Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Happiness is attained, not through self-interest, but through unconditional fidelity in endless love of eternal light.
Truth has no finality to it. It is not something to be held on to. Truth is discovered minute to minute or not at all.
In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
Emotional life is - alongside work - one of the great challenges of existence and is a theme that I keep returning to.
I see religion as a storehouse of lots of really good ideas that a secular world should look at, raid, and learn from.
Art makes us feel less alone. It makes us think: somebody else has thought this, somebody else has had these feelings.
It doesn't do you any service to demonize any group of people. It's much better to try and understand from the inside.
Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.
We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.
There is no bad day that can’t be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet. This is just truth, plain and simple.
What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time.
Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction.
We, as writers, have to figure out a way to create a consciousness in language. It's crazy even to attempt to do that.
Sometimes I don't write at all. Someone once asked me, "What do you do when you're not writing?" And I said, "I idle."
I know what happiness and what despair are, and I never make a jest of such feelings. Take it, then, but in exchange —
The shadow of years was not as big on his small body. He knew I was away . But when people left they always came back.
What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.
While it did smash, breaking a bottle over someone’s head requires a lot more force than movies had led me to believe.
To my mind, a journalist needs to espouse objectivity and distance, while a writer practises an art that is more free.
The burning embers within me burst into flame / My body becomes a fire-lit torch. / Ho someone! Send for the mid-wife.
There are two trilogies I admire: Robertson Davies's 'The Deptford Trilogy' and Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials.'
'Almost' can be a polite way of saying something definitely. It withholds the obvious and dangles it just long enough.
Nothing would have shocked Proust more than to hear that his work was perceived as difficult or inaccessibly rarefied.
Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.
It's unfortunate that the country of immigrants has turned its back on immigrants. The atmosphere after 9/11 is toxic.
Didn't we settle contraception & affirmative action? If the GOP keep going backwards they'll soon be debating slavery.
Conservatives are more religious than liberals--although there is no evidence that they're nicer people because of it.
Never trust the food in a restaurant on top of the tallest building in town that spends a lot of time folding napkins.
Flying is always an unpleasant experience. You wait an hour for every ten minutes you actually spend getting anywhere.
Remember why you're running your marathon. When you're struggling with those training runs that thought will help you.
In the art of design, color is to form what verse is to prose,--a more harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought.
As the Arabs say, "The nature of rain is the same, but it makes thorns grow in the marshes and flowers in the gardens.
If it is true that wars are won by believers, it is also true that peace treaties are sometimes signed by businessmen.
I wonder," he said, "whether the stars are set alight in heaven so that one day each one of us may find his own again.
The abolition of the class struggle does not mean the abolition of the need to struggle as a principle of development.
Like a blazing comet, I've traversed infinite nights, interstellar spaces of the imagination, voluptuousness and fear.
Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.
It is in length of patience, endurance and forbearance that so much of what is good in mankind and womankind is shown.
My thoughts seem thick, ketchup stuck in a bottle. Like trying to feel someone's face while wearing goosedown mittens.
Other people sound flat to my ear; their words just hang in the air. But when my mother says something, the ends curl.
What hypocrites we seem to be whenever we talk of ourselves! Our words sound so humble, while our hearts are so proud.
Once we know of atrocities we cannot remain silent, and knowledge inevitably leads to an urge to protect the innocent.
Thus the regime has deprived Iranian women not just of their present rights, but also of their history and their past.
When I was teaching at the University of Tehran we were struggling against the implementation of the revolution rules.
Don't express your ideas too clearly. Most people think little of what they understand, and venerate what they do not.
There must be something good in a thing that pleases so many; even if it cannot be explained, it is certainly enjoyed.
Remember something about attention. Yes, it’s possible to buy, grab, or even steal it. But it’s far better to earn it.
My mother tried to kill me when I was a baby. She denied it. She said she thought the plastic bag would keep me fresh.