Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A novel determines its own size and shape and I've never tried to stretch an idea beyond the frame and structure it seemed to require.
Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form.
We judge everything as good or evil and forget that resistance, pain and difficulties are there so we can learn when we leave balance.
All letters, methinks, should be free and easy as one's discourse, not studied, as an oration, nor made up of hard words like a charm.
WOKING (vb.) To enter the kitchen with the precise determination to perform something only to forget what it is just before you do it.
If life is a video game, then most of us have no chance of winning, if by winning you mean succeeding in a quest or saving a princess.
We have the alternative. "Do I want to be on the subway looking at these people, or do I want to be in my phone looking at my people?"
All those Nupboards in the Cupboards they're good fun to have about. But that Nooth gush on my tooth brush.....Him I could do without.
Fame you'll be famous, as famous as can be, with everyone watching you win on TV, Except when they don't because sometimes they won't.
Writing novels reminds me of being an awkward 15-year-old typing on a Commodore 64 in his bedroom, trying to be the next Stephen King.
For graduate school I ended up going to the University of Iowa, which is, of course, the best graduate writing program in the country.
I believe you have my umbrella" he says, almost out of breath but wearing a grin that has too much wolf in it to be properly sheepish.
When prayer removes distrust and doubt and enters the field of mental certainty, it becomes faith; and the universe is built on faith.
Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own: [I hate a sage who is not wise for himself]
I think that fortune watcheth o'er our lives, surer than we. But well said: he who strives will find his goals strive for him equally.
If by losing the spirit of prayer, you mean losing the heavenly sensations of deep devotion, I am afraid that does not matter a scrap.
Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher
In short, Google prefers a world where we consistently go to three restaurants to a world where our choices are impossible to predict.
What is really yours? The blessings you bring to yourself, through your spoken or silent word, the things you see with your inner eye.
Ours is the old, old story of every uprising race or class or order. The work of elevation must be wrought by ourselves or not at all.
the only truth is face to face, the poem whose words become your mouth and dying in black and white we fight for what we love, not are
The door could not be heard slamming; they had probably left it open, as is the custom in homes where a great misfortune has occurred.
Baseball is a game where you are always waiting, and then when something happens it's like turning a kaleidoscope when you were a kid.
Good is that darkening of our lives, Which only God can brighten; But better still that hopeless load, Which none but God can lighten.
Often, I get the feeling that the story is really happening somewhere and all I'm doing is trying to work out the best way to tell it.
There's a certain kind of lonely man who rejects love, because he believes that anyone who offers it wouldn't be a lover worth having.
I think kindness is a sort of gateway virtue - having that simple aspiration can get you into deep water very quickly - in a good way.
...the holy men sat in an atmosphere reeking of antiquity, so thick with the dust of ages that you can't see through it -nor can they.
Repeating is the whole of living and by repeating comes understanding, and understanding is to some the most important part of living.
A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts.
Adventure is making the distant approach nearer but romance is having what is where it is which is not where you are stay where it is.
Leisure is one of the three greatest rewards of being a teacher. It is, unfortunately, the privilege which teachers most often misuse.
The problem of disbelieving in God is not that a man ends up believing nothing. Alas, it is much worse. He ends up believing anything.
In matters of truth the fact that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.
The triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.
People decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad.
Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.
[Marxism will] in a generation or so [go] into the limbo of most heresies, but meanwhile it will have poisoned the Russian Revolution.
If the common man in the past had a grave respect for property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes had some of his own.
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all.
One of the most fascinating aspects of politician-watching is trying to determine to what extent any politician believes what he says.
I am glad my life is coming to an end. To think that it might last another five hundred years, now that would be terrible, in my case.
The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.
In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.
You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.
To trace the history of a river . . . is to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body.
Within each of us, there is a silence, a silence as vast as the universe. And when we experience that silence, we remember who we are.
We are accustomed to use our eyes only with the memory of what other people before us have thought about the object we are looking at.
I don't think you fully appreciate the importance of Illusion in life, the Essential Nature of Lies and Deception of the body politic.