Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.
Poetry is a theorem of a yellow-silk handkerchief knotted with riddles, sealed in a balloon tied to the tail of a kite flying in a white wind against a blue sky in spring.
There are ... two kinds of people in this world, those who long to be understood and those who long to be misunderstood. It is the irony of life that neither is gratified.
Most of the research which is done is determined by the requirement that it shall, in a fairly obvious and predictable way, reinforce the approved or fashionable theories.
Every dude in your high school wasn't striving to be the best poet because then he'd get all the girls, right? But you could imagine a society in which that were the case.
America is dealing death, not only to people of other lands, but to its own people. So say the most thoughtful and passionate of our youth, from California to Connecticut.
Moreover, the human condition, if that is what it is, has been getting steadily worse in the Corporate State; more and more life-denying just as life should be opening up.
In all places, and in all times, those religionists who have believed too much have been more inclined to violence and persecution than those who have believed too little.
I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time.
There is a Sunday conscience as well as a Sunday coat; and those who make religion a secondary concern put the coat and conscience carefully by to put on only once a week.
I took a good deal o' pains with his eddication, sir; let him run in the streets when he was very young, and shift for hisself. It's the only way to make a boy sharp, sir.
When we came within sight of the sea, the waves on the horizon, caught at intervals above the rolling abyss, were like glimpses of another shore with towers and buildings.
Willpower isn’t just a skill. It’s a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things.
No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.
This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election, and yet if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail. That's democracy for you.
I've been an activist in the LGBT community for a long time. I think nothing's changed, I'm just a little bit more focused on the 'T' now than I was on the 'L' or the 'G.'
Sometimes a breakdown can be the beginning of a kind of breakthrough, a way of living in advance through a trauma that prepares you for a future of radical transformation.
For a woman to be a lesbian in a male-supremacist, capitalist, misogynist, racist, homophobic, imperialist culture, such as that of North America, is an act of resistance.
Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.
Do you think anything else can go wrong tonight?" Kaden turned to look at Nicholas coming up behind her and nodded. "Yes ma'am. I'd say all kinds of things could go wrong.
The attributes you need to be a travel writer are somewhat contradictory. For travel you need to be tough and resilient and to write you must be sensitive and sympathetic.
It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.
The thing is that racism is systematic, so of course it sometimes manifested itself within the clubs. But I have certainly experienced racism outside of the clubs as well.
I have this theory that the likeability question comes up so much more with female characters created by female authors than it does with male characters and male authors.
I want to stay on the subject of marriage equality because this is the part of the show that everybody loves but you hate if you're the one who has to hear your own voice.
This monopoly over language is one of the means by which males have ensured their own primacy, and consequently have ensured the invisibility or 'other' nature of females.
You want to balance the budget in this country? We change the salary structure for Congress and the President. Every year they don't balance the budget, we don't pay them.
There are books like Darkness at Noon, which from the prose standpoint I don't think is a perfect book. It has flaws. But for its time, it was very politically courageous.
All social workers want is to get everyone involved in a programme. Because a programme provides full employment for three generations of social workers. And they mess up.
The Kindle is the most successful electronic book-reading tablet so far, but that's not saying much; Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of e-book reader projects.
Relationships are not about how two people can survive each other but about how the whole world becomes more capable of love, with all its dim anguish and glowing rapture.
...wanting things for the wrong reasons can turn anyone's life into a marshmallow on a stick over a hot fire: impossibly messy and eventually consumed, one way or another.
Inside each of us dwells a more-perfect self waiting to unfold. It cries loudly for release, yet it is sometimes ignored. To answer its call, you must take time to listen.
Habits begin as offhanded remarks, ideas and images. And then, layer upon layer, through practice, they grow from cobwebs into cables that shackle or strengthen our lives.
Yes, we who are full to the gorge with misery should look well around, doubting everything seen, done, spoken, precisely because we have a word for it, and not its alchemy
What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.
Let's pass more gun control laws and buy metal detectors for every public school in the land - anything but tell kids that life is sacred, because its Creator deems it so.
Delia picked at the raw sores of her conscience...Drunk or sober, Delia lived in the small town in her heart, ignoring the world in which all her love had turned to grief.
I gather that he nearly knocked you down, damaged your property, and generally made a nuisance of himself, and that you instantly concluded he must be some relation to me.
I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.
Mc Donalds he thought. There's no longer any such thing as a Mc Donalds hamburger. He passed out. When he came around seconds later he found he was sobbing for his mother.
It came without ribbions, It cames without tags, It came without packages, boxes, or bags. Christmas can't be bought from a store. Maybe Christmas means a little bit more.
I think managing pain with narcotics could be a useful skill. Hiding your true self from you co-workers, which is totally true. Exacting justice when it needs to be dealt.
I would say this in terms of my career, that my career provided me with everything that I wanted, and I think a man is fortunate if he can say that at the end of his life.
Jealousy is the very reverse of understanding, of sympathy, and of generous feeling. Never has jealousy added to character, never does it make the individual big and fine.
Attach thyself to truth; defend justice; rejoice in the beautiful. That which comes to thee with time, time will take away; that which is eternal will remain in thy heart.
What a great advantage a man can have over women, if he only knew what cold and calculating thoughts are going through her mind.... while her eyes are brimming with tears.
All good and true book-lovers practice the pleasing and improving avocation of reading in bed ... No book can be appreciated until it has been slept with and dreamed over.
I worry that as the problem-solving power of our technologies increases, our ability to distinguish between important and trivial or even non-existent problems diminishes.
It was in the sugar hacienda in Negros, Panay and in Central Luzon where I saw the injustices heaped upon the sugar workers, particularly the sacadas, or seasonal workers.