Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
They were connoisseurs of boredom. They savoured the various bouquets of the subtly differentiated boredoms which rose from the long, wasted hours at the dead end of night.
What a sense of possession, of confidence, it gave one to have pockets, to shove one's fists into them, as if in simply owning pockets one owned riches, owned independence.
For reasons I can't remember, my family eventually stopped attending church, and I started questioning the Catholic Church's beliefs. I dabbled a little, but nothing stuck.
That sinuous southern life, that oblique and slow and complicated old beauty, that warm thick air and blood warm sea, that place of mists and languor and fragrant richness.
You like to think with young adults that with your books, a little part of it has reached them and will stay with them. It is great to be part of an eight-year-old's world.
Upon the present occasion London was full of clergymen. The specially clerical clubs, the Oxford and Cambridge, the Old University, and the Athenaeum, were black with them.
To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.
There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.
Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave. I never get over being thankful for that - for the courage of my readers.
The two most important things to do for self-defense are not to take a martial arts class or get a gun, but to think like the opposition and know where you're most at risk.
Overall, one of the things that excites me most about self-publishing is that the highest-value use of my time in promoting the books will be found in writing more of them.
They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.
The most precious gift that marriage gave me was the constant impact of something very close and intimate, yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant - in a word, real.
My friendship you shall have, leanred Man," piped Reepicheep. "And any Dwarf--or Giant---in the army who does not give you good language shall have my sword to reckon with.
Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religious. The scientific point of view cannot fit any of these things, not even science itself.
A blessed spirit is a mould ever more and more patient of the bright metal poured into it, a body ever more completely uncovered to the meridian blaze of the spiritual sun.
Of course, we are to pray for spiritual awakening, and in various ways we can do something toward it. But we must remember that neither Paul nor Apollos gives the increase.
Zizi was young and often confused about how to live his life, �and when he made a choice he clung to it with fierce resolve, �as if to beat his uncertainty into submission.
I remember when I was in art classes, I hated following the assignments. And I would get in trouble for doing something totally different or taking it in a weird direction.
Sir,' I interrupted him, 'you are inexorable for that unfortunate lady; you speak of her with hate --- with vindictive antipathy. It is cruel --- she cannot help being mad.
People come to Portland, many of them for the quality of life. They love the physical space here. And yet every year, people climbing the mountain get killed by avalanches.
Whenever I try to do anything on a typewriter, it's like having this machine between me and the words; what comes out is not quite what would come out if I were scribbling.
What you forget when you're planning a hijack by yourself is somewhere along the line, you might need to neglect your hostages just long enough so you can use the bathroom.
Of all the priceless objects left behind, this is what we rescue. These artifacts. Memory cues. Useless souvenirs. Nothing you could auction. The scars left from happiness.
I am not like Stephen King, who writes one book, then writes another. I finish a book and go off and... look for wrecks. Then, six months later, I might start another book.
Come back, true love! Sweet youth, return!— But time goes on, and will, unheeding, Though hands will reach, and eyes will yearn, And the wild days set true hearts bleeding.
In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was.
Pressed against her I can hear eternity -- hollow, lonely spaces and currents that churn ceaselessly, and the fallen snow welcomes the falling snow with a whispered "Hush".
Nobody sits alone accompanied only by a stewing ambition that won't see fruit for years. Ambition is something you turn into publicity before there's anything to publicize.
Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness, and the loveless never find love, only the loving find love, and they never have to seek for it.
God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.
They were evidently small men, all wind and quibbles, flinging out their chuffy grain to us with far less interest than a farm-wife feels as she scatters corn to her fowls.
What is the knocking? What is the knocking at the door in the night? It is somebody who wants to do us harm. No, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them, admit them.
For {she} had adopted the standard of the young: what there was in the moment was everything. And moments followed one another without necessarily belonging to one another.
Who doesn't need hope in their lives: hope that something can change, that someone cares, that not only bad things happen unexpectedly but good things can happen to us too?
McCullers is one of those rare writers who remembers what childhood is like. Not incidents, which anyone can recall, but states of mind, which are so difficult to recreate.
I think my writing was certainly shaped from having lived in a place like Niverville as well as by the family that I came from, the religion that I had, that type of thing.
As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I'm still looking for the door.
What must that be like? To be admired before you’ve even said a word, to be desired two or three hundred times a day by people who have absolutely no idea what you’re like?
She used to pride herself on her refusal to see two sides of an argument, but increasingly she accepts that issues are more ambiguous and complicated than she once thought.
But to say that the race is the metaphor for the life is to miss the point. The race is everything. It obliterates whatever isn't racing. Life is the metaphor for the race.
A mouse slid out from under his hat and scrambled down his sleeve, across his lap, and down to the floor. Nothing,' said Fenworth, 'should distract from a wizard's dignity.
It is my belief that children are full of understanding and know as much as and more than adults, until they are about seven, when they suddenly become stupid, like adults.
The human community is evolving... . We can survive anything you care to mention. We are supremely equipped to survive, to adapt and even in the long run to start thinking.
A vast percentage of the human race is literally not wired neurologically to get irony. Well more than half of humanity takes life at face value, which is to me terrifying.
I am always worried that over-planning and outlining will kill the magic of writing; most of the world I created in 'California' occurred via good old sexy sentence-making.
I have been further enlightened by the conversation and correspondence of some illustrious Italians, whom I would gladly name, were I not afraid of exposing them to danger.
Paradoxically, since gay men rarely have gay parents, cultural transmission must come from friends or strangers (a problem since the generations so seldom mix in gay life).
When I was living in Paris in the '80s, I used to go out with an American model who couldn't speak French. But suddenly everyone could speak English because he was so cute.
A man's own conscience is his sole tribunal, and he should care no more for that phantom "opinion" than he should fear meeting a ghost if he crossed the churchyard at dark.