Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
According to an ancient Sardinian legend, the bodies of those who are born on Christmas Eve will never dissolve into dust but are preserved until the end of time.
Everyone accepts that there are inevitably little areas of secrecy reserved for specialists; as regards things in general, many believe they are in on the secret.
Countless people...will hate the New World Order...and will die protesting against it...we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents.
There is no reason whatever to believe that the order of nature has any greater bias in favour of man than it had in favour of the ichthyosaur or the pterodactyl.
A bubble of fear passes up my spine. It's the feeling of standing on ice and suddenly hearing it crack under your weight - both thrilling and terrifying together.
You had better live your best and act your best and think your best today; for today is the sure preparation for tomorrow and all the other tomorrows that follow.
You got to know your limits. Once is enough, but you got to learn. A little caution never hurt anyone. A good woodsman has only one scar on him. No more, no less.
I myself have been on my own and utterly independent since I graduated. I haven't belonged to any company or any system. It isn't easy to live like this in Japan.
Don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life, and it'd lose even its imperfection.
Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.
Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts.
Music always stimulates my imagination. When I'm writing I usually have some Baroque music on low in the background chamber music by Bach, Telemann, and the like.
To become Christ-like is the only thing in the whole world worth caring for, the thing before which every ambition of man is folly and all lower achievement vain.
God's creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself, indeed, in every finite form, but compromised by none.
I struggled in the beginning. I said I was going to write the truth, so help me God. And I thought I was. I found I couldn't. Nobody can write the absolute truth.
She’s an old lady,” Barron says. “And she’s been locked up for years. Let her have some fun. She needs to blow off steam. Seduce old dudes. Lose money at canasta.
Three hundred words in a day is not a lot. So much of it is thinking before writing. And then there's the cutting. But you do what you do and keep moving forward.
Faith, in order to be genuine and of any real value, must be the offspring of that divine love which Jesus manifested when He prayed for His enemies on the cross.
The Orwellian vision was about state-sponsored surveillance. Now it's not just the state, it's your nosy neighbor, your ex-spouse and people who want to spam you.
I've always felt alienated. I realized that I've been terrified my entire life. So I can identify that fear which drives so many of the people that I write about.
The way for me to live is to have no way. My only habit should be to have none. Because I did it this way before is not sufficient reason to do it this way today.
Once, America's size in the imagination was limitless. After Europeans settled and changed it, working from the coasts inland, its size in the imagination shrank.
Occasionally I sense an insane wail deep down in the pit, the echo alone reaching me, striking without warning, a child weeping uninhibitedly, imprisoned forever.
Fear is like a black cavern that is terrifying. Once you enter the cavern and explore it, you realize that you can get out of it, go through it and get out of it.
Ruins provide the incentive for restoration, and for a return to origins. There has to be an interim of death or rejection before there can be renewal and reform.
If you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.
Why are you breaking down, incidentally? I mean if you’re able to go into a collapse with all your might, why can’t you use the same energy to stay well and busy?
Oh, it's lovely to see you!' Franny said as the cab moved off. 'I've missed you.' The words were no sooner out than she realized that she didn't mean them at all.
Sometimes you get tired of riding in taxicabs the same way you get tired riding in elevators. All of a sudden, you have to walk, no matter how far or how high up.
He found himself wondering at times, especially in the autumn, about the wild lands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams.
Indeed you did your best...I hope that it may be long before you find yourself in such a tight corner again between two such terrible old men. ~ Gandalf to Pippin
And now leave me in peace for a bit! I don't want to answer a string of questions while I am eating. I want to think!" "Good Heavens!" said Pippin. "At breakfast?
But I'm so slow on it because I find it terribly hard writing blind on computers. The computer speaks to me, but it's just so slow, I'm so terribly slow using it.
It is an insult for me to have been alive through the times you are calling the so-called civil rights movement. I don't celebrate my humiliations and my insults.
Get Carter remains among the great crime novels, a lean, muscular portrait of a man stumbling along the hard edge - toward redemption. Ted Lewis cuts to the bone.
This sacrifice of a pawn nowadays is only played for drawing purposes. Especially against the very strongest masters it has proved to be quite useful to this end.
Time is all we have. One lifetime under this name to produce a body of work that says, This is how I saw the world. Your work is worthy of whatever time it takes.
Stories," he'd said, his voice low and almost husky, "we are made up of stories. And even the one's that seem the most like lies can be our deepest hidden truths.
Everything about it was false. Right then, in that office, with the realization that no one knew the truth about my life, my thoughts about the world were shaken.
Publishers send me a lot of first novels because my first novel was the defining novel of my career, and I guess a lot of people want my benediction or something.
It took some time to gather the research and develop it into the storyline, and to finally finish an origin myth poem that I had been working on for twenty years.
Anybody can rise to a crisis and face a crushing tragedy with courage, but to meet the petty hazards of the day with a laugh- I really think that requires spirit!
I looked at my palms trying to see the other life, the parallel life. The point at which my selves broke away and one married a fat man and the other stayed here.
A coal mine greets you with only one sentiment, then hammers it: 'This is not a place for people. This is not a place for people. This is not a place for people'.
I don't enjoy putting my characters through hell unless there's a reason. I don't use violence or anything just for shock value. They're always a means to an end.
People will want you to behave a certain way, to make a certain choice because it reinforces the way they see the world...But you have to do what's right for you.
I remember things like that...A lifetimes accredidation of unkindness, all of those little longering hurts that I carried around like stones sewn into my pockets.
To belong to someone - I didn't know it, but now that I think about, it seems like that's all I've ever wanted. To really be somebody's, and to have them be mine.
Even including myself, my favorite author is Eileen Spinelli, who I happen to live with. She's a terrific writer and has written several of my all-time favorites.
The cultural insistence that parenting is the 'most important' job in the world is a smart way to satiate unappreciated women without doing a damn thing for them.