Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can't begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.
music is the most absorbing of all the arts. It absorbs the mind of the artist, whether creator or executant, to the exclusion of every other consideration outside his own immediate necessities or desires.
I watch people get older and lose their intellectual acuity; you lose that sharpness, that cleanness, that brain that you worked so hard on and that you were gifted with and lose the gifts that were given.
Well, you know how it feels if you begin hoping for something that you want desperately badly; you almost fight against the hope because it is too good to be true; you've been disappointed so often before.
But no one except Lucy knew that as it circled the mast it had whispered to her, "Courage, dear heart," and the voice, she felt sure, was Aslan's, and with the voice a delicious smell breathed in her face.
I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, of this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.
Children know how to be cruel, and the cruelty of their elders is the surest residue of the malaise the young feel toward things strange, things other, things that reveal our own ignorance or insufficiency
If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus.
September could see it. She did not know what is was she saw. That is the disadvantage of being a heroine, rather than a narrator. She knew only that a red light glowed and went dark, glowed and went dark.
.. then when the hurt goes, anger takes its place; when the anger runs out of system, loneliness steps in to take over. it's a never ending circle of emotions; every lost emotion being replaced by another.
at your weakest, you end up showing more strength; at your lowest, you are suddenly lifted higher than you’ve ever been. They all border one another, these opposites and show how quickly we can be altered.
The chief effect of talk on any subject is to strengthen one's own opinions, and, in fact, one never knows exactly what he does believe until he is warmed into conviction by the heat of attack and defence.
You had no right to be born; for you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person's strength.
The child learns more of the virtues needed in modern life-of fairness, of justice, of comradeship, of collective interest and action-in a common school than can be taught in the most perfect family circle
It's still true that literary works by women, gays, and writers of color are often framed as specific, rather than universal, small rather than big, personal or particular rather than socially significant.
I think not just Nigeria but I think the whole of Africa has to turn back to the rural areas and that's where the majority of the citizens are and that's where the engine of of development has to be found.
You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you re-enlist.
If we can forgive what’s been done to us... If we can forgive what we’ve done to others... If we can leave all of our stories behind. Our being villains or victims. Only then can we maybe rescue the world.
Your life isn't about doing one perfect 'thing' and then falling down dead. It's more like going to church or writing a book. You do it over and over, always trying to be a little bit better. Then you die.
The only time "early bloomer" has ever been applied to me is vis-a-vis my premature apprehension of the deep dread-of-existence thing. In all other cases, I plod and tromp along. My knuckles? Well dragged.
The things I believed in dont exist any more. It's foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now.
What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This mawky worm-bent tabernacle.
Maybe. Anyway, some men get what they want. No man. Or perhaps only briefly so as to lose it. Or perhaps only to prove to the dreamer that the world of his longing made real is no longer that world at all.
A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.
And yet - and yet - one's kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to let it go. It tugs and tugs and will go, and one is glad the further it goes, even if everybody else is nasty about it.
[T]he price you've paid is not the price of becoming human. It's not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It's the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.
Me, I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right.
In eight years not a day has gone by when she hasn’t thought of him. She misses him and she wants him back. I want my best friend back, she thinks, because without him nothing is good and nothing is right.
When you're reading a book, you're always looking for the natural place to stop. With a movie, you can't really have that sense of it coming momentarily to a halt; there's pressure to keep the momentum up.
On the news two dozen events of fantastically different importance are announced in exactly the same tone of voice. The voice doesn't discriminate between a divorce, a horse race, a war in the Middle East.
The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts.
There's much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world's probably a better place for it.
Where is automatism in the work of Chirico or Tanguy? Even Dali had to renounce it in order to be able to organize the space of the canvas according to the combined laws of dreams and pictorial aesthetics.
It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.
Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world's enemy, and she must stifle it.
Passion should believe itself irresistible. It should forget civility and consideration and all the other curses of a refined nature. Above all, it should never ask for leave where there is a right of way.
A novel is based on evidence, + or -x, the unknown quantity being the temperament of the novelist, and the unknown quantity always modifies the effect of the evidence, and sometimes transforms it entirely.
Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills - research and organization.
What a rare gift, by the by, is that of manners! how difficult to define, how much more difficult to impart! Better for a man to possess them than wealth, beauty, or talent; they will more than supply all.
When you grow up with a mother who has to wash dishes and clean hotel rooms, you know the importance of having a job, and you can't be without a job for any length of time, or you will be without anything.
The world is always full of the sound of waves. The little fishes, abandoning themselves to the waves, dance and sing and play, but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows its depth?
People tend to be put off by the idea of selling sex, but if you spend a winter's night with one of them and talk with her about her family and so on, you're likely to find she's just like any other woman.
Read at a time when everything feels intense, seminal, and like you're the first person to discover it, freshman year of college, Carol Gilligan's 'In a Different Voice' made my hair stand on end with awe.
VR really changes everything for flight because the old simulators for the PC were 2D, and you couldn't look around inside the cockpit and learn the controls or even track other planes through the cockpit.
Various political parties, even if they're in direct opposition with one another, still say they are the spokesperson for the people. The writer must speak his own words and not get mixed up with politics.
People who have nothing to do always lack time. Perish all those who do not think as we do. Reason is a feeble weapon in contending with a woman. Words that sounded kindly, but with a cold, unloving heart.
In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except "Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it"? Money has become the grand test of virtue.
Tragedy, he precieved, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.
I heard a Lannister always pays his debts." "Oh, every penny....but never a groat more. You'll get the meal you bargained for, but it won't be sauced with gratitude, and in the end it will not nourish you.
But it is only in epic tragedies that gloom is unrelieved. In real life tragedy and comedy are so intermingled that when one is most wretched ridiculous things happen to make one laugh in spite of oneself.