Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The Baptists' basic theology is that if you hold someone under water long enough, he'll come around to your way of thinking. It's a ritual known as 'Bobbing for Baptists.'
Folklore and mythology, as well as man's catastrophic disregard for nature, are the meat of Joseph D'Lacey's horror. But the prime cuts are always compassion and surprise.
The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.
Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
Everyone's more vulnerable than they seem, and I think men are more vulnerable. Once you get close to a man, the whole thing's a facade anyway. I think manhood is fragile.
I really love storytelling, and I love the stories as they reveal themselves. It's an incredibly nourishing process; it's probably the closest I come to having a religion.
I've been a musician since I was nine. I think a ghost or goblin visited me in the night. Maybe aliens abducted me, or a divine figure sent me a spiritual memo. Who knows.
I enjoyed learning the poems, but I didn't understand of what use they might possibly be. ‘They'll keep you company on the day you have no books to read,' my teacher said.
The condition of being forgiven is self-abandonment. The proud man prefers self-reproach, however painful --because the reproached self isn't abandoned; it remains intact.
I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
I want to make money, and I would like to have a lot of money, but I still believe that the only reason to write is that somehow it will make something or somebody better.
I look at my books the way parents look at their children. The fact that one becomes more successful than the others doesn't make me love the less successful one any less.
But you cannot expect every writer to dwell on human suffering. I think my books do deal with grave issues. People who say they are too positive probably havent read them.
Moral wounds have this peculiarity - they may be hidden, but they never close; always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and open in the heart.
When you fall in love with a book, something especially interesting and exciting is happening because of the way language works on us as human beings. And I love language.
I think a misconception among many non-religious people is that anyone with a strong faith is, in all ways and at all times, blindly consistent, unwavering, unquestioning.
I'm interested in characters who should know better, who know they should give up, move on, accept life as it is, with all its constraints - life, death, time - but don't.
As she stood in the darkened room and watched my sister and father, I knew one of things that heaven meant. I had a choice, and it was not to divide my family in my heart.
I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow to set me free. He didn't want to burn my photo or toss it away, but he didn't want to look at me anymore, either.
What does it cost us to say: "My God help me! Have mercy on me!" Is there anything easier than this? And this little will suffice to save us if we be diligent in doing it.
Job was astonished at seeing Almighty God so intent on doing good to us that He seems to have nothing more at heart than to love us and to induce us to love Him in return.
If we do not learn from history, we shall be compelled to relive it. True. But if we do not change the future, we shall be compelled to endure it. And that could be worse.
The customer will become so integrated into the production process that we will find it more and more difficult to tell just who is actually the consumer and the producer.
Writing has always felt like a compulsion. Even at high school there'd be times when people would ask me if I wanted to go and hang out and I'd sit home and write instead.
Yeah, you're probably right," I admitted and slowly pulled myself out from underneath the covers. "You know, I really wish you'd catch onto the fact that I'm always right.
The broader and higher aspects of life are international.... There is a goal towards which all nations gravitate, and there is a common ground upon which all nations meet.
Writing in modern Hebrew is a bit like playing chamber music inside a huge, empty cathedral. If you are not very careful with the echoes, you may evoke some monstrosities.
As much as younger women are infused with a greater sense of possibility than most women of preceding generations, as a generation we are generally politically disengaged.
A commitment to sexual equality with males is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.
Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking.
It seems particularly ironic that a church that at one stage, a long time ago, fought to redefine marriage should now be so opposed to these attempts to redefine marriage.
I can heal the scars on your body, but I can’t heal the scars of the soul. Not yours, not mine. You have to learn to live with them. You have to choose to live beyond them
I also don't have organized religion on Pern. I figured - since there were four holy wars going on at the time of writing - that religion was one problem Pern didn't need.
I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel.
For no man is damned precisely because God hath not chosen him, because he is not elected, but because he is a sinner, and doth wilfully refuse the means of grace offered.
If I had died it would have been even better for you political bratchnies, would it not, pretending and treacherous droogs as you are.' But all that came out was er er er.
There were rules in the monastery, but the Master always warned against the tyranny of the law. 'Obedience keeps the rules,' he would say. 'Love knows when to break them.'
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
The seed haunted by the sun never fails to find its way between the stones in the ground. And the pure logician, if no sun draws him forth, remains entangled in his logic.
Mozart began his works in childhood and a childlike quality lurked in his compositions until it dawned on him that the Requiem he was writing for s a stranger was his own.
If you want to know who the oppressed minorities in America are, simply look at who gets their own shelf in the bookstore. A black shelf, a women's shelf, and a gay shelf.
I would like to do another piece of fiction dealing with a number of issues: Lesbian parenting, the 1960's, and interracial relationships in the Lesbian and Gay community.
I have suckled the wolf's lip of anger and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter.
No one demands more caution than a spy, and when someone has the skeleton key to minds, counter him by leaving the key of caution inside, on the other side of the keyhole.
Writing is storytelling and all of us are authors, not just of words but of reality. You are the author of your life, so go out and live! Then never quit writing about it!
Do we need to have 280 brands of breakfast cereal? No, probably not. But we have them for a reason - because some people like them. It's the same with baseball statistics.
Men protect things they find important," Galladon said with a shrug. "If you object, you shouldn't have made yourself so irreplaceable.Kolo?" -Brandon Sanderson (Elantris)
I didn't have my own journals, but my mother kept a journal while I was in the hospital, and my father wrote newsletters to keep friends and family updated on my progress.
I was so naive about writing, I went to the public library and checked out the only volume they had on the topic - an academic treatise about publishing from the WWII era.
Scheduling flexibility is the single greatest non-financial tool -- and the number-one dream-job factor -- at your disposal for winning battles in the talent wars. Use it.