Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I grew up in a house with a lot of kids, brothers and sisters. So I don't mind a lot of talking, yelling, playing. I can tune most of that out.
There's a perception that British pies suffer from mediocrity, and historically they have. We're trying to re-educate people about what pie is.
I don't judge people by their bodies. Even when I was a young girl I liked men for their minds. Now that I'm middle-aged I see how right I was.
On earth the living have much to bear; the difference is chiefly in the manner of bearing, and my manner of bearing is far from being the best.
If I have an antipathy for any class of people, it is for fine ladies. I almost match my Husband's detestation of partridge-shooting gentlemen.
I know intimately the struggle of trying to live your life and be yourself while feeling the pressure of an entire community on your shoulders.
An intelligent person feels guilty for downloading music without paying the musician, but they use this free-open-culture ideology to cover it.
And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives.
It's another sin. Worse than all the other ones, which are immediate, violent and hot...It's the eighth deadly sin. The one God left out, Hope.
No. I just don't want to be a detective. They figure out what happened after the fact, when it's too late. I want to prevent it from happening.
There are so many people that want to tell stories. I think that the issue is how hard it is to get your foot in the door to tell your stories.
Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life - perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody, that is the beauty of it.
Tradition, long conditioned thinking, can bring about a fixation, a concept that one readily accepts, perhaps not with a great deal of thought.
Retiring from writing is to avoid the inevitable bitterness which a writing career is bound to deliver as its end product in almost every case.
The people who have more money and goods than any people in the history of the world spend most of their time worrying about not having enough.
Most of the writers I know have somehow managed to stay in touch with that inner child who's never heard of such a thing as an internal editor.
Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.
In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.
Three things are to be looked to in a building: that it stand on the right spot; that it is securely founded; that it be successfully executed.
The dear good people don't know how long it takes to learn to read. I've been at it eighty years, and can't say yet that I've reached the goal.
I had rather be Mercury, the smallest among seven [planets], revolving round the sun, than the first among five [moons] revolving round Saturn.
The fear that the universe is not what you assume it to be is very basic, especially when you know damn well it isn't what you assume it to be.
The secret of success in battle lies often not so much in the use of one's own strength but in the exploitation of the other side's weaknesses.
This is the power of myth: that we can experience invisible spiritual realities and truths greater than visible, material things in story form.
The oldest continuously operated aquarium in the country features 630 species and more than 8,000 animals. The walruses are especially popular.
Obama's explanation for the slowdown in economic growth is that the public sector is hurting, and that's where Washington must step in and act.
Salzburg... is a mountain town with a rushing river running right through the center, everything in the rain various shades of green and brown.
Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.
I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.
The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.
Even if I don't like what I am, I know what I am. My children like what they are, but they don't know what they are. So tell me which is worse.
The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.
A writer is a man like any other: he dreams. And my dream was to be able to say of this book, when I finished: 'This is a book about Alentejo.'
At a time when Europeans already had a long history of violent contact with Native people, Lewis and Clark made most of their journey in peace.
I just know so many people who have six or seven foreign languages and have read everything and have musical training and they are still dorks.
If buying equities seem the most hazardous and foolish thing you could possibly do, then you are near the bottom that will end the bear market.
What I have done is worthy of nothing but silence and forgetfulness, but what God has done for me is worthy of everlasting and thankful memory.
All information of a spiritual or personal nature will have to come from our father, who art in heaven, and I think he's in New York right now.
An abundance of some good things is perfectly compatible with the scarcity of others; that life is everywhere precarious, man everywhere small.
After I set out to refute Christianity intellectually and couldn't, I came to the conclusion the Bible was true and Jesus Christ was God's Son.
The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.
Being a monarchist - saying that one small group is born more worthy of respect than another - is just as warped and strange as being a racist.
As with most liberal sexual ideas, what makes the world a better place for men invariably makes it a duller and more dangerous place for women.
Katrina was one of those things that rips the clothes off of the guy who keeps saying he's a saint, and underneath you see that he's a monster.
The difference between psychiatrists and other mentally disturbed people is something like the relationship between concave and convex madness.
She was working to remind herself of who she was. She was working to remember that somewhere in another place entirely she was known and loved.
Magic is always impossible.... It begins with the impossible and ends with the impossible and is impossible in between. That is why it's magic.
Writing at home and then going out into the world to talk about why books matter to me feeds the writing. It's a good mix. It provides balance.
My rage and sense of alienation as to how women have been written, have allowed themselves to be written, in so many ways, has political roots.
Lie detection is like language; there is a learning window. Telling whoppers to small children seems to be a family tradition in many families.