Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
What stops you killing yourself when you're intoxicated out of your mind is the thought that once you're dead you won't be able to drink any more.
Funnily enough, it is the subject one dreads talking about at length one ends up talking about at length, often without the slightest provocation.
You soon learn there’s no elegance or dignity in death if you spend time in the castle kitchens. You learn how ugly it is, and how good it tastes.
In the end, it is our defiance that redeems us. If wolves had a religion – if there was a religion of the wolf – that it is what it would tell us.
I was lucky: I feel like I've written four books that mean something to me, and one book that means everything to me, and that's 'The Book Thief.'
Rashly, nor ofttimes truly, doth man pass judgment on his brother; for he seeth not the springs of the heart, nor heareth the reasons of the mind.
The same energy of character which renders a man a daring villain would have rendered him useful in society, had that society been well organized.
Being the first to go to college in my family was a great thing, but it was also a source of guilt. I felt like almost a sellout going to college.
I've been around long enough now that people who don't get into the outrageousness, the over-the-top stuff, they know not to buy my books anymore.
When you have a book out, it's like a period of protracted or concentrated megalomania, and it's really not normal or good for you or any of that.
If science can eliminate sleep, we will have more time to live and no time for the dreams. But living is superior to the dream because it is real!
For God must have more important universal matters to attend to than keeping himself busy with us, people! God is not interested in local matters!
Scatter?' Tate said. 'Why? We stay here. Why go anywhere else?' 'Because we'll never know how great this place is until we leave it,' Narnie said.
If you weren't driving, I'd kiss you senseless," I tell him. He swerves to the side of the road and stops the car abruptly. "Not driving any more.
If we didn't love things, then we couldn't feel their loss. The flip side of loving is losing. I mean, you can't experience one without the other.
There is a brotherhood among the kindly- Closer and defter and more integral- Than any of aisle or coven- For love rang out before the chapel bell
When the Second World War came to an end in Europe, my uncle Sir Alexander Korda was the first filmmaker to reopen offices in Germany and Austria.
To be a fully functioning moral agent, one cannot passively accept moral principles handed down by fiat. Moral principles require moral reasoning.
Being an Image Activist simply means to be in action of supporting, celebrating and creating honest images of a group you care about, or yourself.
When I am attached by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.
Make your educational laws strict and your criminal ones can be gentle; but if you leave youth its liberty you will have to dig dungeons for ages.
I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided if greater pains be the consequence, and pains to be coveted that will terminate in greater pleasures.
Only the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return. (p.148)
We all want to be affiliated with success. It's the impulse of people who have been excluded, and Koreans have been excluded from lots of parties.
My husband is half Japanese and half white European-American, and our son is half Korean, quarter Japanese, and a quarter white European-American.
We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.
To eat or be eaten, to escape or be takena matter of utmost importance to the one concerned, yet it happens all the time and we don't even notice.
But what really is immorality? And what does helping someone really mean? Helping them to be like everyone else, or helping them to be themselves?
Friendship warms like a sunbeam; charms like a good story; inspires like a brave leader; binds like a golden chain; guides like a heavenly vision.
There's this sort of male energy that we have that can seem very destructive. But it doesn't have to be. It actually can be a very positive force.
Traveling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you - or unmaking you.
The unbeliever imagines that religion pretends to offer answers, while the believer knows that the only promise it makes is to multiply questions.
Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for years or even generations.
I was responding to one thing for the woman I knew, and there's another thing for what did she give, right. She [Nina Simone] was a great teacher.
What happiness this is: to fly, skimming over the earth just as we do in our dreams! Life has become a dream. Can this be the meaning of paradise?
A film set becomes its own family anyway, and all family dynamics come out during a shoot. The trick is hiring people who know how to handle that.
With 'Greenberg,' I wanted to make a movie about Los Angeles... my great love for it and also the way that I felt not at home and alienated there.
I had a couple of million dollars' worth of... stock once. And now it's not worth much more than wallpaper. I guess I just wasn't born to be rich.
East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a State.
I have been called 'The American De Maupassant.' Well, I never wrote a filthy word in my life, and I don't like to be compared to a filthy writer.
Religion is a dangerous prod, because it can always be misused and get out of hand, but it's useful for keeping people on the straight and narrow.
The supreme object of life is to live. Few people live. It is true life only to realize one's own perfection, to make one's every dream a reality.
Set in this stormy Northern sea, Queen of these restless fields of tide, England! what shall men say of thee, Before whose feet the worlds divide?
I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.
If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.
My desire to live is as intense as ever, and though my heart is broken, hearts are made to be broken: that is why God sends sorrow into the world.
I wrote when I did not know life; now that I do know the meaning of life, I have no more to write. Life cannot be written; life can only be lived.
The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.
But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.
Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?