Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.
If you can fall in love again and again if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical you've got it half licked.
The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we're passing one another without a look of recognition.
It is amusing to detect character in the vocabulary of each person. The adjectives habitually used, like the inscriptions on a thermometer, indicate the temperament.
No one's death comes to pass without making some impression, and those close to the deceased inherit part of the liberated soul and become richer in their humanness.
One of the things I liked about writing for a magazine was a kind of anonymity. When you do books, it's different than magazine pieces because you become a 'figure.'
Allow me to explain how my whole life has prepared me for this moment. I am used to girls screaming, and your screams – will be sweeter than another’s cries of love.
I read 'Sabella or The Blood Stone' by Tanith Lee, which was hugely influential to me. I love Tanith's writing. She's just really lyrical, beautiful use of language.
It is the goodly outside that sin puts on which tempteth to destruction. It has been said that sin is like the bee, with honey in its mouth, but a sting in its tail.
Be circumspect in your dealings, and let the seed you plant be the offspring of prudence and care; thus fruit follows the fair blossom, as honor follows a good life.
Obedience, as it regards the social relations, the rules of society, and the laws of nature and nature's God, should commence at the cradle and end only at the tomb.
The ancients, who in these matters were not perhaps such blockheads as some may conceive, considered poetical quotation as one of the requisite ornaments of oratory.
I want to have an epic life. I want to tell my life with big adjectives. I want to forget all the grays in between, and remember the highlights and the dark moments.
Only the long melancholy call to prayer, or the wail of women over the dead, or the barking of dogs, breaks the silence which at sunset falls as a pall over Baghdad.
I don't believe in fairies floating around, and I don't believe in telepathy, but there are things I want to say that just simple real-life stories don't let me say.
We see but the outside of a rich man's happiness; few consider him to be like the silkworm, that, when she seems to play, is at the very same time consuming herself.
It's really important to me to keep growing as a writer, to look for new challenges and be harshly critical of my own work in order to learn and tell better stories.
Budget grows out of the story. If you're writing a story with people caught in an elevator for most of the film, you're pretty sure it won't be a $200 million movie.
Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?
Art doesn't want to be familiar. It wants to astonish us. Or, in some cases, to enrage us. It wants to move us. To touch us. Not accommodate us, make us comfortable.
Our life is what our thoughts make it. A man will find that as he alters his thoughts toward things and other people, things and other people will alter towards him.
Suffering is always the effect of wrong thought in some direction. It is an indication that the individual is out of harmony with himself, with the Law of his being.
The authorities in the United States confiscated private gold holdings in the Depression of the 1930's. They may seek to do so again in the Depression of the 1990's.
Where are your combing seas, your blue water, your rollers, your breakers, your whales, or your waterspouts, and your endless motion, in this bit of a forest, child?
When something is staring you in the face in your life and you see it with your own two eyes and feel it within your heart only a fool doesn't believe it to be true.
We would not have been a successful family without my father and stepfather, who were working-class men with better dreams for their children. We just wore them out.
The most essential factor is persistence - the determination never to allow your energy or enthusiasm to be dampened by the discouragement that must inevitably come.
I believe that the Source from which we come is alive in us as our breath, and as we speak and sing and breathe, we release the beauty of the Creator into the world.
The first thing I notice is the sky, so full of blue and the kind of brilliant white clouds that make you ecstatic to have eyes. Nothing can go wrong under this sky.
Sometimes when a man gets older he has a revelation and wants awfully bad to get back to the place where he left his life, but he can't get to that place- not often.
The best novel I wrote was one called 'Crusoe's Daughter,' which never won any prizes. But I was getting somewhere in that. I'm not sure I have in any of the others.
My space chums think reality was once a primitive method of crowd control that got out of hand. In my view, it’s absurdity dressed up in a three-piece business suit.
Connie drove a silver Camry with rosary beads hanging from her rearview mirror and a Smith& Wesson stuck under the seat. No matter whatwent down, Connie was covered.
At a minimum if we can just have enough distribution of clout in society so it isn't run by a tiny minority, then at the very least it gives us some room to breathe.
All peace-loving women shut up when they sense they have stepped onto Guy Turf. Guy Turf is a murky realm of ego and pride and chivalry and testosterone and heroism.
It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?
All behavioral or mood disorders - including depression, OCD, ADHD and addiction - have some neurochemical components, but sufferers can still work to overcome them.
My novella, 'The Lucky One,' is inspired in part by my dad and also by a Holocaust survivor I interviewed for the Steven Spielberg Survivors of the Shoah Foundation.
Can the mind see the truth of its own incapacity to know the unknown? Surely if I see very clearly that my mind cannot know the unknown, there is absolute quietness.
Long patience and application saturated with your heart's blood-you will either write or you will not-and the only way to find out whether you will or not is to try.
You can't be evangelical and associate yourself with Jesus and what he says about the poor and just have no other domestic concerns than tax cuts for wealthy people.
Don't dissipate your powers; strive to concentrate them. Genius thinks it can do whatever it sees others doing, but it will surely repent of every ill-judged outlay.
Old age is never honored among us, but only indulged, as childhood is; and old men lose one of the most precious rights of man,--that of being judged by their peers.
The clever reader who is capable or reading between these lines what does not stand written in them but is nevertheless implied will be able to form some conception.
The mortal race is far too weak not to grow dizzy on unwonted brights. [Ger., Das sterbliche Geschlecht ist viel zu schwach In ungewohnter Hohe nicht zu schwindeln.]
Whether one show one's self a man of genius in science or compose a song, the only point is, whether the thought, the discovery, the deed, is living and can live on.
No wonder we are all more or less pleased with mediocrity, since it leaves us at rest, and gives the same comfortable feeling as when one associates with his equals.
In the closing years of the nineteenth century, African-American historians began to look at their people's history from their vantage point and their point of view.
If you have one strong idea, you can't help repeating it and embroidering it. Sometimes I think that authors should write one novel and then be put in a gas chamber.
The ones I pity are the ones who never stick out their neck for something they believe, never know the taste of moral struggle, and never have the thrill of victory.