Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Those who are quite satisfied sit still and do nothing; those who are not quite satisfied are the sole benefactors of the world.
It's not my responsibility to be beautiful. I'm not alive for that purpose. My existence is not about how desirable you find me.
We learned some bad things, and the Vietnam War led to some bad conclusions. We're not the greatest generation, that's for sure.
The dull externals of the screenwriter's working life are well known: We are the people taking up too much table space at cafes.
They're getting crazier every day, the whole world's going crazy. And you got to take your mind out to keep your smile in place.
Women ... to them any wedding is better than no wedding and a big wedding with a villain preferable to a small one with a saint.
I've gone fishing thousands of times in my life, and I have never once felt unlucky or poorly paid for those hours on the water.
Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.
No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves.
One is always more vexed at losing a game of any sort by a single hole or ace, than if one has never had a chance of winning it.
One truth discovered is immortal, and entitles its author to be so; for, like a new substance in nature, it cannot be destroyed.
Like a rustic at a fair, we are full of amazement and rapture, and have no thought of going home, or that it will soon be night.
Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away.
I'm not sure I'm trying to communicate a message. I'm just trying to be part of the movement away from the unacceptable present.
But a haiku by Buson came into his mind: 'I try to forget this senile love; a chilly autumn shower.' The gloom only grew denser.
It's not in the nature of stoic Cincinnatians to boast, which is fortunate, really, for they have meager pickings to boast about.
So much of life is not about whether you're good or bad, or right or wrong, or can afford or not afford - it's just about timing.
The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness".
Madness is the emergency exit. You can just step outside, and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened. Forever.
Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
Oh, how desperately bored, in spite of their grim determination to have a Good Time, the majority of pleasure-seekers really are!
Our daughter was born in Chicago, and she's already showing it. The temperature has to be approaching zero for her to wear a hat.
What I don't like about America is not necessarily an American thing; it's a capitalist thing. This is the Vatican of capitalism.
Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children.
I searched everywhere for a proof of reality, when all the while I understood quite well that the standard of reality had changed
But the wicked passions of men's hearts alone seem strong enough to leave pictures that persist; the good are ever too luke-warm.
I'm a novelist. I'm not a crusader, and I'm not an editorial writer. And I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.
I know Irish-American people. I know what their homes look like. I know what they have for dinner. I know how they turn a phrase.
I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.
The brain is highly structured, but it is also extremely flexible. It's not a blank slate, but it isn't written in stone, either.
If only they would all just leave me alone with my books and my letters, I would be content to let life, and the world pass me by
I see myself as part English and part American, with a dash of Irish thrown in, and a pinch of Italian from my mother's ancestry.
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
I wanted to show you that it's not all cold and intimidating," Finn explained. "I wanted you to see something warm and beautiful.
Breathless and unharmed, we emerge from the mazes of metaphysics and psychology where man and the soul are playing hide-and-seek.
Over 70 years after Hitler, a German chancellor, a woman, is the leader of the free world. So don't talk to me about irrevocable.
Trump is many things. He is pampered. He is an immature man. He is a teenager craving unconditional, endless love from everybody.
If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.
Feminist art... will take the great human themes – love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself – and render them fully human.
I see my books as a body of work, in my opinion, of singular importance and deeply disrespected in a way that is savagely unfair.
My wife likes history and documentaries, but I'm not so keen on them. I generally go and do some work if there's one of those on.
In the futile attempts we all make to tidy up our lives and our surroundings, nothing is more difficult than throwing out a book.
A woman over 30 will never wake you in the middle of the night to ask, "What are you thinking?". She doesn't care what you think.
If I'd known how many problems I was going to run into before I finished, I can't remember a single project I would have started.
So this is how life was, she thought with a faint smile: It wore you down until you emerged at its wildest, most unexpected ends.
Diana felt she was beginning to understand why, in all those novels she read, the headiest loves were the loves that couldn't be.
To cry was to release all sorts of ugly little pressures and tensions. Like waking out of a long, dark dream to a sun-filled day.
It's always good to remember where you come from and celebrate it. To remember where you come from is part of where you're going.
The woman who too easily and ardently yielded her devotion will find that its vitality, like a bright fire, soon consumes itself.
Don't you know, priests, why our sermons do not touch the people's heart? Because we do not preach to the eyes, only to the ears.