Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think my stubbornness has served me well. I just knew at an early age what I wanted to do and I was determined to be able to make it happen, no matter how long it took.
Do what you love. Live fearlessly and take risks. Don't take no for an answer from anyone - go ahead and prove the naysayers wrong. Believe that anything can be possible.
There were hundreds of them spread across the floor, each telling its own tale of triumph or sadness, each letter representing a phase in her life. She had kept them all.
Anyway, it doesn't matter how much, how often, or how closely you keep an eye on things because you can't control it. Sometimes things and people just go. Just like that.
A lizard in the spring - hear his darling sing. A bird with wings to fly - go back to his darling weep and moan till he dies. A mole in the ground - root a mountain down.
It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but yourself, than to commit a hasty action whose evil consequences will extend to all connected with you.
I shall be thirty-one next birthday. My youth is gone like a dream; and very little use have I ever made of it. What have I done these last thirty years? Precious little.
The idea of seeing the sea - of being near it - watching its changes by sunrise, sunset, moonlight, and noonday - in calm, perhaps in storm - fills and satisfies my mind.
What tale do you like best to hear?' 'Oh, I have not much choice! They generally run on the same theme - courtship; and promise to end in the same catastrophe - marriage.
The negation of severe suffering was the nearest approach to happiness I expected to know. Besides, I seemed to hold two lives - the life of thought, and that of reality.
It is the story that owns and directs us. It is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark on the face that sets one people apart from their neighbors.
I was stunned to learn that more than 200,000 abandoned, neglected, or orphaned children had been sent from the East Coast to the Midwest on trains between 1854 and 1929.
Hardcovers will never completely disappear. They are delightful to hold; they feel weighty and substantial. But my anecdotal evidence suggests that the world is changing.
I must honor those who fight of their own free will, he said to himself. And I must try to imitate their courage by following my path as a pacifist, wherever it takes me.
Or maybe...just maybe this whole process is our training wheels towards something bigger. If we can reflect and know our lives, we might stay awake and shape our futures.
A hotel, he told me, was a big house where a lot of people lived and ate and slept, but no one knew each other. He said that described most families in the outside world.
The ultimate joke was the idea that capitalism would eat its own feces in order to make money, that would make fun of itself if capitalism thought there was a buck in it.
I was born about 80 years too late. If you were a kid in 1910, the Fourth of July was a big deal. You knew all about the Revolution, and you still had Civil War veterans.
If the world's nations can set aside their petty bickering over religion, politics, and territory, certainly I can 'get that Olympic Spirit' and rise above my prejudices.
He reflected on the decay of mankind-the decline of the human race into folly and weakness and rottenness. 'Be a good animal, true to your animal instinct' was his motto.
He always ran away from the battle with himself. Even in his own heart's privacy, he excused himself, saying, "If she hadn't said so-and-so, it would never have happened.
The sign stopped me-- or rather, this text stopped me. Words are my profession; I seized these and demanded that they explain themselves, that they cease to be ambiguous.
The history of blacks is complicated, fragmented, disturbing to contemplate - not a neat trail of challenges met or of felled trees blocking the path to the mountain top.
That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine.
Yay, Old'uns' Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds an' made miracles ord'nary, but it din't master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o' humans, yay, a hunger for more.
Act', implores the Ghost of Future Regret. 'I shan't give you another chance'. [and so Jacob does] 'Damned fool,' groans the Demon of Present Regret. 'What have you done?
Ethnic divisions can definitely be exacerbated by a lack of natural resources, but those tensions become violent when people manipulate them for their own political gain.
Well then,' said Femworth as he came to his feet, 'let's go. Sounds like a delightful challenge before supper. Stimulate the appetite, or kill it. Interesting either way.
Like an old gold-panning prospector, you must resign yourself to digging up a lot of sand from which you will later patiently wash out a few minute particles of gold ore.
I guess the thing about exposing your heart is that people may not even notice it. Like a flop movie. Or they'll borrow your heart and they'll forget to return it to you.
I think that to acknowledge a new generation is to acknowledge some degree of obsolescence in yourself, and that is very hard to do and often comes with undeniable anger.
The things worth writing about, and the things worth reading about, are the things that feel almost beyond description at the start and are, because of that, frightening.
For many people, myself included, the end of the world is happening all the time! It is a form of criticality that paradoxically gives us hope for change and improvement.
The early mist had vanished and the fields lay like a silver shield under the sun. It was one of the days when the glitter of winter shines through a pale haze of spring.
Man is at the nadir of his stregth when the Earth, the seas, the mountains are not in him, for without them his soul is unsourced, and he has no images by which to abide.
The summit is believed to be the object of the climb. But its true object--the joy of living--is not in the peak itself, but in the adversities encountered on the way up.
I can write anywhere. But I don't use a computer, and I could never write on a laptop. I hate the sound of computers; it's too dull, like it's not doing anything for you.
I have such a vivid memory of seeing science fiction movies and going to the lobby and playing whatever the space games were, and imagine I was blowing up the Death Star.
I am purely evil; Hear the thrum of my evil engine; Evilly I come. The stars are thick as flowers In the meadows of July; A fine night for murder Winging through the sky.
The joker in the deck of lesbian fidelity is female vanity: no woman of fifty is going to undress in front of a woman of twenty no matter how much she might lust for her.
God has such gladness every time he sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to Him with all his heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby's face.
There is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and useful for life in later years than some good memory, especially a memory connected with childhood, with home.
Atheism: It seeks to replace in itself the moral power of religion, in order to appease the spiritual thirst of parched humanity and save it; not by Christ, but by force.
There was a house at the foot of the tower, close to the thunder of the waves breaking against the cliffs, where love was more intense because it seemed like a shipwreck.
For me, writing [was] a question of survival...I could not trust anyone, even my family. The atmosphere was so poisoned. People even in your own family could turn you in.
Every race gets the religion it deserves, and only as policemen, pugilists, and priests have they succeeded, here and there a successful lawyer, but nothing more serious.
Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.
I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.
Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.
You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that evey sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.