Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger.
Christian principles are, admittedly, stricter than the others; but then we think you will get help towards obeying them which you will not get towards obeying the others.
Am I to understand,' said Reepicheep to Lucy after a long stare at Eustace, 'That this singularly discourteous person is under your Majesty's protection? Because, if not--
All writers know how important a good title is. It's the first thing readers see, along with a knock-your-socks-off cover - a seductive 'come hither' for the story within.
When you're on your own, you look for signs. Sometimes you make them up, sometimes they're actually there, but most of the time you can't tell the difference from the two.
I was climbing up a mountain-path With many things to do, Important business of my own, And other people's too, When I ran against a Prejudice That quite cut off the view.
I know that there's a cultural expectation that women be nurturing, delicate flowers. And I am. So delicate. But that doesn't mean I can't write a good, gory murder scene.
Democracy is not something you put away for ten years, and then in the 11th year you wake up and start practicing again. We have to begin to learn to rule ourselves again.
I was a supporter of the desire, in my section of Nigeria, to leave the federation because it was treated very badly with something that was called genocide in those days.
This would be...a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power.
you're a product just as much. a product of a product. the people who design cars, they're products, your teachers, products. the minister in your church, another product.
You can feel good about failure. Failure means you did something. You finished the story even if it wasn't what you'd hoped. Failure means you're learning. Growing. Doing.
My heart has become as hard as a city street, the horses trample upon it, it sings like iron, all day long and all night long they beat, they ring like the hooves of time.
I would rather sit still in a state of peace on a stone than ride in the motor-car of a multi-millionaire and feel the peacelessness of the multi-millionaire poisoning me.
The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.
The rise of fascism in Europe sent most Americans home. Some black American communists who had emigrated to the Soviet Union perished in Stalin's purges of the late 1930s.
When I was in high school, I looked for the black presence in a British historical tradition - before too much slavery and empire - that would not cost me my self-respect.
We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?
Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I've stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again.
Right, my phone. When these things first appeared, they were so cool. Only when it was too late did people realize they are as cool as electronic tags on remand prisoners.
Every relationship has its own language. It takes a long time to evolve and read one another. Just as it's true for people, it's also true on a national or cultural level.
I had always been led to believe that ageing was a slow and gradual process, the creep of a glacier. Now I realise that it happens in a rush, like snow falling off a roof.
There was a wonderful atmosphere of gentle age, a smell of flowers and beeswax, sweet yet faintly sour and musty; a smell that makes you feel very tender towards the past.
I found it quite easy to carry on a casual conversation it was as if my real feelings were down fathoms deep in my mind and what we said was just a feathery surface spray.
As the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.
Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.
The way we experience history and time in all its forms shifted quite massively between 1989 and 2001 - to the point where contrivances like decades are now kind of silly.
But it struck him that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality.
Democracy is not a Beloved Republic really, and never will be. But it is less hateful than other contemporary forms of government, and to that extent deserves our support.
The government is mainly an expensive organization to regulate evildoers, and tax those who behave: government does little for fairly respectable people except annoy them.
His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.
Most timidities have such secret compensations and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self depreciation.
In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: Is there someone new?
As it has been finely expressed, "Principle is a passion for truth." And as an earlier and homelier writer hath it, "The truths we believe in are the pillars of our world.
We are always talking about being together, and yet whatever we invent destroys the family, and makes us wild, touchless beasts feeding on technicolor prairies and rivers.
'Jane Eyre,' when I think of that book, it conjures up the best moments of college English courses. Literature is extraordinary, especially when you have a good professor.
Writing for me is a dragnet that carries everything away with it: expressions and figures of speech, postures, feelings, thoughts, troubles. In short, the lives of others.
Our constancy, same might call it our madness, was necessary to wear down the oppressive forces of the old democracy which, in Spain, was a hundred years behind the times.
The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners.
Let us not forget that the reasons for human actions are usually incalculably more complex and diverse than we tend to explain them later, and are seldom clearly manifest.
Paradise is hidden in each one of use, it is concealed within me too, right now, and if I wish, it will come for me in reality, tomorrow even, and for the rest of my life.
I am a ridiculous man. They call me a madman now. That would be a distinct rise in my social position were it not that they still regard me as being as ridiculous as ever.
What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined - to strengthen each other - to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.
How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice.
In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.
All things journey: sun and moon, Morning, noon, and afternoon, Night and all her stars; 'Twixt the east and western bars Round they journey, Come and go! We go with them!
I am feeling easy now, and you will well understand that after undergoing pain this ease is opening paradise. Invalids must be excused for being eloquent about themselves.
We are apt to think it the finest era of the world when America was beginning to be discovered, when a bold sailor, even if he were wrecked, might alight on a new kingdom.
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it.