Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Everything one reads is nourishment of some sort - good food or junk food - and one assumes it all goes in and has its way with your brain cells.
I am part of what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on the other hand, is what I was looking for.
Part of the philosophy of 'The Dice Man' is that you have got to be laughing at yourself at every moment and be free of yourself at every moment.
I honestly believe that everything I know about the writing of non-fiction (or writing) could be engraved on the head of a pin with a garden hoe.
I do not think that I will ever reach a stage when I will say, "This is what I believe. Finished." What I believe is alive ... and open to growth
Man is; it matters to him; this is terrifying unless it matters to God, too, because this is the only possible reason we can matter to ourselves.
Now I am setting out into the unknown. It will take me a long while to work through the grief. There are no shortcuts; it has to be gone through.
Don't give me that look. I'm not trying to find out who you are. I don't care who you are. I just want to know why it is you are the way you are.
I turned back to my extracurricular study of death and disease. Because no matter what Grace thought, I knew that in Mercy Falls, it's never over
Without turning on the light, I went to my bed and lay down, my arm thrown across the mattress, my hand aching because Grace wasn't underneath it
The power of nature exists in its silence. Human words cannot encode the meaning because human language has access only to the shadow of meaning.
Jude's rule number five: Never get to close to anyone or anything that you can't walk away at a moment's notice if you have to. When you have to.
One of us... One of them... One of us... One of them... A rhythm playing like train wheels on a circular track -- never ending but going nowhere.
May death be no more than the bell that sounds when school is over, and going home, may I find that I had laid up my treasure in the right place.
All of us need better skills in listening, conversing, respecting one another's uniqueness, because these are essential for strong relationships.
Bread is for us a kind of successor to the motherly breast, and it has been over the centuries responsible for billions of sighs of satisfaction.
Salt represents the civilized: it requires know-how to get it, and a sophisticated combination of cooking and spoilt, jaded appetites to need it.
In a certain state of mind, all trace of feeling is banished. Whenever I remain silent in a certain way, I don't love you, have you noticed that?
When you wept it was just over yourself and not because of the marvelous impossibility of reaching her through the difference that separates you.
Reading was such an enrichment of my life. And it was that pleasure that I had as a very young reader probably that is the origin of my vocation.
The novels that have fascinated me most are the ones that have reached me less through the channels of the intellect or reason than bewitched me.
The nice thing about working with BOOM! on 'Irredeemable' and 'Incorruptible,' man, was they let me have my head. No one said boo about anything.
This is the twilight of the banks. It would be a more cheerful spectacle if we could envision the dawn of the institutions that will replace them
I was supposed to be working on 'The Weekenders,' but I was blocked. I got this crazy idea that I would make Christmas stockings out of blankets.
Great loves were almost always great tragedies. Perhaps it was because love was never truly great until the element of sacrifice entered into it.
Nothing has afforded me so convincing a proof of the unity of the Deity as these purely mental conceptions of numerical and mathematical science.
If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion and explanation, those of women, by a parity of reasoning, will not shrink from the same test.
In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family character, as it were, to the century.
The Golden Arches of McDonald's rise, glorious across the landscape, contempo-monolithic, simple in concept as Stonehenge if we could but see it.
If you are stuck only at your culture, you will miss thousands of good things in other cultures; and more importantly, you will miss many truths!
The simplest secret of reaching any place is to start walking! If people say you can't reach there, close your ears to them and continue walking!
When a beautiful road ends, remember how it was to live it over again! When a hard road ends, remember how it was to get a lesson for the future!
What are you doing?" she asked, trying to raise herself. "First, I thought I'd show you what a pity it would be if they cut off my wicked tongue.
I don't know what else to tell you. I often think how different my life would have been - how much happier - if you'd been a part of it. One day.
Humans are, by nature, pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns whether they exist or not.
Obstinacy and dogmatism are the surest signs of stupidity. Is there anything more confident, resolute, disdainful, grave and serious than an ass?
The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear, and with good reason; that passion alone, in the trouble of it, exceeding all other accidents
The first lessons with which we should irrigate his mind should be those which teach him to know himself, and to know how to die ... and to live.
I have to believe that literature can effect change; otherwise, I would have no purpose in my life and would have wasted four years on Ilustrado.
When his wife was at his side, she was also in front of him, marking out the horizon of his life. Now the horizon is empty: the view has changed.
A novel, especially a first novel, is... really an emotional autobiography. All these emotions I'm embarrassed at having had, I've written about.
I think therapeutic spirituality has largely been a help in the modern world. So the fact that people can approach religion with practical needs.
I think there's a natural link between the fact that our self is a story that we make up and that we're drawn to stories. It resonates, in a way.
Childbirth changed my perception of my wife. She was now the bloodied special forces soldier who had fought and risked everything for our family.
We need to start imagining the future or it will get imagined for us, and the ways that it has been imagined thus far don't seem very attractive.
What if democracy does not serve liberty? This question is seldom asked in the West, where democracy is often seen as synonymous with liberalism.
When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.
I had to educate myself about female circumcision, about the clitoris, about sexology. We studied gynecology only. Pregnancy, maternal care, etc.
Men's hearts and faces are always wide asunder; women's are not only in close connection, but are mirror-like in the instant power of reflection.
What's the difference between dragging a black man behind a truck in Jasper, Texas, and beating a white boy to death in Wyoming because he's gay?