Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My principle anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh.
In religions which have lost their creative spark, the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls.
O Sun, great Oriental, my proud mind's golden cap, I love to wear you cocked askew, to play and burst in song throughout our lives, and so rejoice our hearts.
I've often admired the way many Catholics who have left the priesthood, for example, have nevertheless remained sincere Catholics. They voted with their feet.
Despite popular conviction, a writer needn't wear black, be unshaven, sickly and parade around New York's East Village spewing aphorisms and scaring children.
Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we're as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.
You search for God, and seek to find Him here. Or you seek to find Him there. Why need you to look in the corners of the room when He entirely fills the room?
My dear young lady, there was a great deal of truth; I dare say, in what you said, and you looked very pretty while you said it, which is much more important.
LADY BRACKNELL: Do you smoke? JACK: Well, yes, I must admit I smoke. LADY BRACKNELL: I'm glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind.
No woman should have a memory. Memory in a woman is the beginning of dowdiness. One can always tell from a woman's bonnet whether she has got a memory or not.
Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man should catch young and have done with, for when it comes in middle life it is apt to be serious.
I was interested in political failure here in the U.S. The way we're failing to work together to solve even our smallest problems, let alone the complex ones.
I am interested in agricultural corporations and how they function. The idea that they own the genetics of our food supply is a really compelling thing to me.
Novelists want to be published and need a publisher to decide to print 20,000 copies. So you need to entertain on some level. I want to reach out and connect.
I used to work for a newspaper that covered local resource issues, and my coworkers and friends were journalists. Their reporting work was always pretty grim.
The liberal says the end of religion is to make man happy while he's alive. And the fundamentalist says the end of religion is to make man happy when he dies.
A werewolf tossed me against a giant packing crate while I was trying to rescue a frightened young girl who'd been kidnapped by an evil witch and a drug lord.
There's something really fun about being scared, and I guess that was at least part of why I wanted to film certain scenes from my new book, 'Skeleton Creek.'
Considering the amount of work I put into each piece, the amount I need to make from it is pretty high. I won't sell for less... but that means I rarely sell.
The best government in the world, the best religion, the best traditions of any people, depend upon the good or evil of the men and women who administer them.
Giving presents is one of the most possessive things we do, did you realize that? It's the way we keep a hold on other people. Plant ourselves in their lives.
It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it.
Only that Swiss in the heart want still a king or at least a strong Upper House of Parliament. Swiss long themselves for less democracy and more dictatorship.
You must accept that you can change and that a pattern of principles adhered to and used repeatedly will not only direct your life, but change it permanently.
Once we thought a few hundred corpses would be enough then we saw thousands were still too few and today we can't even count all the dead Everywhere you look.
The idea that He would take his attention away from the universe in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds is just so unlikely I can't go along with it.
Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry.
Everybody who's been on television more than once wears in public an expression of fatuous affability. Because you may be addressed at any moment by somebody.
I have no idea what that is, but yawn, anyway, just on principle. Eat up. Pancakes is brain food. Apparently not grammar food. Wow.You college girls are mean.
He dunked his tea bag and watched the results critically. “I really must get a new supplier. This tea is pathetic. America just doesn’t understand tea at all.
You don't learn to write by going through a series of preset writing exercises. You learn to write by grappling with a real subject that truly matters to you.
We are, at almost every point of our day, immersed in cultural diversity: faces, clothes, smells, attitudes, values, traditions, behaviours, beliefs, rituals.
If I like a book, I tend to read the author's entire collection. But I choose mainly through personal recommendations, general word of mouth and book reviews.
I sometimes get up at night when I can't sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, 'My God, did I write that?
The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you're seventeen you know everything. When you're twenty-seven if you still know everything you're still seventeen.
I find it amusing that I'm on the Internet now, because I've criticized it, but mainly I've criticized it on the basis of, 'What are you going to do with it?'
To say that everything without exception is going straight to hell is not an alternative vision but only an inversion of the mainstream's 'everything's fine.'
Blanche, prosaic in a pale yellow sweater and blue jeans, was wondering again if anything mattered—-life, faith--specifically, finishing homework assignments.
Man's brain, enlarged fortuitously, invented words in an ambitious attempt to learn how to think, only to have them usurped by his emotions. But we still try.
We design our lives through the power of our choices. We feel most helpless when we've made choices by default, when we haven't designed our lives on our own.
When in the world are we going to begin to live as if we understood that this is life? This is our time, our day...and it is passing. What are we waiting for?
The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It's in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay.
A Daughter: The companion, the friend, and the confidant of her mother, and the object of a pleasure something like the love between the angels to her father.
Once you know what women are like, men get kind of boring. I'm not trying to put them down, I mean I like them sometimes as people, but sexually they're dull.
People hear that I am a horror writer and they think that I must be a monster, but actually I have the heart of a small child - I keep it in a jar on my desk.
Design a portfolio you are not likely to trade... akin to premarital counseling advice; try to build a portfolio that you can live with for a long, long time.
You can usually tell how healthy a ballet company is by the degree of your interest in the middle ranks of the dancers - the not-yet stars, the up-and-comers.
The extent to which we live from day to day, from week to week, intent on details and oblivious to larger presences, is a gauge of our impoverishment in time.
Within a Metaphysics of Quality, science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are not the reality they describe.
Lincoln was known to have walked miles to borrow books, to get the most rudimentary form of education. So what do we do on his birthday? We close the schools!