Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I find it really disturbing to be watching a lot of the medium that I'm trying to work in. I prefer to be doing things that are farther away.
Compassion is ethical intelligence: it is the capacity to make connections and the consequent urge to act to relieve the suffering of others.
If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.
A gentleman is one who understands and shows every mark of deference to the claims of self-love in others, and exacts it in return from them.
To die is only to be as we were before we were born; yet no one feels any remorse, or regret, or repugnance, in contemplating this last idea.
Apart from my absolute belief in National Socialism and my conviction of Hitler's superhuman heroism, I had always been attracted to Germany.
Perhaps evil is the crucible of goodness... and perhaps even Satan - Satan, in spite of himself - somehow serves to work out the will of God.
You don't blame us for being here, do you? After all, we have no place to go. No home... Incidentally, what an excellent day for an exorcism.
Most people now seem to treasure anything they value in proportion to the extent that it's followed about and surrounded by the vulgar public.
Scientists and artists are both living in the cultural milieu that they come up in. They're always responding to what is happening culturally.
Someone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can't say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment.
Deadlines comes as a surprise....superb: a new genre, in fact, combining the pleasures of list-making with that of last-minute eaves-dropping.
The most intractable of our experiences is the experience of Time-the intuition of duration, combined with the thought of perpetual perishing.
Ultimate Reality is not clearly and immediately apprehended except by those who have made themselves loving, pure in heart and poor in spirit.
You have to suspend thinking in narratives. The moment you are conscious of yourself the gap opens up. And in this gap, stories are generated.
We have wasted our spirit in the regions of the abstract and general just as the monks let it wither in the world of prayer and contemplation.
The dark side of life, and the horror of it, belonged to a world that lay remote from his own select little atmosphere of books and dreamings.
Those who say they would rather fight to the death than be raped are fools. I would rather be raped a thousand times. You do what you have to.
"When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things," Franny said. "What about the dead?" I asked. "Where do we go?"
Children have a very good idea of how to distinguish between fantasies and realities. It's just they are equally interested in exploring both.
Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers.
I deposit in many banks including the bank of wisdom. The more I draw on my accounts, no matter how big the sum, the bigger my balance becomes
In 'Bombay-London-New York,' I speak of the ways in which the 'soft' emotion of nostalgia is turned into the 'hard' emotion of fundamentalism.
Evil is retributive: every trespass slips fetters on the will, holds the soul in durance till contrition and repentance restore it to liberty.
A book is meant not only to be read, but to haunt you, to importune you like a lover or a parent, to be in your teeth like a piece of gristle.
Othello' is the most domestic of Shakespeare's tragedies and the one that's likely to strike a personal note with a lot of people watching it.
Sooner or later the world will have to return to the good old days when we fought wars and killed people the old-fashioned way, one at a time.
Christians talk as though goodness was their idea but good behavior doesn't have any religious origin. Our prisons are filled with the devout.
Before a kid learns how to use a computer that can solve mathematical problems, he or she should know how to do arithmetic without a computer.
Also minimalism is a term that all of us who share so little in common and who are lumped together as minimalists are not terribly happy with.
But Ship Who Sang remains my favorite story. I really rocked folks with that and still cannot read it aloud myself without weeping at the end.
As a child, I'd always liked cowboys and Indians stories where there were two layers - gruesome in the foreground but funny in the background.
Demagoguery enters at the moment when, for want of a common denominator, the principle of equality degenerates into the principle of identity.
You cannot use someone else's fire. You can only use your own. And in order to do that, you must first be willing to believe that you have it.
In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction.
If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough.
Der, die, das, dem, den, des. German's six ways of saying 'the', like six sexual positions you never knew existed. Hey, I just sprung a boner.
The special forces gave me the self-confidence to do some extraordinary things in my life. Climbing Everest then cemented my belief in myself.
That feeling when you're so cold you'd give anything to be warm - I've had it before, literally huddled around a candle flame on an ice sheet.
Do you want a world with . . . more joy and happiness? Then find your own joy and happiness and contribute to the joy and happiness of others.
Joel, lad, school is about learning to learn. If you don't practice studying things you don't like, then you'll have a very hard time in life.
I think a lot of superheroes seem to have the same value system; they just have a different costume. They're all doing exactly the same thing.
All little creatures are beautiful...every living thing when it first sees life is born in beauty. What they grow to be is a different matter.
Your own creations are your own children; you gave life to them, so you'll always have, if not more passion to them, more connections to them.
My parents grew up during the space race, and I think they imagined the future would be us living on moon bases and everyone has rocket shoes.
Girls are really looking to places that have limits and boundaries: where adults are the adults and there are rules, and where they feel safe.
Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for.
I wrote 'Little Fires Everywhere' and sold the book in 2015, still the Obama years. The possibility of a Trump presidency was not on my radar.
The first bookstore I loved wasn't a little independent gem nestled in a neighborhood: it was a modest Waldenbooks in our local shopping mall.
What I remember about race relations in the 1990s is that you showed your awareness by saying you didn't see race, that you were colour-blind.