Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
No one's perfect," I whisper. "It doesn't work that way. One bad thing goes away, and another bad thing replaces it." I traded cowardice for cruelty; I traded weakness for ferocity.
I'm surprised you know that," I say quietly, " since you left halfway through my one and only fight." "It wasn't something I wanted to watch." he says. What's that supposed to mean?
His eyes search the crowd until they find my face. My heartbeat lives in my throat; lives in my cheeks. "I still don't understand," he says softly, "how she knew that it would work.
I close my eyes. I don't expect Four to reassure me, and he makes no effort to, but I feel better standing here than I did out there among the people who are my friends, my faction.
Lynn smacks Uriah hard in the back of the head, Christina says, “Hey Tris!” and Uriah cries, “Ow! How on earth do you make a pillow hurt, Lynn?” “My exceptional strength,” she says.
Writing is a very lonely occupation. To write you need to concentrate, to concentrate you need to lock yourself away. No distractions; you want your stream of thought uninterrupted.
I love speculating about solutions to problems in mathematics. I have no interest whatever in sudoku. But I do look at chess and bridge problems in newspapers. I find that relaxing.
I've been told my old city possesses a 'thriving arts scene,' whatever that is; personally, I think artists should lie low and stick to their work, not line-dance through the parks.
If we represent knowledge as a tree, we know that things that are divided are yet connected. We know that to observe the divisions and ignore the connections is to destroy the tree.
I suppose if I had to give a one-word answer to the question of why I read, that word would be pleasure. The kind of pleasure you can get from reading is like no other in the world.
Censors will try to censor a little bit more each year (because, like editors and other officious people, censors don't feel they are getting anywhere unless they are up and doing).
Coming from where I came from, the Midwest, in the era I was born, the '30s, movies were glorious fun - Bette Davis dying or whatever. But whatever they were, they were not serious.
Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.
In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.
Truth is used to vitalize a statement rather than devitalize it. Truth implies more than a simple statement of fact. "I don't have any whiskey," may be a fact but it is not a truth.
The greatest mercy, I have often thought, of the Mediterranean coast lies in its mosquitoes. Did we not suffer from their unwelcome attention, we could not bear our holidays to end.
All adventuring is rash, and all innovations dangerous. But not nearly so dangerous as stagnation and dry rot. From grooves, cliques, clichés and resignation - Good Lord deliver us!
My life has been in shambles, like my personal relationships, my laundry, paying bills now I have someone who pays my bills and it's always been a challenge because it overwhelms me.
'The Man in the High Castle' was not the first alternative history novel, nor even the first Nazis-win-the-war novel, but it is still probably the most influential book in the genre.
As you yourself have said, what other explanation can there be?' Poirot stared straight ahead of him. 'That is what I ask myself,' he said. 'That is what I never cease to ask myself.
Everything I dream is something simple and plain and everyday. That’s how I know they are dreams. Because the simple and plain and everyday things are the ones that we can never have
I researched children's rights, divorce law, and parental kidnapping. Millions of children and parents are touched by the inadequacy of the legal system to deal with the human heart.
Some people think of the '50s as a time of innocence, but they are misremembering it or reinventing it: if you look at the papers of the time, they are filled with dread and anxiety.
The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond clear water in it. Some shady trees leaned over it, and rushes and water-lilies grew at the deep end.
I do not know much about God and prayer, but I have come to believe over the last twenty-five years, that there's something to be said about keeping prayer simple. Help, Thanks, Wow.
If you're lucky you find your way into a spiritual community and you start to find the great teachers of all the ages who said the same thing. There's only love, you're made of love.
Life does not seem to present itself to me for my convenience, to box itself up nicely so I can write about it with wisdom and a point to make before putting it on a shelf somewhere.
by then I'd figured out the gift of failure, which is that it breaks through all that held breath and isometric tension about needing to look good: it's the gift of feeling floppier.
I could run nearly naked on a hot, windy beach and plunge without care into a running diamond sea; roll on the sand and fling my arms wide to the sun and still be what I was...young.
It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.
You men find so many angels in your travels. You have been honester than some. You have generally been off with the old angel before you were with the new, as far at least as I knew.
Chess is all about getting the king into check, you see. It's about killing the father. I would say that chess has more to do with the art of murder than it does with the art of war.
People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it - walk.
Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not.
I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.
I'm not sure why I'm so drawn to heroes who do bad things and to villains who think they're the good guys, but I do find that moral ambiguity and conflict makes for great characters.
Man was appointed by God to have dominion over the beasts, and everything a man does to an animal is either a lawful exercise or a sacrilegious abuse of an authority by divine right.
The real trouble about the duty of forgiveness is that you do it with all your might on Monday and then find on Wednesday that it hasn't stayed put and all has to be done over again.
Wouldn't it be dreadful if some day in our own world, at home, men start going wild inside, like the animals here, and still look like men, so that you'd never know which were which.
To admire Satan [in Paradise Lost] is to give one's vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography.
I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say "at last", I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do — so much have I enjoyed it.
Many thousands of people have had the experience of finding the first friend, and it is none the less a wonder; as great a wonder (pace the novelists) as first love, or even greater.
The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a metaphor, not just for books but for ideas, for language, for knowledge, for beauty, for all the things that make us human, for collecting memory
One of my ambitions has been to go back to what those great authors were doing then ... to bridge that sensibility of old Victorian Gothic tales and reconstruct them in a modern way.
It was strange how you could never form any conclusion from what women said. It was not that they did not know what they were talking about, but you never drew the right conclusions.
To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds, and watch the renewal of life - this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do.
My home is humble and unattractive to strangers, but to me it contains what I shall find nowhere else in the world - the ... affection which brothers and sisters feel for each other.
It did not seem as if a prop were withdrawn, but rather as if a motive were gone: it was not the power to be tranquil which had failed me, but the reason for tranquility was no more.
I Believe she thought I had forgotten my station; and yours, sir.' 'Station! Station!-- your station is in my heart, and on the necks of those who would insult you, now or hereafter.
The time is approaching when we shall consider it abhorrent to our civilization to allow a human being to die in prolonged agony which we should mercifully end in any other creature.