Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
For me, the battle isn't Hillary [Clinton] vs. [Bernie] Sanders. And I understand that for some people that's the battle. But for me, more than anything, it's stopping a Republican president.
I do think that books are invaluable as a reservoir of what we call the human space. And this is why I think that, even if they're threatened, the work that they do has an incalculable merit.
When I enter that higher-order space that's required to write, I'm a better human. For whatever my writing is, wherever it's ranked, it definitely is the one place that I get to be beautiful.
As is well known, all collectors are prepared to steal or murder if it is a question of getting another piece for their collection; but this does not lower their moral character in the least.
Flannery O'Connor was a revelation for me. When I read her, I was very young, and I didn't understand what she was doing. I didn't see the - any of the Catholicism or any of the social stuff.
We underestimate children and the people who work with them. I swear - so often, I tell people I am a children's author, and it's like they want to pat me on the head: 'Aw, isn't that sweet.'
He was trying to tell me something.' Derek snorted. 'Aren’t they all? Must be a rule in the ghost handbook—if in danger of evaporating, make sure you’re in the middle of a dire pronouncement.
It wasn't until I was in my teens that I started admiring writers as inspirations for my own work, and my earliest influences there were Stephen King, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Richard Adams.
Humans are, as Sartre put it, 'condemned to be free'. To insist that science, or God, objectively defines moral values is to abandon our responsibility as human beings to make such judgments.
The real Stephen Colbert is a practicing Catholic. He teaches Sunday school. He can recite chapter and verse of chapter and verse - from both the King James Bible and 'The Lord of the Rings.'
What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagiani was philosophical. He said it sure beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War.
The mountebank told them that God was surely trying to kill them, possibly because He was through with them, and that they should have the good manners to die. This, as you can see, they did.
The busybodies have begun to infect American society with a nasty intolerance - a zeal to police the private lives of others and hammer them into standard forms - A Nation of Finger Pointers.
For now, we assume that self-evolving robots will learn to mimic human traits, including, eventually, humor. And so, I can't wait to hear the first joke that one robot tells to another robot.
These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraphs and kerosene and coal stoves -- they're good to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em.
Her blue eyes were still beautiful, but they did not know what was before them, and Mary herself could never look through them again to tell Laura what she was thinking without saying a word.
I started off like everyone else does, slogging but having a compulsion to put words on paper. I didn't write or read horror or fantasy, other than children's fantasy, until I was in my teens
She doesn't understand what she's asking, Jean-Claude said. No, but she asks, and if we do not do it, we will always wonder. I would rather thy and fail than regret having never tried at all.
We are all flawed, my dear. Every one of us. And believe me, we've all made mistakes. You've just got to take a good hard look at yourself, change what needs to be changed, and move one, pet.
I think that ties in with issues of identity as well - that sometimes there are parts of us we want to hide, and then there's other times we say, "You know what? Nope. Done hiding that part."
You're fighting a battle of good and evil with your dog pimp! Your only weapon is the shimmy! There is power in the shimmy! Make him fear your shimmy! Now, goddamnit, show me your war shimmy!
In principle if I could not have a home I wouldn't. But not having a home would be too difficult procedurally, going from hotel to hotel, the gap of three hours where you're hungry and tired.
Music is the shorthand of emotion. Emotions, which let themselves be described in words with such difficulty, are directly conveyed to man in music, and in that is its power and significance.
What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or endanger the life of living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit to their cruelty.
Go take the mother's soul, and learn three truths: Learn What dwells in man, What is not given to man , and What men live by . When thou hast learnt these things, thou shalt return to heaven.
The average session takes about one to two hours. It's totally amazing because when a person breathes, they go through one stage of relaxation after another, and every stage releases tension.
Come back!" the Caterpillar called after her. "I've something important to say." This sounded promising, certainly. Alice turned and came back again. "Keep your temper," said the Caterpillar.
I went last week to get hypnotized. To quit smoking. And the hypnotist said, 'The reason you smoke is you're bitter and depressed.' No, the reason I smoke is the little sucker tastes so good.
Pippa's laugh is bitter, tinged with tears. 'Ha! Why do girls think being beautiful will solve every problem? Being beautiful just creates problems. It's a misery. I wish I were someone else.
Adults are living increasingly as children: completely in their imaginations. Reading Harry Potter while every newspaper in the country goes out of business. They know so little that is real.
I have decided to follow in my sinful ways, and have largely abandoned the increasingly religious life I was leading over the previous months, including several hours of Talmudic study a day.
Like the bodies of dancers or athletes, the minds of readers are genuinely happy and self-possessed only when cavorting around, doing their stretches and leaps and jumps to the tune of words.
Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal process──which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake.
There is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel, that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.
A potato is a poor thing, poorly treated. More often than not it is cooked in so unthinking and ignorant a manner as to make one feel that it has never before been encountered in the kitchen.
You love writing; I hate it; and if I had a lover who expected a note from me every morning, I should certainly break with him. Let me beg you then not to measure my friendship by my writing.
Home is a place in the mind. When it is empty, it frets. It is fretful with memory, faces and places and times gone by. Beloved images rise up in disobedience and make a mirror for emptiness.
A great deal has been written about the forthrightness of the moderns shocking the Victorians, but there is no shock like the one which the forthrightness of the Victorians can give a modern.
She says people ought to learn to live like them, with the body abandoned in a wilderness, and in the mind the memory of a single kiss, a single word, a single look to stand for a whole love.
Our pleasures in literature do not, I think, decline with age; last 1st of January was my eighty-second birthday, and I think that I had as much enjoyment from books as I ever had in my life.
I can understand pulling a book whose contents have been questioned - after all, false information has a way of sticking in your brain and seeming true when you go to retrieve it years later.
Everyone knows what it's like to make the wrong decision for the right reasons. For me, wrong decisions are the heart of drama - a character who's always making the right decisions is boring.
Rosa Hubermann was sitting on the edge of the bed with her husband's accordion tied to her chest. Her fingers hovered above the keys. She did not move. She didn't ever appear to be breathing.
One ought not to write for money, but I consider it a first duty after one has written to exact the highest possible price. It is not a matter which concerns only the writer, but all writers.
I hope, too, that my book will illuminate my belief that love of art - be it poetry, storytelling, painting, sculpture, or music - enables people to transcend any barrier man has yet devised.
Monotony and repetition are characteristic of many parts of life, but these do not become sources of conscious discomfort until novelty and entertainment are built up as positive experiences.
I see not a step before me as I tread on another year;But I've left the Past in God's keeping,-the FutureHis mercy shall clear;And what looks dark in the distance may brighten as I draw near.
Over the tops of it, beginning to dusk under a young white moon, trailed a wavering ghost of smoke, and at the end of it I came upon the Pocket Hunter making a dry camp in the friendly scrub.
Nevertheless there are certain peaks, canons, and clear meadow spaces which are above all compassing of words, and have a certain fame as of the nobly great to whom we give no familiar names.