Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Along the coast the sea roars, and inland the mountains roar – the roaring at the center, like a distant clap of thunder.
Both childbirth and abortion are medical procedures but neither is an illness, and sometimes they're both treated as such.
At 12 I dropped out of school but I had lost interest in it at a much earlier age. For me, school was very very stressful.
Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I'm basically the child of Richard Dawkins.
We accept the need to train extensively to fly a plane; but think instinct should be enough for marrying and raising kids.
Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.
the world is neither meaningful, nor absurd. it quite simply is, and that, in any case, is what is so remarkable about it.
Deux me' tresou un peu plusse parent donc l'homme de la femme. Two metres, or a little more, separates a man from a woman.
Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once and it's too much. My heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst.
The word courage comes from the French word 'coeur', which means heart. True power proceeds not from force, but from love.
To grow, you must be willing to let your present and future be totally unlike your past. Your history is not your destiny.
You can be helping many people, but if you are not helping yourself, you have missed the one person you were born to heal.
Our noblest purpose in life is to remember our spiritual nature in the face of suggestions that we are a material society.
Culture is just a shambling zombie that repeats what it did in life; bits of it drop off, and it doesn't appear to notice.
It's a treat being a runner, out in the world by yourself with not a soul to make you bad-tempered or tell you what to do.
Government wars aren't my wars; they've got nowt to do with me, because my own war's all that I'll ever be bothered about.
If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time.
If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats.
Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.
Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues - which takes years.
You can no more bridle passions with logic than you can justify them in the law courts. Passions are facts and not dogmas.
As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.
I am strong against everything, except against the death of those I love. He who dies gains; he who sees others die loses.
There are misfortunes in life that no one will accept; people would rather believe in the supernatural and the impossible.
Infatuated, half through conceit, half through love of my art, I achieve the impossible working as no one else ever works.
Be good, be young, be true! Evil is nothing but vanity, let us have the pride of good, and above all let us never despair.
Oh. To be filled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness.
Any fiction writer who assumes that a character is typical no doubt runs the risk of stumbling into cliche and stereotype.
Let a man turn to his own childhood - no further - if he will renew his sense of remoteness, and of the mystery of change.
If I had but an hour of love,if that be all that is given me,an hour of love upon this earth,I would give my love to thee.
I was not a Southern California girl. I hated having my photograph taken. I felt shy and embarrassed around famous people.
Esteem incites friendship, but not love; the former is the twin brother of Reverence; the latter is the child of Equality.
The brightest ornaments in the crown of the blessed in heaven are the sufferings which they have borne patiently on earth.
The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.
Sometimes it seems to me that that’s all my life has been, a series of things that I loved deeply that I could never have.
Revolution is glorified by intellectuals, apotheosized by poets, sanctified by visionaries, and bled white by politicians.
In a true democracy is the cure for most of our social and political ills, but a few of them must remain to keep us going.
The mind is fast emancipating itself from the dominion of man and of matter. It has let loose fearful forces on the world.
I don't write novels about expeditions to the planet Mars because I haven't been there and I don't know anything about it.
When I was a little girl, I thought I was Sydney Carton in Dickens' 'A Tale of Two Cities.' I don't think anyone else did.
Men know everything - all of them - all the time - no matter how stupid or inexperienced or arrogant or ignorant they are.
It would be nice to spend billions on schools and roads, but right now that money is desperately needed for political ads.
I edit as I write. I revise endlessly. I don't go forward until I know that what I've written is as good as I can make it.
Life was a short window and there was no sense in doing the wrong thing over and over even if it was so difficult to stop.
Because everyone is the same distance from the sun. Does it really lessen the distance if you live on top of a skyscraper?
What he had yearned to embrace was not the flesh but a down spirit, a spark, the impalpable angel that inhabits the flesh.
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
If I tell a hotel I'm a travel writer, I can't get out of there without spending a few hours looking at every single room!
After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.