Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think that once you're born, the thing you have to do is find out who you are and live that life as well as you can. You can't spend your time wondering how things would have been if you were someone different.
Be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education.
It was the year they fell into devastating love. Neither one could do anything except think about the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatience they felt when they answered them.
There is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle.
Recently I was reading somewhere or other an Italian curio-dealer who attempted to sell a 17th century crucifix to J.P. Morgan. Inside it was concealed a stiletto. What a perfect symbol of the Christian religion.
Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other.
Ten years from now, no one is going to care how quickly the books came out. The only thing that will matter, the only thing anyone will remember, is how good they were. That's my main concern, and always will be.
My mother raised me to be bold. If I do not go, I will spend the rest of my life wondering what might have happened if I had." "If you do go, the rest of your life may be too short for wondering. - Asha & Rodrick
The prejudice is still there, but it's breaking down. You have writers like Michael Chabon and The Yiddish Policemen's Union. He's a writer who's determined to break down genre barriers. He's done amazing things.
The vast majority of writers out there, they finish their books, and no one cares whether their book is late or ever comes out at all. And then it comes out, and two reviews are published, and it sells 12 copies.
They want politics and think it will save them. At best, it gives direction to their numbed desires. But there is no politics but the manipulation of power through language. Thus the latter’s constant debasement.
I don't believe in writing at night because it comes too easily. When I read it in the morning it's not good. I need daylight to begin. Between nine and ten o'clock I have a long breakfast with reading and music.
People want to be loved; failing that admired; failing that feared; failing that hated and despised. They want to evoke some sort of sentiment. The soul shudders before oblivion and seeks connection at any price.
Creole women take after Europe in their intelligence, after the Tropics in the illogical violence of their passions, and after the Indies in the apathetic indolence with which they commit or suffer good and evil.
You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.
I will kill him.” “Erra’s eyebrows rose. “You’d have to go through me first.” I shrugged. “I have to do something for a warm-up.” She laughed softly. “That’s the spirit. I do think you might be my favorite niece.
I closed my eyes. “Are you okay?” “I’m tired. My knee is hurting again and I’m trying to teleport myself upstairs.” “Um, Kate, you can’t do that.” “I know. But I’m trying very hard. Let me know if I start fading?
I never agree with the compliments paid to it. It is not a great healer. It is an indifferent and perfunctory one. Sometimes it does not heal at all. And sometimes when it seems to, no healing has been necessary.
Now, I don’t want any of you youngsters to worry — you’ll still have your Potions master when I’m through with him, never fear!” “Wouldn’t it be good if they finished each other off?” Ron muttered in Harry’s ear.
This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
Hand over the prophecy and no one need get hurt," said Malfoy coolly. It was Harry's turn to laugh. "Yeah, right!" he said. "I will give you this - prophecy, is it? And you'll just let us skip off home, will you?
The narrow path had opened up suddenly onto the edge of a great black lake. Perched atop a high mountain on the other side, its windows sparkling in the starry sky, was a vast castle with many turrets and towers.
Why do they have to move in packs?" Harry asked Ron as a dozen or so girls walked past them, sniggering and staring at Harry. "How're you supposed to get one on their own to ask them?" "Lasso one?" Ron suggested.
Marissa, " he mumbled, taking her hand. "Don't want to see you drink so much?" Wait, not really what he'd been going for. "Ah...don't you to see me drink so much...want." Whatever. God...he was so confused.~Butch
A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest. If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved.
But night would come and with it the mountain moon and the lake would be moon - laned and I'd go out and sit in the grass and meditate facing west, wishing there were a Personal God in all this impersonal matter.
I started reading. I read everything I could get my hands on...By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. I had read every book in two libraries and had a card for the Forty-Second Street branch.
In every department of life--in its business and in its pleasures, in its beliefs and in its theories, in its material developments and in its spiritual connections--we thank God that we are not like our fathers.
In a letter from Bath to her sister, Cassandra, one senses her frustration at her sheltered existence, Tuesday, 12 May 1801. Another stupid party . . . with six people to look on, and talk nonsense to each other.
I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.
When once married people begin to attack me with, 'Oh! you will think very differently, when you are married,' I can only say, 'No I shall not'; and then they say again, 'Yes you will,' and there is an end to it.
Books--oh! no. I am sure we never read the same, or not with the same feelings." "I am sorry you think so; but if that be the case, there can at least be no want of subject. We may compare our different opinions.
I was obsessed with The Who. I would have accepted a marriage proposal from Roger Daltrey on the spot. I went to all of their shows in San Francisco and some in L.A. That was as close as I got to being a groupie.
I think that a lot of people are in love with stress. It's the dirty little secret of Western civilization. People often mistake stress for fuel.... to me, stress is just another bad drug that I don't want to do.
When I was writing my first novel, 'Where the Line Bleeds,' which had young black men as its main characters, I was very invested in telling the story and also very worried about the effects the story would have.
I ought to be more hardboiled; I'd like to be. I don't think I have it in me. To write in clipped sentences. To employ gritty metaphor in the introduction of sultry blondes... I can't do it, so why bother trying?
Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do.
The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding.
I look at my father, who was in many ways an unhappy person, but who, not long before he got sick, said that the greatest source of satisfaction in his life had been going to work in the company of other workers.
It wasn't for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster area.
But because their ancestors were men of righteousness, shall we consent to the abuses of their degenerate descendants? Because they did us a great good, would we be guilty if we prevented them from doing us evil?
It is sometimes said that toleration should be refused to the intolerant. In practice this would destroy it... The only remedy for dogmatism and lies is toleration and the greatest possible liberty of expression.
I had from childhood not only the experience of love and truth common to all family life, but the idea of them embodied in the person of Jesus, a picture always present to our imagination as well as our feelings.
Then why are you getting dressed?” “Maybe I don’t like being the only naked one in the room,” I said sarcastically. And immediately regretted it. “That is easily remedied,” he told me, and pulled off his sweater.
We have to wear clothes, a requirement of custom, but more time, temper, character, and peace of mind, not to mention money, have been sacrificed to them than to any other altar on this green earth, and for what?
Only three things them ladies talk about: they kids, they clothes, and they friends. I hear the word Kennedy, I know they ain’t discussing no politic. They talking about what Miss Jackie done wore on the tee-vee.
I grew up in a modern home, but my grandmother lived across the street in an old house that was built when churches were illegal in Mexico. She had a chapel in the home, right between the kitchen and dining room.
I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude.
A God who counts minutes and pennies, a desperate sensual God, who grunts like a pig. A pig with golden wings, who falls and falls, always belly side up, ready for caresses, that’s him, our master. Come, kiss me.
I thought: hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.