, and you perspire, and the page gets all blotty and messed up, so I don't do that anymore.
I've been invited to speak at about 20 colleges. There's always this moment when I'm having dinner with the college president: 'Ernie, where'd you go to school?'
I'm surprised that VR has come about so quickly. It's lucky I just happened to write a book imagining virtual reality right on the cusp of it actually happening.
I wasn't used to children and they were getting on my nerves. Worse, it appeared that I was a child, too. I hadn't known that before; I thought I was just short.
Animal rights activists gives disillusioned feminists an excuse to go back to being women protecting wee creatures without compromising their radical credentials
What's important about me is that I really have, in ways I never could have foreseen when I was young, a writing career that's reached a lot of different places.
There are some places you love with your heart, and there are some places that you love with your mind- the places that you love with both are called 'libraries'
Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.
When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me, I reach my end, for artless I surrendered to one who is my undoing and my end.
A Complicated Kindness is just that: funny and strange, spellbinding and heartbreaking, this novel is a complicated kindness from a terrifically talented writer.
Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.
Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.
A kiss is but a kiss now! and no wave of a great flood that whirls me to the sea. But, as you will! we'll sit contentedly, and eat our pot of honey on the grave.
I'm fat, but I'm thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there's a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there's a statue inside every block of stone?
An admiral without ships, a hand without fingers, in service of a king without a throne. Is this a knight who comes before us, or the answer to a child's riddle?
Most have been forgotten. Most deserve to be forgotten. The heroes will always be remembered. The best. The best and the worst. And a few who were a bit of both.
I do play all the characters, when I write them, one after another. If they actually had to film me, the only one I could play would be Samwell Tarly or Hot Pie.
The old man laid a withered, spotted hand on his shoulder. "It hurts, boy," he said softly. "Oh, yes. Choosing . . . it has always hurt. And always will. I know.
I think my very earliest stories were all intellectual exercises and I was writing from experiences I had never had about characters who were about an inch deep.
One never knows how much a family may grow; and when a hive is too full, and it is necessary to form a new swarm, each one thinks of carrying away his own honey.
Do you recall Fred Merriville?” She stared at him. “Fred Merriville? Pray, what has he to say to anything?” “The poor fellow has nothing to say: he’s dead, alas!
Unhappy people do the oddest, most terrible things, just trying to keep despair at bay. All you have to do is accept them...go around them...take evasive action.
We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls.
Next, suddenly, lightning suddenly, while I am still a child, a branch is lopped from my being, and a portion of my childhood ends forever. I see what poets are.
A good conscience is never lawless in the worst regulated state, and will provide those laws for itself which the neglect of legislators had forgotten to supply.
Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.
Above all do not ask that justice be just: It is just, because it is justice. The idea of a just justice could have originated only in the brain of an anarchist.
Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.
Someone once asked me "If your life could be extended to 150 and you could start another career, would you?" And I said "No, thanks, I think I'll stick at this."
It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance.
Something has happened, hasn't it? ... It's like being up close to something so large you don't even see it. Even now, I'm not sure I can. But I know it's there.
At the door, Audrey called, "Are you coming?" "No, just breathing hard, love." He glanced at her and was rewarded by an outraged glare, followed by, "Oh, my God!
In days of doubt, in days of dreary musings on my country's fate, you alone are my comfort and support, oh great, powerful, righteous, and free Russian language!
As we read the school reports on our children, we realize a sense of relief that can rise to delight that thank Heaven nobody is reporting in this fashion on us.