Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I needed people to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that rearticulates more clearly what it's shown.
I've been lucky enough to work with extraordinary teachers along the way, and I'm excited to share what I've learned with graduate students at SNHU. I'm just as excited for what I'll learn from them.
So the news that divorced fathers are to be denied a legal right to a relationship with their children, in the long overdue review of family law published this week, fills me with horror and despair.
Even diseases have lost their prestige, there aren't so many of them left. Think it over... no more syphilis, no more clap, no more typhoid... antibiotics have taken half the tragedy out of medicine.
Love is a flower that grows in any soil, works its sweet miracles undaunted by autumn frost or winter snow, blooming fair and fragrant all the year, and blessing those who give and those who receive.
You have grown abominably lazy, and you like gossip, and waste time on frivolous things, you are contented to be petted and admired by silly people, instead of being loved and respected by wise ones.
I had been an abject fan of Robert Stone since the early eighties, when I borrowed a copy of 'A Flag for Sunrise' to read on a plane to Rome. I was twenty-something, with a first novel under my belt.
Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.
The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.
An hour or so later he received a note from Odette. Swann had left his cigarette case at her house. "If only," she wrote, "you had also forgotten your heart! I should never have let you have it back.
... I have always been a disappointment to my friends. I have no gift of talk, not much to say; and though I have always been an excellent listener, that only succeeds under auspicious circumstances.
I never understood the concept of a fluffy summer read. For me, summer reading means beaches, long train rides and layovers in foreign airports. All of which call for escaping into really long books.
When I graduated high school, I was one of many English-majors-to-be traveling through Europe with a copy of 'Let's Go Europe' in one hand, 'Anna Karenina' in the other, a Eurail pass for a bookmark.
I respect humanity. That's my religion. I can't stand these religions that are really businesses. So much money everywhere that's going to buy a really nice house in heaven - or what? I don't get it.
People's position on immigration, once they get "sophisticated," and they rise to the higher levels of commentary or government, it's usually determined solely by economics. And not by anything else.
Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart.
Any writer knows he has to pay for his compliments. As soon as he has said, Why, thank you, that's very generous of you, the other person clears his throat and dives into his own writing experiences.
The feature film business, the studio film business, feels to me like there's just nowhere else to go. It's like a record that's just skipping at the end, with the needle stuck in the run-out groove.
I actually carry a little picture of a wolf in my wallet, rather like people carry a picture of their kids. The reason I do that is to remind myself why I'm doing this, to remind myself of the story.
Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.
A few feathery flakes are scattered widely through the air, and hover downward with uncertain flight, now almost alighting on the earth, now whirled again aloft into remote regions of the atmosphere.
The world surely has not another place like Oxford; it is a despair to see such a place and ever to leave it, for it would take a lifetime and more than one to comprehend and enjoy it satisfactorily.
I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn't have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private - a comforting thought.
Emotions come and go and can't be controlled so there's no reason to worry about them. That in the end, people should be judged by their actions since in the end it was actions that defined everyone.
See, that was the problem in relationships when emotion began muddying the waters. It was as if (Lexie) expected him to do or say exactly the right thing at exactly the right time, whatever that was.
Ironically, he'd yet to leave a good impression. First he'd spilled soda on her, next she'd seen him almost involved in a riot, and then this morning she'd believed him to be either lazy or an idiot.
I actually find it pretty tedious when magazines ask me to write articles based on my real life, because I've already lived it and there's nothing new to discover. So, I'm unlikely to write a memoir.
I wrote my first novel-length story when I was 14 but had no idea what to do with it. Brisbane was a long way from the publishing industry then. Nowhere's a long way from the publishing industry now.
I consider myself a person who comes from a Muslim culture. In any case, I would not say that I'm an atheist. So I'm a Muslim who associates historical and cultural identification with this religion.
In a cement park across the street is this giant sculpture. It is a giant umbrella frame lying on its side. It's green. Stand under it, during a rainstorm, you'll still get wet - that's why it's art.
On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.
I started reading SF when I was about twelve and I read all I could, so any author who was writing about that time, I read. But there's no doubt who got me off originally and that was A. E. van Vogt.
A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.
We become more worthy the more we bend our minds to the impersonal. We become better as we take in the universe, thinking more about the largeness that it is and laugh about the smallness that is us.
I am a better writer for having fewer demons, and I am more curious about the world and the people in it. So those of you thinking you might need your demons in order to be creative: I beg to differ.
The little pig began to pray But Wolfie blew his house away. He shouted, "Bacon, Pork, and Ham! Oh what a lucky wolf I am!" And though he ate the pig quite fast, He carefully kept the tail till last.
We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented.
He is not dead, this friend; not dead, Gone some few, trifling steps ahead, And nearer to the end; So that you, too, once past the bend, Shall meet again, as face to face, this friend You fancy dead.
But, finally, I just realized a few years ago that this is where I belonged. I mean everything I had was invested here, emotionally and every other way. And the country had invested enormously in me.
Yes, there was music after all. The sound of the swamp rose up to him. The sound of frogs and crickets, of birds and 'gators, of life in every puddle and pond and knothole and leaf. I Travel By Night
Nor did I need anyone's pity, but I would accept it with grace, because I have been well trained. Rudeness was a sign of weakness. Grace stemmed from power, the powere to accept anything and move on.
My first novel, 'You Lost Me There,' has been described as a beach read. Tough bracket, beach reads. There's not much room for mistakes when you're competing against the sun for a person's attention.
I'm not interested in who am I. I'm interested in what's gone, the disinheritance, what I've been able to become or learn or fuse with or not fuse with. A certain freedom comes... I like it that way.
That sense of happiness just out beyond my reach - I'm not sure I'd grasped that exactly, but I'd got something close to it, contentment maybe, or at least a functioning routine with regular rewards.
I was actually born in New York City, but my family moved to Atlantic City when I was five, this being my dad's home town, so I think that qualifies me as a Jersey resident if not a bona fide native.
It's thought that about 96% of us have visual imagery, and there's a very tiny minority in the population, some of whom are normal, some of whom have brain lesions, who cannot produce visual imagery.
Do you know what 'masturbation' is? I think you probably do because you are older than me. But just in case, I will tell you. Masturbation is when you rub your genitals until you have an orgasm. Wow!
She thought of how much people changed you. It was the opposite of what you always heard, that no one could change a person. It wasn't true. It was only through other people that one ever did change.
No matter what grief or loss takes place, most of life flows on all around us, as though nothing's changed. At some point in our sorrow, we each make a choice to sink or swim. There's no alternative.
I'm still very much in the apprentice stage of writing. I read somewhere that you need to write a million words before you know what you're doing - so I'm headed that way, but I'm nowhere near there.