Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn't matter whether you call it therapy or teaching or poetry.
Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer.
Pain is an event ... Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain.
When it's over you look up: the world looks the same but you are somehow different and that feeling lingers for days.
Smoking had become my favorite thing in the world to do. It was like having instant comfort, no matter where or when.
It terrified me to consider: What if, as a grown-up, I craved another body beside me as still as this one? What then?
What is not seen is as if it was not. Even the Right does not receive proper consideration if it does not seem right.
When the robot mind is mastered, undisciplined thinking ceases and is replaced by awareness. Awareness can know love.
Or is there no such thing as 'too late'? Is there only 'late' and is 'late' always better than 'never'? I don't know.
I love writing, and I am never as happy as when I have a week, a month - three months - with nothing to do but write.
Like most Chinese, I am basically a fatalist - too sophisticated for religion and too superstitious to deny the gods.
The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.
Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just 'The Other.'
Any time I see someone succeed I am happy, for it affirms my belief that I live in a world where success is possible.
You don't get it? He poisonded me! He poisonded me, and you're next. I'm going to die. We're all going to die." -Seth
The problem with being clever, Serene thought with a sigh, is that everyone assumes you're always planning something.
I never trained in pro wrestling with The Sheik, but I did amateur wrestling with pro wrestlers in my dad's basement.
A mouse is small and can go unnoticed: but there is no limit to what a brave heart and a fearless spirit can achieve.
The pace of Swedish crime fiction is slower - Stieg Larsson's the exception. And I think we use the environment more.
You'll reach into your wallet to brandish a photograph of a new puppy, and a friend will say, 'Oh, no - not pictures.
Passivity is corrosive to the soul; it feeds on feelings of integrity and pride, and it can be as tempting as a drug.
Census figures be damned: If you choose to be alone, you're destined to spend a certain amount of time wondering why.
Falling in love doesn't always lead to heartbreak, honey. With the right man, it can be a one-way ticket to paradise.
History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.
I'm very comfortable with tweeting, I have a very active author Facebook page, I Skype book clubs all over the world.
In life we shall find many men that are great, and some that are good, but very few men that are both great and good.
Contemporaries appreciate the person rather than their merit, posterity will regard the merit rather than the person.
Tomorrow! It is a period nowhere to be found in all the registers of time, unless, perchance, in the fool's calendar.
Much too oft we make life gloomy-- When happy we might be, If we gathered more of sunshine, And not dark shadows see.
The past scampers like an alley cat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter.
Our affections, however laudable, in this transitory world, should never master us; we should guide them, guide them.
Credit is a system whereby a person who can not pay gets another person who can not pay to guarantee that he can pay.
I hate a man who swallows [his food], affecting not to know what he is eating. I suspect his taste in higher matters.
I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature, not even excepting the delicate creatures which bear them.
To sigh, yet feel no pain; To weep, yet scarce know why; To sport an hour with Beauty's chain, Then throw it idly by.
If an idea is compelling enough it'll stick in my head until I am forced to write it. If it's forgettable, who cares?
The nationalism I seek is one that decolonizes the brown and female body as it decolonizes the brown and female earth
How [stories] are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told — are really dependent on power.
Whether it's long-form journalism or investigative journalism, it's no fun to just be the guy diagnosing the problem.
And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.
Instead of worrying about what people say of you, why not spend time trying to accomplish something they will admire.
what has been termed 'correct' English is nothing other than the blatant legitimation of the white middle-class code.
Pretty sad. Pretty lonely. But that's how I prefer it? I quess? I guess. It's a good guess. It's the best quess ever.
All [tv] shows are like cigarettes. You watch two, you have a higher chance of watching three. They're all addictive.
If somebody's cat happens to turn on the TV, my numbers can double. It's almost unrelated to what's really happening.
There is virtually nothing I wouldn't be willing to do, to try and make sure that children have a fair shake in life.
To be sure, robotics are not the only job killers out there, with outsourcing stealing far more gigs than automation.
Long, dark, and lovely she had been, in those days before her mind broke and the parts scattered and she let them go.
Every time I get through the work on a book of nonfiction, I say I'll never do it again; it takes so much out of you.
I have a huge editor in my head who's always making me miserable. But sometimes, I try to let my unconscious act out.