Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
At such moments, you realize that you and the other are, in fact, one. It's a big realization. Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.
Mythologies, in other words, mythologies and religions are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a
It is not only that there is no hiding place for the gods from the searching telescope and microscope; there is no such society any more as the gods once supported.
Someone — Cyril Connolly? Ezra Pound? — once said that anything that can be read twice is literature; I would say that anything that bears saying twice is quotable.
I almost choke on my popcorn when I hear film stars, who walk on red carpets as much as the rest of us do on zebra crossings, criticising youngsters who crave fame.
While I was writing Wild Swans I thought the famine was the result of economic mismanagement but during the research I realised that it was something more sinister.
There is a lot of scepticism today as to whether memoir is real. But when fiction is done at a certain level there is scepticism as to whether it is really fiction.
When I got heartbroken at 20, it just felt like someone had spiraled a football right into my skull. At 40, it feels like someone had driven a 757 right through me.
Migration gives a blank cheque to put anything you don't feel like addressing in the memory hold. No neighbours can go against the monster narrative of your family.
Teachers wondered why I didn't speak up more in class. Why would I when I knew how precarious words could be, how betraying they were, how vulnerable they made you?
Here’s the million-dollar question: how are you going to write this book if you’re afraid to start writing? Give your friend Doubt a name, and then block his calls.
Think of me as the praying mantis of the supernatural world. Aren't those the bugs that bite the heads off the males? Link looked skeptical. Yes. Then they eat them
She was wearing a purple T-shirt, with a skinny black dress over it that made you remember how much of a girl she was, and trashed black boots that made you forget.
I don't think I'm going to like it at all. I think it's going to hurt. But after the hurt I think maybe something good and strong and beautiful will come out of it.
Some people recovering from drugs or alcohol stay with the programs indefinitely, making the recovery program their family, a long-term source of attention rewards.
Anybody who's read 'Pretty Deadly' knows that I tend to savor an immersive, 'You'll figure it out as you go!' style. 'Pretty Deadly' really does not hold your hand.
Hidden yourself in a hole and dared to burden no one with your grievous friendship? I will have friends, Katsa. I will have a life, even though I carry this burden.
War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.
I pity the Jews trying to get through life with only half a Bible. That's like trying to get from here to San Francisco with a road map that stops at Dubuque, Iowa.
When we passed a Catholic church, I recalled, he said, "You think your dad's a good chemist? They're turning soda crackers into meat in there. Can your dad do that?
He had supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not imagine what it was.
I'm screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because I'm funnier than a lot of people, I think, and that's appreciated by young people.
Sometimes you fight what you are, and sometimes you give in to it. And some nights you just don’t want to fight yourself anymore, so you pick someone else to fight.
Oh, I'll enjoy myself. I want to make sure you enjoy yourself." "Why?" I said. "If you enjoy yourself, then there's a better chance you'll want to be with me again.
I spend most of my waking hours confronting and destroying things that I fear. A thousand-year-old master vampire was a tall order, but a girl's got to have a goal.
I pull my lower lip all the way in between my teeth. If I try hard enough, maybe I can gobble my whole self this way.... I didn't try hard enough to swallow myself.
As my late mother famously observed, the one thing to be said for growing old is that every year there are a few more things I don’t have to give a rat’s ass about.
Synesthesia has interested me for a long time, both as a literary device and as a puncturing of the membranes that organize how the world comes into someone's head.
In the past, when I shot films about fishermen and hunters, I always had to admire their ability to perceive time in its entirety. The present was always temporary.
There is a place. Like no place on Earth. A land full of wonder, mystery, and danger! Some say to survive it: You need to be as mad as a hatter. Which luckily I am.
You know," he (Tweedledee) added very gravely, "it's one of the most serious things that can possibly happen to one in a battle--to get one's head cut off." pg. 199
I'm a staunch believer in enterprise, and I'm glad I live in a country where - I don't think some people understand this, but if I work hard, I get rewarded for it.
Scoring well on tests is the sort of happy thing that gets the school district the greenbacks they crave. Understanding and appreciating the material are secondary.
No one ever owns a cat...you share a common habitation on a basis of equal rights and mutual respects...although somehow the cat always comes out ahead of the deal.
When the sun is shining, think of the time it won't be, because even when you're sitting in your house with the doors shut, misfortune can fall from above. Page 279
Marriage isn't a passion-fest; it's more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way.
As the writer, I may choose to ignore the emotional heart of the matter, and focus on details, and trust that the heart of the matter will be conveyed nevertheless.
I am basically the sort of person who has stage-fright teaching. I kind of creep into a classroom. I'm not an anecdote-teller, either, although I often wish I were.
He had even read Pride and Prejudice--although he had thought that many of the heroine's problems would have been solved if someone had simply strangled her mother.
The stability and peace which seemed to be so firmly established by the brilliant monarchy of Francis I vanished with the terrible outbreak of the Wars of Religion.
The most beautiful landscapes in the world, if they evoke no memory, if they bear no trace of a remarkable event, are uninteresting compared to historic landscapes.
It was one frayed rope thrown across the chasm between us. Not enough to get across, but maybe just enough to tell that it wasn't as wide as I'd originally thought.
Listen to you sounding all badass. I bet you're just listening to a CD called 'The Sounds of Crime' while you cruise for chicks outside the Old Navy in your Camaro.
When he kissed me, his lips soft and careful, it was all the thrill of our first kiss and all the practiced familiarity of the accumulated memory of all our kisses.
...sensation of rightness, of saying the right thing atthe right time to the right person, that too-raresensation of having the right thing to say and believing it.
I write a book over a period of months or years, and when I'm done with it, usually another year goes by before I see it in print. It's hard to be patient and wait.
I was well warned about English food, so it did not surprise me, but I do wonder sometimes, how they ever manage to prise it up long enough to get a plate under it.
It is possible to eat English piecrust, whatever you may think at first. The English eat it, and when they stand up and walk away, they are hardly bent over at all.
The integration of the Negro into American society is one of the most exciting challenges to self-development and self-mastery that any nation of people ever faced.
When you use words loosely, without care and consideration, you erode trust in yourself and in what you're saying. When you squander words, you diminish your power.