Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I do not think that any civilization can be called complete until it has progressed from sophistication to unsophistication, and made a conscious return to simplicity of thinking and living.
The best proof that Christ has risen is that he is still alive. And for the immense majority of our contemporaries, the only way of seeing him alive is for us Christians to love one another.
Acting is very much like a child making believe. I'm not one to become a character, but I fall in love with the character. It's like having faith; you're going to be that person for a while.
I do see an interest in writing for Twitter. While publishers still do love the novel and people do still like to sink into one, the very quick form is appealing because of the pace of life.
Madame de Stael thought it was pride in mankind to endeavour to penetrate the secret of the universe; and speaking of the higher metaphysics she said: "I prefer the Lord's Prayer to it all."
The memories which come to us through music are not accompanied by any regrets; for a moment music gives us back the pleasures it retraces, and we feel them again rather than recollect them.
This is a love story. I never knew there were so many kinds of love or that love could make people do so many different things. I never knew there were so many different ways to say goodbye.
I love inventing interesting people and then pushing them to their absolute limits - and usually those absolute limits involve homicidal faeries, werewolves, or some other paranormal menace.
So why did you want to kiss me?" "We're friends aren't we?" Callum shrugged. I relaxed into a smile. "Of course we are." "And if you can't kiss your friends who can you kiss?" Callum smiled.
Eventually the bad stuff I'm writing turns into better stuff. Other times, I've just walked away from what I was working on, and figured I'd have a better perspective when I came back to it.
The house, while sound in wind and limb, was described as being of 'no character.' We didn't think then that it had anything but character, rather sinister perhaps, but definitely character.
There's a road to hell that is paved with good intentions but it's a long route. The quicker path is paved with the kind of ignorance that clever men who just don't want to know are best at.
Obama's Nobel Peace Prize is an exquisite act of condescension from Norwegians, a dog biscuit and a pat on the head to the American hyperpower for agreeing to spay itself into a hyperpoodle.
When she faced the noise, she found the mayor’s wife in a brand-new bathrobe and slippers. On the breast pocket of the robe sat an embroidered swastika. Propaganda even reached the bathroom.
The highest thing one can do in literature is to succeed in saying that thing which one meant to say. There is nothing better than that - to make the world see your thoughts as you see them.
I can always look up at the cosmos and marvel, no matter what happens. And when I look up at it, I feel as though my problems are small. I don't know why, but it always makes me feel better.
If you have a guru, leave him; if you don't have, get one. In other words, keep changing your gurus! Ocean's wisdom comes from knowing many ships and many fishes, many storms and many waves!
There is the will of the people, there is the will of the mind! Always be at the side of the second one! The first one contains mostly stupidity; the second one contains always intelligence.
It is hard to celebrate the past in an ecumenical way, or even in a fair-minded one, apparently. The trouble with the past is not just that it's behind us, it's that it is not even over yet.
If you have known how to compose your life, you have done a great deal more than the person who knows how to compose a book. You have done more than the one who has taken cities and empires.
For among other things he had been counseled to bring me to love knowledge and duty by my own choice, without forcing my will, and to educate my soul entirely through gentleness and freedom.
Others form man; I tell of him, and portray a particular one, very ill-formed, whom I should really make very different from whathe is if I had to fashion him over again. But now it is done.
The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious-think of Cervantes!
Artists are in the imagining/ prototyping business. Society needs people to be out there thinking of what might be. That cannot be something we just delegate to politicians or technologists.
I don't think I am a citizen of the world; I am very much a citizen of my own country. But my own country is closely related to other parts of the world and influenced by what happens there.
There is no good word for stomach; just as there is no good word for girlfriend. Stomach is to girlfriend as belly is to lover, and as abdomen is to consort, and as middle is to petite amie.
I'm suspicious of full-replacement programs - that is, pronouncements that one way of doing something will entirely supplant another, and that in fact we have to hurry the replacement along.
I feel a real connection to Brooklyn, certainly, because I spent 20 years of my life there, but I don't think of myself as a Brooklyn artist any more than I think of myself as a male artist.
I guess I'm interested in people who are very sophisticated in intellectual ways, while being completely off the mark in emotional ones, with huge blind spots in terms of their own behavior.
I'll bet you anything you like that half an hour after they have met, they will be calling each other sister. Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first.
What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise [in the future. But only if we set out to make this true and anticipate it so we look for the blessings until we find them].
A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art.
At six o'clock we cleaned our cells, At seven all was still, But the sough and swing of a mighty wing The prison seemed to fill, For the Lord of Death with icy breath Had entered in to kill.
The people who have adored me-- there have not been very many, but there have been some-- have always insisted on living on, long after I had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me.
It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.
There's an American idea that you want to look as young as you can for as long as you can. If you can be mistaken for a teenager from behind into your 50s, then you've won; you've succeeded.
Remorse is extremely useful for a generation which has in fact dirtied its hands but for the next generation you cannot ask, for instance, young Germans today to feel guilty about Hitlerism.
What did i know of your fantasies? Why do we know so little about the fantasies of our parents? What do we know of somebody if we know nothing of the images passed to him by his imagination?
You should be home sleeping. What is the use of having a man in the house, if he cannot take care of you for a while?” “Mmm,” I said. “I give up. What's the use of having a man in the house?
Like most people, there are things I love about Amazon. It's cheap, it's fast, and it's at my doorstep. But Amazon will never replace the important role my local indie plays in my community.
The problem is too often they are boring, and boring in a meeting happens for the same reason as in a book or movie - when there is not enough compelling tension. Meetings should be intense.
Of the birth of subgenres, there is no end. They arise like bubbles full of miraculous hopes and potentials from the Planckian foam of the canon, inspiring writers new and established alike.
To overcome any form of adversity, to not give up, to not give up on yourself, your dreams, to not sequester yourself away from people - that's the most important thing to do with your life.
Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story.
At conventions, one of the standard questions I get is, 'Are you writing any new novels?' To which I used to respond, in my smart-[alec] fashion, 'No, I've decided to write only old novels.'
I've had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, I'm also helpless in two or three other languages.
Every invention creates new needs, but the biggest needs are not for new and more advanced versions of the last invention but for solutions to the social problems the last invention created.
In 1975, I left the burning city of Beirut for the quiet insanity of England. To say that short, frail and wispy 15-year-old me didn't fit in would be such an understatement as to be a joke.
When students write from experience, they can breathe those specifics into their writing- dialect, odd smells, precise names of plants- that can animate even the most tired and tedious text.
I liked this idea: that peculiarness wasn't a deficiency, but an abundance; that it wasn't we who lacked something normals had, but they who lacked peculiarness. That we were more, not less.