Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The crimes of extreme civilization are probably worse than those of extreme barbarism, because of their refinement, the corruption they presuppose, and their superior degree of intellectuality.
Getting some distance allowed me to develop a hunger for India and to come back and explore it in a way I wouldn't have had I been living here. And that probably made me more political as well.
I am telling you that the child will not out live the buildings. Do you understand that wheras women may touch the immortal by giving birth, men--great men-- must build monuments and seek fame?
I'm receiving 300 to 500 letters every week from people telling me that God used my stories to save their marriage or to introduce them to Christ or to heal a relationship that had been broken.
The dead leave their shadows, an echo of the space within which once they lived. They haunt us, never fading or growing older as we do. The loss we grieve is not just their futures but our own.
My background is standard American blue collar of the itchy-footed variety. We're new-world mongrels. The women in the family read horoscopes, tea leaves, coffee bubbles, Tarot cards and palms.
It's hard when you make a film from a book that so many people love, because there's no way to get the entire story into a two-hour movie. But I was pleased with the reaction [for Kite Runner].
When I go to Afghanistan, I realize I've been spared, due to a random genetic lottery, by being born to people who had the means to get out. Every time I go to Afghanistan I am haunted by that.
I had asked her for help, and she had sent me to the lions. I knew that she was trying to save her little girl, but sometimes mothers with the best intentions kill their daughters all the same.
It was so much easier to be angry. Being angry made him feel strong, even though-- and this contradiction did nothing to diminish his anger-- he was angry only because his position was so weak.
Story has a mind of its own and tells things sometimes it might have preferred us not to know. Stories operate like dreams; both veil what is to be uncovered, neither is capable of the coverup.
The mind is satisfied with phrased, but not the body, the body is more fastidious, it wants muscles. A body always tells the truth, that's why it's usually depressing and disgusting to look at.
That's all small talk is - a quick way to connect on a human level - which is why it is by no means as irrelevant as the people who are bad at it insist. In short, it's worth making the effort.
One day it hit me: Truest friends, God bless their hearts, could not care less. They love you, they're pleased you're getting married and, ultimately, they don't give a fig how you get it done.
There are moments in your life when you see yourself through someone else’s eyes, when your only hope of believing you’re capable of doing something is because someone else believes it for you.
We must love men more than things, and I admire and weep more for the soldiers than for the churches which were only the recording of an heroic gesture which today is reenacted at every moment.
We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.
A relieved grin filled up Thorne’s face. “We’re having another moment, aren’t we?” “If by a moment, you mean me not wanting to strangle you for the first time since we met, then I guess we are.
I better make the plot good. I wanted to make it grip people on the first page and have a big turning point in the middle, as there is, and construct the whole thing like a roller coaster ride.
I rode 300 miles through the forest and ate all sorts of strange food. And every time 'Torak' did something new, like swimming with killer whales or kayaking, I thought I'd better go and do it.
Is it possible your pragmatical worship should not know that the comparisons made between wit and wit, courage and courage, beauty and beauty, birth and birth, are always odious and ill taken?.
Science teaches us, in effect, to submit our reason to the truth and to know and judge of things as they are-that is to say, as they themselves choose to be and not as we would have them to be.
There is great incongruity in this idea of monuments, since those to whom they are usually dedicated need no such recognition to embalm their memory; and any man who does, is not worthy of one.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that you are there, in everything I am, in everything I've ever done, and looking back, I know that I should have told you know much you've always meant to me.
You know...it's a hard age. Kids are in that stage where they're beginning to understand the world of adults, without having the maturity of adults to deal with everything going on around them.
Sir Terry Pratchett - he was knighted in 2009, and on him it looked earned rather than entitled - wrote about dragons, wizards, turtles, witches, time-travelling monks, and suitcases with legs.
I'll have that someday, thought Peter. Someone who'll kiss me good-bye at the door. Or maybe just someone to put a blindfold over my head before they shoot me. Depending on how things turn out.
I met Donald Barthelme when I was 30, and it's fair to say that before that moment, I was pre-modern, and after I met him, I was nudged rather forcefully towards this other end of the spectrum.
Are you okay?' she asked me. Of course,' I said. 'Why wouldn't I be okay?' There are lots of reasons why you might not be okay.' There are lots of reasons why anyone might not be okay,' I said.
Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.
Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine, and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.
I think the most important part of storytelling is tension. It's the constant tension of suspense that in a sense mirrors life, because nobody knows what's going to happen three hours from now.
I begin every novel with the vow that I will not write about technology, Catholicism, or Hell. As you know, I end up writing about all three. They just happen to be personal obsessions of mine.
Let the Unions become engines for the working people to right their wrongs. Not benefit societies, or burial clubs. Let the Unions become civilian regiments to fight in the cause of the people.
I looked back at some of my earlier published stories with genuine horror and remorse. I got thinking, How many extant copies might there be, who owns them, and do they keep their doors locked?
I'm one, too," he said. "What?" He spit a wad of blood and mucus into the dirt. "A virgin." What a shock. "What makes you think I'm a virgin?" I asked. "You wouldn't have hit me if you weren't.
Maybe you reach a certain point in evolution where boredom is the greatest threat to your survival. Maybe this isn't a planetary takeover at all, but a game. Like a kid pulling wings off flies.
I know that it's easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and irreversible.
After years of having a dog, you know him. You know the meaning of his snuffs and grunts and barks. Every twitch of the ears is a question or statement, every wag of the tail is an exclamation.
I think everybody must be aware that this society is a whole lot shakier now than it was before the war. I was trying to examine, in 'Dog Soldiers,' the process of that blow falling on America.
One of the things I've learnt is not to depend on there being a woman in your life to make it work. I love my work, I love my children, I've got wonderful friends, you know, I have a nice life.
Many of us didn't believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border.
Shakespeare drew a map of the human mind as clearly as Newton mapped the heavens. Wht is one considered science and the other fir only to be mocked with jokes about pretty girls and drury lane?
It is fair to say the New Testament is the most ethically sophisticated of the great scriptures; the proper comparison for the Qur'an is with the Old Testament - against which it holds its own.
There is no greater compliment to the Jews than the fact that the degree of their unpopularity is always the scientific measure of the cruelty and silliness of the regime under which they live.
Never can the innate power of a work be hidden or locked away. A work of art can be forgotten by time; it can be forbidden and rejected but the elemental will always prevail over the ephemeral.
always there is a sort of dream of air between you and the hills of California, a veil of unreality in the intervening air. It gives the hills the bloom that peaches have, or grapes in the dew.
The inside jokes weren't jokes anymore. They had become stories. Nobody brought up the bad names or the bad times. And nobody felt sad as long as we could postpone tomorrow with more nostalgia.
I don't like coming home. It keeps me from being nostalgic, which by nature I am. Even before the plane begins its descent, I find myself dreading the questions left unanswered by my childhood.
Never give up on your dream...Perseverance is all important. If you don't have the desire and the belief in yourself to keep trying after you've been told you should quit, you'll never make it.