Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If you're behind the times, they won't notice you. If you're right in tune with them, you're no better than they are, so they won't care much for you. Be just a little ahead of them.
No highbrow literary type would ever say 'Moby Dick' is good but it's just about a whale, or a Jane Austen would be important if she wasn't just writing about romantic relationships.
Like paths and alleys overgrown with hardy, rank-growing weeds, the words we use are overgrown with our individual, private, provincial associations, which tend to choke the meaning.
What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,’ and, ‘What a man is is an arrow into the future and a what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.
The only thing that surprises me is the characterization of teachers as lazy and greedy. Only someone with very little understanding of what teaching requires would say such a thing.
Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood, Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.
I've never thought about the con of living in New York as a writer. Because I always think, Oh, what fun to be around so many writers. Because I've never been around so many writers.
When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.
I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone, I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again, I am to see to it that I do not lose you.
The eager and often inconsiderate appeals of reformers and revolutionists are indispensable to counterbalance the inertia and fossilism marking so large a part of human institutions.
All theological lore is growing distasteful to me. All my recent excursions into such fields proves it to be a shifting, hypothetical, doubt-fostering, dusty, and unprofitable study.
It is a very nice world-that is, if you remember that while morals are all-important between the Lord and His creatures, what counts between one creature and another is good manners.
The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.
Now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Is it not certain that the Creator yawns in earthquake and thunder and other popular displays, but toils in rounding the delicate spiral of a shell? -Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil
A fretful temper will divide the closest knot that may be tied, by ceaseless sharp corrosion; a temper passionate and fierce may suddenly your joys disperse at one immense explosion.
They fix attention, heedless of your pain, With oaths like rivets forced into the brain; And e'en when sober truth prevails throughout, They swear it, till affirmance breeds a doubt.
Ambition's monstrous stomach does increase By eating, and it fears to starve, unless It still may feed, and all it sees devour; Ambition is not tir'd with toll nor cloy'd with power.
Who alone suffers suffers most i' th' mind, Leaving free things and happy shows behind; But then the mind much sufferance doth o'erskip When grief hath mates, and bearing fellowship.
"Fair, kind, and true" is all my argument, "Fair, kind, and true" varying to other words; And in this change is my invention spent, Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords.
He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man. He that is more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a man, I am not for him.
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, But bad mortality o'ersways their power, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
Lauren Kirshner creates a first-person narrator you never stop rooting for. . . . [Where We Have to Go] highlights Kirshner as a new novelist to watch. A very strong, original debut.
My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
Culture is everything. Culture is the way we dress, the way we carry our heads, the way we walk, the way we tie our ties - it is not only the fact of writing books or building houses.
O happiness! our being's end and aim! Good, pleasure, ease, content! whate'er thy name: That something still which prompts the eternal sigh, For which we bear to live, or dare to die.
Judge not of actions by their mere effect; Dive to the center, and the cause detect. Great deeds from meanest springs may take their course, And smallest virtues from a mighty source.
Some old men, continually praise the time of their youth. In fact, you would almost think that there were no fools in their days, but unluckily they themselves are left as an example.
Oh, sons of earth! attempt ye still to rise. By mountains pil'd on mountains to the skies? Heav'n still with laughter the vain toil surveys, And buries madmen in the heaps they raise.
The meeting points the sacred hair dissever From the fair head, forever, and forever! Then flashed the living lightning from her eyes, And screams of horror rend th' affrighted skies.
Oft, as in airy rings they skim the heath, The clamtrous lapwings feel the leaden death; Oft, as the mounting larks their notes prepare They fall, and leave their little lives in air.
Love lieth deep; Love dwells not in lip-depths; Love laps his wings on either side the heart Absorbing all the incense of sweet thoughts, So that they pass not to the shrine of sound.
Happy he With such a mother! faith in womankind Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high Comes easy to him; and tho' he trip and fall, He shall not blind his soul with clay.
Men expect too much, do too little, Put the contraption before the accomplishment, Lack skill of the interior mind To fashion dignity with shapes of air. Luxury, yes but not elegance!
When I behold the heavens as in their prime, And then the earth (though old) still clad in green, The stones and trees, insensible of time, Nor age nor wrinkle on their front are seen
Keepers of books, keepers of print and paper on the shelves, librarians are keepers also of the records of the human spiritthe records of men's watch upon the world and on themselves.
Loving if the answering breast Seem not to be thus possessed, Still in hoping have a care; If it do, beware, beware! But if in yourself you find it, Above all things mind it, mind it!
Poetry had great powers over me from my childhood, and today the poems live in my memory which I read at the age of 7 or 8 years and which drove me to desperate attempts at imitation.
When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you're suffering in.
She stood upon a continent of ice, which sparkled between sea and sky, endless and dazzling, as though the world kept all its treasure there; a scale which balanced poetry and prayer.
So a maiden, whilst she remains untouched, so long is she dear to her own; when she has lost her chaste flower with sullied body, she remains neither lovely to boys nor dear to girls.
Because I hold an Israeli passport, I have a share in all the wrongs that are done to the Palestinians. . . . I want to be able to say that I did all I could to prevent the bloodshed.
You've got to know when to let a woman go if you want to keep her,and if you don't want to keep her you let her go anyhow so it's always a process of letting go, one way or the other.
You can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. your life is your life. know it while you have it.
The craft of questions, the craft of stories, the craft of the hands - all these are the making of something, and that something is soul. Anytime we feed soul, it guarantees increase.
Many people have trouble with forgiveness because they have been taught it is a singular act to be completed in one sitting. That is not so. Forgiveness has many layers, many seasons.
I knew very early what I wanted to do, and I considered myself lucky to know that's what I wanted, even in a place like Saint Lucia where there was no publishing house and no theatre.
I don't know what would have happened to me as a writer if I had gone to England and shaped my life out of England. Of course, I will never know, but I think I prefer what did happen.
Men don't like nobility in woman. Not any men. I suppose it is because the men like to have the copyrights on nobility -- if there is going to be anything like that in a relationship.
I'm really fortunate to be at Stanford. I go home every 10 weeks, but Stanford apart from being just a wonderful university is one of the places that are part of a great conversation.