Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The bad thing about falling into pieces is that it hurts. The good thing about it is that once you're lying there in shards you've got nothing left to protect, and so have no reason not to be honest
In this room we understand why this war might be fought...it's about our common belief that no one has the right to tell two creatures that they cannot love each other--no matter what their species.
What others regard as retreat from them or rejection of them is not those things at all but instead a breeding ground for greater friendship, a culture for deeper involvement, eventually, with them.
The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.
There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag...
We are changed souls; we don't look at things the same way anymore. For there was a time when we expected the worst. But then the worst happened, did it not? And so we will never be surprised again.
Here's what I think: the five most unattractive traits in people are cheapness, clinginess, neediness, unwillingness to change and jealousy. Jealousy is the worst, and by far the hardest to conceal.
A religion that never suffices to govern a man will never suffice to save him; that which does not sufficiently distinguish one from a wicked world will never distinguish him from a perishing world.
O woman! woman! thou shouldest have few sins of thine own to answer for! Thou art the author of such a book of follies in a man that it would need the tears of all the angels to blot the record out.
It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.
I have always paid careful attention to social and economic conflicts, to the dialectic - if we can call it that - between high and low. Maybe it's because I was not born or brought up in affluence.
I've retroactively made all that wasted time rotting my brain into research. It makes me a hypocrite when I try to tell my own daughter, "I don't know, I think we've played a little too much Mario."
I have a professional acquaintance whose recent eyelid job has left her with a permanent expression of such poleaxed astonishment that she looks at all times as if she had just read one of my books.
The long march of Western civilization from pantheons of gods for every taste to one God for all has been thrown into reverse by celebrity worship to give us a plethora of ancient deities to follow.
It seems hardly fair to quarrel with a place because its staple commodity is not pretty, but I am sure I should have liked Cincinnati much better if the people had not dealt so very largely in hogs.
There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words. Your thought, even a bad one, while it is with you, is always more profound, but in words it is more ridiculous and dishonorable.
She let him finish, scratching his head with the tips of her fingers, and without his having revealed that he was weeping from love, she recognized immediately the oldest sobs in the history of man.
... there is a lightness about the feminine mind--a touch and go--music, the fine arts, that kind of thing--they should study those up to a certain point, women should; but in a light way, you know.
Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated.
In all secrets there is a kind of guilt, however beautiful or joyful they may be, or for what good end they may be set to serve. Secrecy means evasion, and evasion means a problem to the moral mind.
Yet who can say how our souls have been stamped by witnessing such a cruel drama? All souls are hostages to their human envelopes, but souls must decay and suffer at such indignity, don't you agree?
I don't want to hear any words like that while I'm here. Scout, you'll get in trouble if you go around saying things like that. You want to grow up to be a lady, don't you?' I said not particularly.
I can no longer think of anything but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me.
The causes that govern the heart appear to be wholly alien to the results achieved. Are the forces that moved a desperate criminal the same that fill a martyr with pride, as both mount the scaffold?
I stopped the blade two inches before it touched Andrea’s neck. Because she was my best friend, and sticking knives into your best friend’s windpipe was generally considered to be a social faux pas.
Who is Hunter Becker?" "Becker the Gory? Lighthouse Keepers? Boston?" "I would've preferred Becker the Easiley Surrendering or Becker the Quite Reasonable, but beyond that his name tells me nothing.
Time, as is well known, sometimes flies like a bird and sometimes crawls like a worm, but human beings are generally particularly happy when they don't notice whether it's passing quickly or slowly.
Behind me there are already so many memories (...) Lots of memories, but no point in remembering them, and ahead of me a long, long road with nothing to aim for ... I just don't want to go along it.
Each individual is more or less dimly aware of his significance, is aware that he's something innately superior, something eternal--and lives, is obligated to live, in the moment and for the moment.
No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway's postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war.
Hello, Minister!" bellowed Percy, sending a neat jinx straight at Thicknesse, who dropped his wand and clawed at the front of his robes, apparently in awful discomfort. "Did I mention I'm resigning?
As much money and life as you could want! The two things most human beings would choose above all - the trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things that are worst for them.
The poor are discussed as this homogeneous mash, like porridge. The idea that they might be individuals, and be where they are for very different, diverse reasons, again seems to escape some people.
I'm a big fan of the poet Mary Jo Salter, and although she doesn't need to be discovered at all - she's widely admired and anthologized and extremely accomplished - I wish she were a household name.
As the vampire trailed a fingertip along the girl’s collarbone, she appeared to fall into a trance. It was not mind games on Zypher’s part. Females of both races couldn’t help themselves around him.
Blay said roughly,"I'm still in love with him" Saxton dropped his eyes and brushed at the top of his thigh, as if there might have been a tiny piece of lint there. " I know. You thought you weren't?
Ah, if I could realize, if I could forget myself and devote my meditations to the freeing, the awakening and the blessedness of all living creatures everywhere I'd realize what there is, is ecstasy.
I had come to feel that my mother's love for me was designed solely to make me into an echo of her; and I didn't know why, but I felt that I would rather be dead than become just an echo of someone.
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.
The fact is, if a young man is naturally indolent, the spur of necessity will drive him but a very little way, while the having enough to live upon is often the means of preserving his self-respect.
A great philosopher has stated that the worst evil of poverty is, that it makes folks ridiculous; by which, I hope, he only means that, as in the above case, it places them in incongruous positions.
The writing workshops and programs that are everywhere have encouraged writing. And if that produces more writing, it's also producing more readers of an elevated level. So all in all, a good thing.
No: the years which had destroyed her youth and bloom had only given him a more glowing, manly, open look, in no respect lessening his personal advantages. She had seen the same Frederick Wentworth.
You see? I know where every single book used to be in the library. She pointed to the shelf opposite. Over there was Catch-22, which was a hugely popular fishing book and one of a series, I believe.
I had this idea that I could hire myself out as a person to go on archeological digs and dig, without any training! I actually wrote to a number of archeology departments and offered up my services.
I think the big lesson I've learned is that it's very hard to write satire in America because almost immediately, whatever you've thought of turns out to come true, or sometimes it already was true.
People give the South a bad rap. It's often stereotyped as backwards and close-minded and dogmatic, and all of those things have been true. But I think that the South is changing, slowly but surely.
A collection of short stories is generally thought to be a horrendous clinker; an enforced courtesy for the elderly writer who wants to display the trophies of his youth, along with his trout flies.