Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I have to challenge myself, and I have to challenge the reader. We should be weaving and working on new stories and not the same story over and over.
One question hovers over all of us who choose to spend our lives writing: why keep doing this in a world where so many forces are aligned against us?
Let your kids pick their punishments. Our instinct as parents is to order our kids around. It's easier, and we're usually right! But it rarely works.
People lie because they don't remember clear what they saw. People lie because they can't help making a story better than it was the way it happened.
Relationships are complicated, but happiness in a relationship isn't: It's just wanting exactly what you have. Wanting something else is dispiriting.
I think we'd all hate to be the one who gets declared undateable by one's entire grad-school population based on a couple of told and retold stories.
We have to figure out why we see the world in different ways and then how are we going to adjust so that we can at least still understand each other.
Short fiction and the novel, nonfiction and fiction, electronic texts and books - these are not opposites. One need not destroy the other to survive.
Courage is like the diamond,--very brilliant; not changed by fire, capable of high polish, but except for the purpose of cutting hard bodies useless.
To know a man, observe how he wins his object, rather than how he loses it; for when we fail, our pride supports us - when we succeed, it betrays us.
Whenever we find ourselves more inclined to persecute than to persuade, we may then be certain that our zeal has more of pride in it than of charity.
Compromise is necessary so long as you never give up who you are. That isn't compromise; that's spiritual death. You have to remain true to yourself.
There's bad apples in whatever way you want to group people - doesn't matter if it's religious, political or social. The big mistake is generalizing.
I wear the chain I forged in life....I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.
He was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset
As cities have grown rapidly across the nation, many have neglected infrastructure projects and paved over green spaces that once absorbed rainwater.
Oh for a tongue to curse the slave Whose treason, like a deadly blight, Comes o'er the councils of the brave, And blasts them in their hour of might!
Not for the first time, he wished he commanded a highly trained bunch of soldiers instead of a ragtag mob of rejects in varying stages of alcoholism.
Enchantment and seduction were fine means of persuasion, but when time is short, an awkward but quick concussion could better serve a girl's purpose.
Lonliness evaporated off of them like the steam off dry ice, and by morning it was just a cloud on the ceiling of the room, then gone with the light.
For me, reading has to be pleasurable. Otherwise, I'm ditching the book and turning on Netflix. There's way too much good TV right now to write dull.
No night so wild but brings the constant sun With love and power untold; No time so dark but through its woof there run Some blessed threads of gold.
Wikipedia is forcing people to accept the stone-cold bummer that knowledge is produced and constructed by argument rather than by divine inspiration.
Relationships are like a dance, with visible energy racing back and forth between the partners. Some relationships are the slow, dark dance of death.
Just because we can doesn’t mean we should. Just because we always have doesn’t mean we always have to. Once we know better, we should choose better.
People will buy anything at jumble sales,' I said. 'At the Evacuated Children Charity Fair a woman bought a tree branch that had fallen on the table.
In fact, merely writing the facts on a piece of paper and stating our problem clearly goes a long way toward helping us to reach a sensible decision.
You can close more business in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.
I think each family has a funhouse logic all its own, and in that distortion,in that delusion, all behavior can seem both perfectly normal and crazy.
When I really have to push and grope and scratch and claw to make a story work, that's a telltale sign that maybe something conceptually isn't right.
Call it my little gesture toward social conscience, but I like to think I'm teaching a certain number of people to read. Now that sounds pretentious!
I taught in a small teacher's college for three or four years, at which point all the administrators got a pay raise and the teaching faculty didn't.
Politics is about winning. If you don't win, you don't get to put your principles into practice. Therefore, find a way to win, or sit the battle out.
Social confusion has now reached a point at which the pursuit of immorality turns out to be more exhausting than compliance with the old moral codes.
I hate two kinds of sentences you hear in workshops, the ones beginning "I really like ..." and the ones beginning "My problem with this poem is ..."
Recognize when your peak energy occurs during the day. Allocate the most difficult projects to that period. Work on easy projects at low-energy times
The very condition of Woman is so subject to Hazard, so complex, and so grievous, that to place her at one moment is but to displace her at the next.
Michael Koryta is an amazingly talented writer, and I rank The Prophet as one of the sharpest and superbly plotted crime novels I've read in my life.
When you are in deep distress and cannot restrain some expression of it, sit down and write out a harsh letter venting your anger. But don't send it.
To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick.
the autobiography is at one and the same time a single element in the series of the writer's created works and an interpretation of the whole series.
Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.
And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before--and thus was the Empire forged.
Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.
I now see Norman Thomas as indeed a liberal, but as a real, old-fashioned, unreconstructed liberal who believes in freedom and justice for everybody.
My mission in life is to make everybody as uneasy as possible. I think we should all be as uneasy as possible, because that's what the world is like.
Living is very serious, very real. It is also always a game. If we are wise, it is very real, very terrible, and very lovely, and a good deal of fun.
Know what you want to do, hold the thought firmly, and do every day what should be done, and every sunset will see you that much nearer to your goal.
Dogma is a lie reiterated and authoritatively injected into the mind of one or more persons who believe that they believe what someone else believes.
Most diseases are the result of medication which has been prescribed to relieve and take away a beneficent and warning symptom on the part of Nature.