Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A great artist transforms our world, removes scales from our eyes, plugs from our ears, gloves from our fingertips, teaches us to perceive reality differently.
What we might have been dealing with here - with the building of the Pyramids - is an age that got lost. Man had to learn again what they previously had known.
So I will stand more steadfastly for the things I stand up for, like people who work for a living. I'd like to be able to stand that way when I go to Congress.
I zipped myself all the way into the sleeping bag of myself, not because I was hurt, and not because I had broken something, but because they were cracking up.
I like to have my characters talking in an up-to-date way, and I like their essentially modern self-awareness, which means we can have lots of irony and jokes.
Time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.
Whoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.
I'm not interested in the fact that a writer may label himself as being intellectual or anti-intellectual. l'm really interested in the stuff he's turning out.
. . . if there is a way for the world to be transformed for the better, it can only be done by pessimism; optimists will never change the world for the better.
I was a good pupil at primary school: in the second class I was writing with no spelling mistakes, and the third and fourth classes were done in a single year.
The Trail of Tears should teach all of us the importance of respect for others who are different from ourselves and compassion for those who have difficulties.
When, in the present world, men behave well, that is no doubt sometimes because they are creatures of habit as well as, sometimes, because they are reasonable.
Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort have created a biblically sound course that will not only motivate Christians; it will equip them to fulfill the Great Commission.
Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?
In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.
Monarchists frequently declare that without the royal family, Britain would be 'nothing.' What a woeful lack of love for one's country such statements express.
Mine (story) ain't the scariest, the clearest, the most painful, or the most beautiful. It just happens to be the one that's got it's fingers around my throat.
For me it's a remarkable thing that there is a prize celebrating and honouring and making for a brief moment short fiction the centre of the literary universe.
People who like to fume about the manner in which Disney changed beloved classics are often ignorant of history, not to mention the realities of show business.
I wanted to find a place to hide from all of it, where the nightmares and the rivers and reality couldn't find me. For me, that place was always inside a book.
Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.
The world has become uglier since it began to look into a mirror every day; so let us settle for the mirror image and do without an inspection of the original.
I saw a poet chase a butterfly in a meadow. He put his net on a bench where a boy sat reading a book. It's a misfortune that it is usually the other way round.
No point in thinking, you just have to get on with life. We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try.
You think I led him on? For what? Kicks? I don't have enough exictement in my life, so maybe I'll tease a nice guy, get his hopes up, then laugh and skip away?
Another werewolf thing. Like most animals, we spent a large part of our lives engaged in the three Fs of basic survival. Feeding, fighting and... reproduction.
I envy my dad and his faith. I envy all people who have someone to beseech, who know where they're going, who sleep under the fluffy white comforter of belief.
An integral approach acknowledges that all views have a degree of truth, but some views are more true than others, more developed, more evolved, more adequate.
Why? is the boy's motto, why does, why is, why not? Food, weather, time, fires, sea and season, clothes and cars and people; it's all grist to the mill of why.
My advice to would-be young authors is to read a lot, write a lot, and not worry about creating a finished product. Keeping a journal is not a bad idea either.
Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
The chief weapon of sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was too late, how heartless and greedy they were.
You can't help it but you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed — so you were a good man just the same.
Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.
Just because we think we're so wonderful doesn't mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much.
The Western poet and writer of romance has exactly the same kind of difficulty in comprehending Eastern subjects as you have in comprehending Western subjects.
It was as if the power and loneliness of the vampires' world had combined with the group oriented puppy-pile world of the shapeshifters and made something new.
The seeds of genius are in many blogs, but bloggers lack the interest in or understanding of the difference between blogging and fully-formed literary efforts.
All through life there were distinctions - toilets for men, toilets for women; clothes for men, clothes for women - then, at the end, the graves are identical.
If you make it a habit not to blame others, you will feel the growth of the ability to love in your soul, and you will see the growth of goodness in your life.
I have to create a circle of reading for myself: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal, The New Testament. This is also necessary for all people.
Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.
There it is!' he thought with rapture. 'When I was already in despair, and when it seemed there would be no end- there it is! She loves me. She's confessed it.
Power, from the standpoint of experience, is merely the relation that exists between the expression of someone's will and the execution of that will by others.
And thus they give the time, that Nature meant for peaceful sleep and meditative snores, to ceaseless din and mindless merriment and waste of shoes and floors.
Adina appealed to the sky. "We asked for rescue and you sent us incompetent rockstar pirates with a broken ship and perfect abs?" "Thank you, God," Petra said.
She smiled as sweetly as a show poster for the glorified, all-American Ziegfeld girl just before dumping her second cigarette into Wally’s fresh cup of coffee.
You have a steady fella?” Sam asked after a bit. “No fella can hold me for long.” Sam gave her a sideways glance. “That a challenge?” “No. A statement of fact.
The only part of Christian teachings which will be truly accepted by the Chinese people is Christ's injunction to be "harmless as doves" but "wise as serpents.