Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
So Satan, whom repulse upon repulse Met ever, and to shameful silence brought, Yet gives not o'er though desperate of success.
Neither as a writer nor, moreover, as a leader of a nation should you use terminology that obscures the reality of human evil.
You can't drive to the coastline. You can only drive so close to the white chalky cliff and then you have to get out and dive.
I like the idea of chance coming into filmmaking, in shooting, in editing, and I do make space in my rules of game for chance.
I adore war. It is like a big picnic but without the objectivelessness of a picnic. I have never been more well or more happy.
As the ancient commander addressed his soldiers before battle, so should the moralist speak to men in the struggle of the era.
A priest is he who lives solely in the realm of the invisible, for whom all that is visible has only the truth of an allegory.
Never expect what you write to be any good, 'cause it's the fear of writing badly that stops you from finding the right words.
I slept and I dreamed that life is all joy. I woke and I saw that life is all service. I served and I saw that service is joy.
In one drop of water are found all the secrets of all the oceans; in one aspect of You are found all the aspects of existence.
Oh heart, if one should say to you that the soul perishes like the body, answer that the flower withers, but the seed remains.
In all my life, I have never been free. I have never been able to do anything with freedom, except in the field of my writing.
The Jewish people and the Negro people both know the meaning of Nordic supremacy. We have both looked into the eyes of terror.
Genre categorization is a capitalist (rather than artistic) thing, a symptom of marketing and major-chain bookshelf placement.
There are two worlds: the world we can measure with line and rule, and the world that we feel with our hearts and imagination.
he who seeks pleasure with reference to himself, not others, will ever find that pleasure is only another name for discontent.
Some things never leave a person: scent of the hair of one you love, the texture of persimmons, in your palm, the ripe weight.
Nothing but blackness above And nothing that moves but the cars... God, if you wish for our love, Fling us a handful of stars!
As far as the stars are from the earth, and as different as fire is from water, so much do self-interest and integrity differ.
Lucretius, who follows [Epicurus] in denouncing love, sees no harm in sexual intercourse provided it is divorced from passion.
I read most often in bed as part of my attempted sleep ritual. But I spend a lot of time reading on planes and in hotels, too.
Writing went from being a calling to being a job. Business ruined things. It became like making sausages in a sausage factory.
How, unless you drink as I do, could you hope to understand the beauty of an old Indian woman playing dominoes with a chicken?
Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.
Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera - or an NHL game.
How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times Creation's mighty seed - For Man has broke the Fellowship With murder, lust, and greed.
Everything you study, everything you learn, makes you a better writer, because you have more understanding of how things work.
Keeping a commitment to listening has led me to my own growth, beyond any imagined dreams I may have had throughout the years.
Your seventh wife, Phileros, is now being buried in your field. No man's field brings him greater profit than yours, Phileros.
No hero to me is the man who, by easy shedding of his blood, purchases fame: my hero is he who, without death, can win praise.
I get about five memoirs per week in my mailbox, and few of them inspire anything but a desire to pick up the channel changer.
Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.
I want feelings to be expressed, to be open, to be natural, not to be looked on as strange. It's not weird if you feel deeply.
Most of the time when "universal" is used, it's just a euphamism for "white"; white themes, white significance, white culture.
I don't know if music can change the world overnight but I know that music can help someone make it through a difficult night.
Hypochondriacs squander large sums of time in search of nostrums by which they vainly hope they may get more time to squander.
Local images have one kind of reality. 'U.S. 1' will, I hope, have that kind and another, too. Poetry can extend the document.
The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us
Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.
The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly.
There are two kinds of people who blow through life like a breeze, And one kind is gossipers, and the other kind is gossipees.
Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface.
I attempt a difficult work; but there is no excellence without difficulty. [Lat., Ardua molimur; sed nulla nisi ardua virtus.]
Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.
Death is not grievous to me, for I shall lay aside my pains by death. [Lat., Nec mihi mors gravis est posituro morte dolores.]
The position is: the Gaelic language is no longer the native language; it is dead, yet food is being brought to the graveyard.
For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry
I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.
The mind has transformed the world, and the world is repaying it with interest. It has led man where he had no idea how to go.
Anne DeGrace is a gifted story teller and Far From Home contains some of her most intriguing characters. Thoroughly enjoyable.