Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I love characters who are kind of haunted by their pasts, who struggle on despite their flaws, knowing that, at the end of the day, they're not going to shuffle off to those pearly gates.
I think the call of the inward life starts here. Solitude helps you differentiate, define the borders of the self. Solitude helps you figure our where everybody else stops and you begins.
If you wish for something hard enough, the fairy tales teach us, you can get it in the end. But it's hardly ever the way you thought it would be, and the endings aren't always happy ones.
When an older writer tries to tell a younger writer through a review what kind of career she should be pursuing, it tends to speak to the reviewer's anxieties rather than the book itself.
People who have tried it, tell me that a clear conscience makes you very happy and contented; but a full stomach does the business quite as well, and is cheaper, and more easily obtained.
When I was growing up, the first thing I wanted to be was a cowboy. That lasted till I was about ten. Then I wanted to be a baseball player. Preferably shortstop for the New York Yankees.
More often than not, my reference point is not the kids or the grandkids but myself when I was that age. I remember the days at Hartranft Elementary and Stewart Junior High in Norristown.
We are asking a really fundamental question whether thought can ever be creative. If thought is not the ground of creation then what is creation? Is love the only factor that is creative?
Meditation is not hard to understand. Anyone who knows how to worry knows how to meditate. Worriers are skilled in the meditation process but are meditating on the wrong kind of thoughts.
All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience.
A great artist... must be shaken by the naked truths that will not be comforted. This divine discontent, this disequilibrium, this state of inner tension is the source of artistic energy.
We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last we destroy them out discretion, and so disappears the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverably for ourselves and for others.
Mathematics can remove no prejudices and soften no obduracy. It has no influence in sweetening the bitter strife of parties, and in the moral world generally its action is perfectly null.
The camera would miss it all. A magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal.
When I wake up in the morning, I need the writing to go to. I begin there. And that's not an accident, I mean, that habit of getting up in the morning and going to my writing first thing.
What example do you have of anything like the Pyramids outside of Africa? You have them in Mexico, but that can be traced to early African migration. So the African created mound culture.
Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad's message made a whole lot of people feel whole again, human being again. Some of them came out and found a new meaning to their manhood and their womanhood.
I'm a person of the mountains and the open paddocks and the big empty sky, that's me, and I knew if I spent too long away from all that I'd die; I don't know what of, I just knew I'd die.
Though troubles assail And dangers affright, Though friends should all fail And foes all unite; Yet one thing secures us, Whatever betide, The scripture assures us, The Lord will provide.
It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.
Fear pounds on the door to our heart demanding to be let in. Joy is modest and often comes into our lives like a shy person entering a room; it can take a while to even notice it's there.
Many of those who argue for vouchers say that they simply want to use competition to improve public education. I don't think it works that way, and I've been watching this for a longtime.
Ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore -- "I'm easy; I'll eat anything" -- can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society.
I wanted to touch him, to tell him that even if everyone left everyone, I would never leave him, he talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor to his sadness.
I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.
Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That's why it's good to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower.
What a fool I was! and yet, in the sight of angels, are we any wiser as we grow older? It seems to me, only, that our illusions change as we go on; but, still, we are madmen all the same.
Perhaps it had nothing to do with sin and everything to do with sociopathy, that most incurable of human disorders because all so afflicted consider themselves blessed rather than cursed.
My second husband believed I had such a fickle attitude to friendship that each Friday he would update the list of my 'Top Ten' friends in the manner of a Top Of The Pops chart countdown.
'Stress' was the catch-all every pamper-pedlar I spoke to used to explain why healthy women feel the need to be regularly patted, petted and preened into a state of babyish beatification.
He and I…we share a bond. Not love, exactly. It goes beyond that. He is mine as surely as sun follows moon across the sky. Mine before ever I knew he existed. Mine until death and beyond.
For indeed you have a choice. You can flee and hide, and wait to be found. You can live out your days in terror, without meaning. Or you can take the harder choice, and you can save them.
You don't like it that I am the one you need to keep the wolf from the door; that comes as no surprise. But I am the one you have. At some point we'll both have to risk telling the truth.
For it is precisely because certain groups have no representation in a number of recognized political structures that their position tends to be so stable, their oppression so continuous.
Mystical state, madness, how it frightens people. How utterly crazy they become, remote, rude, peculiar, cruel, taunting, farouche as wild beasts who have smelled danger, the unthinkable.
However muted its present appearance may be, sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power.
An entire nation, it seemed, was standing in one long breadline, desperate for even the barest essentials. It was a crisis of monumental proportions. It was known as the Great Depression.
Fiction is often a much-needed step back that gives you the distance to see things more clearly; it's very often better at explaining why events happened as opposed to just what happened.
I think good art should always be entertaining, or at least give pleasure of some sort. And my chief goal as a writer has always been to tell a good story and give my readers a good time.
Okay, now I know your yanking my chain. Pigs will fly before Blake would ask for our help." Rhoan "Better start ducking those flying piggies then, bro, because I'm totally serious." Riley
I'm hyper-aware of my last name and it's lack of Derby or Horowtiz-esque sonorousness. Moffett sounds like a type of couch cushion. I guess I'm hoping to start a wave of first-name usage.
I'm accountable - this sounds emo - to black American writing, Southern writing, Southern black American writing, American writing and my people. That's kind of what keeps me accountable.
People hate it when they're tickled because laughter is not pleasant, if it goes on too long. I think it's a desperate sort of convulsion in desperate circumstances, which helps a little.
kar.a.bek.i.an (n.); (from Rabo Karabekian, U.S. 20th Cent. painter). Fiasco in which a person causes total destruction of own work and reputation through stupidity, carelessness or both.
I've managed to create intimacy with people I know, and people that I don't know. The longer things stay inside of us, the more we think they are black or tainted, but they're really not.
People jump back and forth in pursuit of pleasures only because they see the emptiness of their lives more clearly than they do the emptiness of whichever new entertainment attracts them.
Death destroys the body, as the scaffolding is destroyed after the building is up and finished. And he whose building is up rejoices at the destruction of the scaffolding and of the body.
Often a man goes on for years imaging that the religious teaching that had been imparted to him since childhood is still intact, while all the time there is not a trace of it left in him.
The Cheshire Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt it ought to be treated with respect.
You can write the best column in the world on Monday, and it does you absolutely no good on Tuesday. There is no way to win. You just write until you are tired, they fire you, or you die.