Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The debate analysis in the media is rampant with contest analogies of war, baseball, boxing, football; you name it. Any testosterone contest imaginable is fair game.
He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.
My test for writing is always, is this fun or does it feel like a job? Is it moving me? Or am I just fulfilling my own expectations - or even worse, somebody else's?
When I feel I'm going to write something, then I just am quiet and I try to listen. Then something comes through. And I do what I can in order not to tamper with it.
In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.
It is important to understand that there are many different ways of seeing the world and expressing the wisdom of Native belief...No one voice speaks for all voices.
Native people such as the Cherokees are just as human and complex and real as Americans are, and our nation needs to respect American Indian cultures and traditions.
If you follow your bliss you will find a path laid out before you that has been waiting for you all along and you will begin to live the life you ought to be living.
Now, when Luke Skywalker unmasks his father, he is taking off the machine role that the father has played. The father was the uniform. That is power, the state role.
One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We re interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour.
The Greeks, it will be recalled, regarded Eros, the god of love, as the eldest of the gods; but also as the youngest, born fresh and dewy-eyed in every living heart.
They that never peeped beyond the common belief in which their easy understandings were at first indoctrinated are strongly assured of the truth of their receptions.
Recreation is intended to the mind as whetting is to the scythe, to sharpen the edge of it, which otherwise would grow dull and blunt,--as good no scythe as no edge.
I learned to look up suddenly from a hatch or feeding frenzy and find myself momentarily removed from solid earth. I go fishing not to find myself but to lose myself
Iconic Paris tells us: here are our three-star attractions, go thou and marvel. And so we gaze obediently at what we are told to gaze at, without exactly asking why.
Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.
The writer's life [is] full of frailty and defeat like any other life. What counts is the work. Yet the work can quite easily be buried, or half-buried, by the life.
I know it's hard for you to trust me. If I ever find the man who did this to you, who made you so frightened, I'll kill him with my bare hands. But you can trust me.
It's taken us 10 years, and it was constant excitement. I was constantly shocked by how evil he could be. Mao was very, very shrewd but he didn't have human feeling.
I was a kid who lived to read. It was the primary pleasure of my existence. It's still one of the primary pleasures of my existence. It's where I draw my sustenance.
I always write with music. It takes me a while to figure out the right piece of music for what I'm working on. Once I figure it out, that's the only thing I'll play.
I'm predisposed to think that as a people, we're hardwired to understand things through the telling of stories. I think that as human beings it's part of who we are.
I write in my house, at my desk, where I have Christmas lights strung over it to try and convince me that I'm having a good time. I can't really write anywhere else.
With fiction, the works of women are often over-interpreted as autobiography, especially when the main character is a woman, especially if she is seen as privileged.
For years I lived rather medicated and muted - I did not possess language to describe my vague feelings of unhappiness, to politicize it, to attempt to transcend it.
I think the mad wives and mistresses are my hysterics - even the fictionalized ones. I want to trace how they were silenced, I want to find for them an escape route.
Always point your finger at the chest of the person with whom you are being photographed. You will appear dynamic. And no photo editor can crop you from the picture.
The lessons this life has planted in my heart pertain more to caring than crops, more to Golden Rule than gold, more to the proper choice than to the popular choice.
My bounce-around life had taught me that dreams were dangerous things - they look solid in your mind, but you just try to reach for them. It's like gathering clouds.
There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, I said, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.
Harry closed his eyes. He never wanted to open them again. His heart sent this message to his molecules: "For reasons obvious to all of us, this galaxy is dissolved!
In the 21st Century, I'd like to think women have the right to live lives free of both sexual violence and daily harassment, as well as any other form of inequality.
So Pa sold the little house. He sold the cow and calf. He made hickory bows and fastened them upright to the wagon box. Ma helped him stretch white canvas over them.
Most hatred is based on fear, one way or another. Yeah. I wrapped myself in anger, with a dash of hate, and at the bottom of it all was an icy center of pure terror.
Jason patted me on the back. “Tomorrow night we'll take you out chasing deer.” “I thought you'd chase cars,” I said. He grinned. “What fun is that? Cars don't bleed.
New York is an ugly city, a dirty city... But there is one thing about it. Once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.
Several renowned scientists have been predicting for some time that the world could enter a period of cooling right around now, with consequences that could be dire.
Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal - that there is no human relation between master and slave.
Christian love comes from the understanding that there is a unity of divine origins in oneself and in other people, and not only in people, but in all living things.
He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it
I just refer to myself as being Spirit, Mind and Body like everybody else and working toward the mastery of my natural divinity and the healing of my emotional mind.
Reeling and Writhing of course, to begin with,' the Mock Turtle replied, 'and the different branches of arithmetic-ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision.
And for a moment, I understand that I have friends on this lonely path; that sometimes your place is not something you find, but something you have when you need it.
I've met a lot of the astronauts, which was such an incredible experience. They're all very macho guys, like fighter pilots, but then there's a mysticism about them.
Where there are too many policemen, there is no liberty. Where there are too many soldiers, there is no peace. Where there are too many lawyers, there is no justice.
Yiddish is the voice of exile, the tongue of ghettos, but I'll shed a tear when it joins ancient Greek and dead Latin. For gossip and insult, you can't beat Yiddish.
Pretending that there are no choices to be made - reading only books, for example, which are cheery and safe and nice - is a prescription for disaster for the young.
Pleasantness was the machismo of the Midwest. There was something athletic about it. You flexed your face into a smile and let it hover there like the dare of a cat.
Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether.
One of the good things about the profession of being a professor, is that you also have time to do what interests you and what you care about or what you're good at.