Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When you say "I am," the words that follow are summoning creation with a mighty force, because you are declaring it to be fact.
Then be sure of one thing: The Is has imagined it quite a bit better than you have. The original sin is to limit the Is. Don't.
But America isn't a country of family values; Mexico is a country of family values. This is a country of people who leave home.
There is hardly that person to be found who is not more concerned for the reputation of wit and sense, than honesty and virtue.
Plants, like people, are social or anti-social: the good plant has to be able to live amicably with other plants in the border.
Show me a writer, any writer, who hasn't suffered and I'll show you someone who writes in pastels as opposed to primary colors.
It doesn't matter to me. We're still cousins in our own way. Blood's just something old people talk about to make you feel bad.
For me, the real pleasure in writing is in having an excuse to pursue my curiosity about people who have meant something to me.
You go up the mountaintop and all you're gonna get is a great big heavy stone tablet handed to you with a bunch of rules on it.
A politician who climbs high over the bodies of the slain is described as vile or great according to the degree of his success.
Inflation is bringing us true democracy. For the first time in history, luxuries and necessities are selling at the same price.
Those caught in the cycle of self-concern suffer helplessly, while the compassionate are more free and, implicitly, more happy.
You run risks. That's the plain truth. You run risks and, even in the most unlikely places, you are subject to destiny's whims.
Life's the adventure. You don't have to drop your bundle and go bush. It's about being brave within the context that you're in.
The poet has to make a synthesis out of the moral life of our time, and this life is lived at this moment on a political plane.
The American does not drink at meals as a sensible man should. Indeed, he has no meals. He stuffs for ten minutes thrice a day.
The best advice I can give anybody about going out into the world is this: Don't do it. I have been out there. It is a mess....
The charm of television entertainment is its ability to bridge the chasm between dinner and bedtime without mental distraction.
If you go back in American history, oysters were the food of poor people. New York was filled with oyster saloons in the 1800s.
My idea of management is that what your job is as the boss is to find really good people and empower them and leave them alone.
I try not to picture a reader when I'm writing. It's like trying to make a great table but not picturing anybody sitting at it.
In 'The Violinist's Thumb,' I talk about the poignancy of cells leaking across the placenta into both the mother and the child.
Hate is the complement of fear and narcissists like being feared. It imbues them with an intoxicating sensation of omnipotence.
Friends are often chosen for similitude of manners, and therefore each palliates the other's failings because they are his own.
The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.
It may be laid down as a position which seldom deceives, that when a man cannot bear his own company, there is something wrong.
In my early years I read very hard. It is a sad reflection, but a true one, that I knew almost as much at eighteen as I do now.
A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian, Who left scarcely any style of writing untouched, And touched nothing that he did not adorn.
To dread no eye and to suspect no tongue is the great prerogative of innocence--an exemption granted only to invariable virtue.
He that shall peruse the political pamphlets of any past reign will wonder why they were so eagerly read, or so loudly praised.
The great end of prudence is to give cheerfulness to those hours which splendor cannot gild, and acclamation cannot exhilarate.
Health is so necessary to all the duties, as well as pleasures of life, that the crime of squandering it is equal to the folly.
The mind can be but full. It will be as much filled with a small disagreeable occurrence, having no other, as with a large one.
Sitting on a plastic chair at night listening to the sea lapping below while sipping a cold beer is about as good as life gets.
If you know two cultures and two languages, that intermediate place, where the two don't perfectly meet, is really interesting.
That's what you need for your writing - to learn how to be present, learn how to be calm. So take that nap, do that meditation.
Whether you wish to chant 'Our houses, our selves' or 'We have houses, hear us roar,' for us women, home is where the heart is.
It is not simply that we share with each other a common humanity, but that individually we have no humanity without each other.
Like a blinking cursor on an empty page, it was just the first thing. The beginning of the beginning. But at least it was done.
The point,' Ms. Conyers continued, "is that no word had one specific definition. Maybe in the dictionary, but not in real life.
As if he was beating me to the punch, his words living forever, while I was left speechless, no rebuttal, no words left to say.
On the whole, I think I spent a lot of high school just trying to stay under the radar: I don't think I was all that memorable.
But anyone who has been that young knows that the great grief of love is that your body feels the most when it knows the least.
We need to give credence to the nonsexual relationships...the idea of having significant others instead of a significant other.
The despair is there; now it's up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change.
In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt.
I firmly believe people have the power to make decisions locally and cooperatively. Anarchism is how that is put into practice.
I don't think anybody does anything anymore without commenting on why they're doing it or making fun of it as they're doing it.
A rousing tale of techno-geek rebellion, as necessary and dangerous as file sharing, free speech, and bottled water on a plane.
I cannot transfer my abilities to anyone, but I can think of quicker ways with which to help people develop numerical aptitude.