Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Why did people assume that the beautiful among them needed nothing but their beauty to bring them happiness? That behind the beauty there was nothing but an empty shell, insensitive shell?
It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion that they were created rather to feel than reason.
It took me at least all my 20s and some of my 30s to get the confidence to realise I could just write about what I wanted to write about without having to pass a test or look super clever.
I think being central to the culture is overrated. Who really gives a damn if something is popular? Jay-Z isn't actually any better than James Joyce even though more people understand him.
For a novelist, the great thing about the Stone Age people is that we know virtually nothing about their beliefs - which means that I get to make it up! But it's still got to be plausible.
Hell has been conceived as a police institution, to inspire fear in this world. But the worst of it all is that it no longer frightens anyone, and therefore it will have to be closed down.
Not to be alone - ever - is one of my ideas of hell, and a day when I have had no solitude at all in which 'to catch up with myself' I find mentally, physically and spiritually exhausting.
But I think she would have been happy with Fabrice,' I said. 'He was the great love of her life, you know.' Oh, dulling,' said my mother, sadly. 'One always thinks that. Every, every time.
There's never a bad time to put earplugs in. They're the kind of thing you can reject as a bit lame, but somebody told me to do start wearing earplugs and it turned out to be great advice.
In the summer of 2010, I was working on a version of "True Detective" that I was thinking might be my next novel, and it was told in these two first-person voices; Cohle and Hart's voices.
In the summer of 2010, I was working on a version of 'True Detective' that I was thinking might be my next novel, and it was told in these two first-person voices; Cohle and Hart's voices.
How had I become middle-aged while the ravages of time ignored her? I didn't know and didn't care, and before I could stop them, the words were already out. "You're beautiful," I murmured.
I think that men know how to romance a woman and most do it well, at least for a time, otherwise women wouldn't marry them. The problem is that most of them begin to rest on their laurels.
It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.
There are many times when I think I would have rather died with my husband. It would have been pleasanter, simpler. But it would have been worse for the children and the family in general.
I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.
In such places as Greenwich Village, a menage-a-trois was completed- the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.
You frighten me, when you say there isn't time." "I don't see why. Christians have been expecting the imminent end of the world for millennia." "But it keeps not ending." "So far, so good.
It has been my experience that the better a man you are, the more folks there are who resent you for it, and find occasion to get angry at you no matter how kindly meant your deeds may be.
Oh yes!...The sweet summons of God to man. That's when He calls you up to His arms. And it's the most beautiful thing, a rebirth, a new life. But, just the same I'm in no rush to find out.
The fire of true enthusiasm is like the fires of Baku, which no water can ever quench, and which burn steadily on from night to day, and year to year, because their well-spring is eternal.
My mother was a member of the Cape Coloured community. 'Coloured' is the South African word for the half-caste community that was a by-product of the early contact between black and white.
Tolkien is considered the grandfather of fantasy and, for me, I consider myself the grandson, with Terry Brooks as the kind of crazy uncle of fantasy, being the one who brought me into it.
(Insanity) is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate - confusion between him who worships and that which is worshipped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.
death ... is not a great affair! Think - it happens once only - to each of us - as birth does. What do you know about being born? that - and no more - will you know about the act of death.
Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it." Stephen Covey "It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing.
What is missed when people talk about books is the moment of grace when the reader creates the book, lends it the authority of their life and soul. The books I love are me, have become me.
We're all hoping that Trump doesn't get our world on his terms because there won't be anything of it left. Trump is a true psychopath, a psychopath in the way that tragedy becomes tragedy.
I had a talk with the president of my publisher, and he averred that e-books are dropping off . So I wonder if the potential advantages are really going to happen as quickly as they ought.
To the old our mouths are always partly closed; we must swallow our obvious retorts and listen. They sit above our heads, on life's raised dais, and appeal at once to our respect and pity.
Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying, Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now, Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying, My heart remembers how!
The result of a single action may spread like the circles that expand when a stone is thrown into a pond, until they touch places and people unguessed at by the person who threw the stone.
My first novel was called 'Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald,' about the difficulties of graduating from college, the longing and mourning you feel when all your promise seems to float away.
I do not think that you can be changing the end of a song or a story like that, as though it were quite separate from the rest. I think the end of a story is part of it from the beginning.
Happy endings must come at the end of something,' the Walrus pointed out. 'If they happen in the middle of a story, or an adventure, or the like, all they do is cheer things up for awhile.
He who has waited long enough, will wait forever. And there comes the hour when nothing more can happen and nobody more can come and all is ended but the waiting that knows itself in vain.
How many chapters have been written about love verses - and how many more might be written! - might, would, could, should, or ought to be written! - I will venture to say, will be written!
Businesspeople are like sharks, not just because we're gray and slightly oily, or because our teeth trail the innards of those we have eviscerated, but because we must move forward or die.
In the future if my mother tries to shame me with her disapproval, I will let her know in no uncertain terms that I reject her and all of her codependent baggage. I am Codependent No More.
My children are as at home in the Port Elgin library as I used to be, and they've sat in the cinema seats where I sat with their aunt every Saturday afternoon, watching the matinee movies.
By experience", says Roger Ascham, "we find out a short way by a long wandering." Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further travel, and of what use is our experience to us then?
In Sleep we lie all naked and alone, in Sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, and we are strange and beautiful asleep; for we are dying the darkness and we know no death.
Everybody's vaguely miserable sometimes...and most people are vaguely miserable most of the time. The trick is to scrap your way from the most-of-the-time to the some-of-the-time category.
Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor, ruin your health or live to old age, you always end up back where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses - young loving.
Why do writers, say, give up a job in economics and decide to write poetry? Or, why do they give up a job in a bank and decide to paint, like Krishan Khanna? They want to convey something.
I would consider myself simply a critic of the market economy. My standard isn't primarily political. First of all, it's ecological. And then I get to matters that are social and cultural.
While ice is not really alive, it is certainly animate. It exists in an dynamic state of perpetual vibration, flux and movement. Enjoy its existence, and its safe passage in the mountains.
In India the odd thing is that English is this almost artificial language floating on the surface of a place with about fifty other languages. The same is true of Nigeria but even more so.
If you... scaled down human beings, scaled down society, if you land with a group of little boys, they are more like a scaled-down version of society than a group of little girls would be.