Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.
One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey; I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone.
Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while. Maybe the only gift is a chance to inquire, to know nothing for certain. An inheritance of wonder and nothing more.
If trustees feel it is in their charity's interest to pay high salaries to attract talented people, then they should have the courage of their conviction and explain their decisions publicly.
Admiration is one of the most bewitching, enthusiastic passions of the mind; and every common moralist knows that it arises from novelty and surprise, the inseparable attendants of imposture.
How do I feel when I am invited to a congregation of scientists? I feel quite at home. When they break into their cultic scientific argot, I know when I'm not wanted and step out for a drink.
No 13-year-old or over should ever be seen in trousers that finish above the ankle. It doesn't matter how good your legs are, or if you're on a beach in Bermuda where they invented the things.
You know, Democratic and Republican administrations alike have supported individuals and regimes that have slaughtered millions across the globe. And they need to be held accountable for that.
There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
The idea of a book that can make a change to your life, that can affect your perspective, is a beautiful and great ambition: one that Seneca, Nietzsche and Tolstoy would have sympathised with.
The number one person who needs my books is me. I'm not some sort of disinterested guru who has worked life out and is handing things out to the poor people who might not have life worked out.
The Rudderless World is not shaped by vague metaphysical Forces. It is not God who kills the Children. Not Fate that butchers them or Destiny that feeds them to the Dogs. ... It´s us. Only us.
Yes, of course, the whole idea is utterly inane, but to let its predictable inanities blind you to its truly fabulous and breathtaking aspects is to do both oneself and the genre a disservice.
The old fiction room at my high school was a small box of wonders, and no matter how long I spent investigating its seven and a half overstuffed shelves, I never stopped discovering treasures.
We seem to live a culture that doesn't want blemishes. The vision of most beautiful models... airbrushed in order to be seen as perfect, infects our notion of how literature should be written.
Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?
No Romeo-and-Juliet acts, no nonsense about Love with a large L, none of that popular song claptrap with its skies of blue, dreams come true, heaven with you. Just sensuality for its own sake.
Literature is always something - it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is.
I have served one idea, marched under one banner - war against all imposed authority - against every kind of deprivation of freedom, in the name of the absolute independence of the individual.
Art is one of the prime ways we have of opening ourselves and going beyond ourselves. That's what art is: it's the product of the human being in the world and imagination, all coming together.
When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.
It's hard, because when you talk about process or your characters ruling your narrative, it sounds like you have no control, but obviously you're ultimately the author, so you do have control.
Death, with funereal shades in vain surrounds me, My reason through his darkness seeth light: 'Tis the last step which brings me close to Thee: 'Tis the veil falling, 'twixt Thy face and mine.
O God-Man present in this sacrament for me - what a comfort, what a privilege to know I kneel before God! And to think that this God loves me!... Mary, my mother, help me to love him in return
I didn't come out and pay a really painful price often, to be LGBT, to not claim my sexuality at the same time. It's not all right with me to not talk about it so I don't make anybody nervous.
I arrived in the U.S. for graduate study in literature in the fall of 1986. I was twenty-three. After a year, I began to paint, even though I had come to the U.S. intending to become a writer.
I have a couple of thick files about things that have gone wrong between people; I ought to write about them in the manner of a thriller. It would finally convince me that I was a real writer.
The very same book, even if it is translated very accurately, let's say from Hebrew into English or from English into Hebrew, becomes a different book because language is a musical instrument.
Whenever we're having a great time, we're already anticipating the day when we will remember this great time. Many of us live in that unreal area between the past, the present, and the future.
Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Proust - not exactly authors one expects to whiz through or take lightly, but like all works of genius, they are meant to be read out loud and loved.
As a memoirist, I may claim to write the easier-to-remember things, but I could also just be writing to sweep them away. 'Don't bother me about my past,' I'll say, 'It's out in paperback now.'
Sicily has suffered 13 foreign dominations from which she has taken both the best and the worst. The sequence of different cultures has made Sicily a fascinating place, quite unlike any other.
As a fairly innocent teenager, growing up in a village in Wales, I just thought, "God, I would like to go and hang about Soho and write great poetry and try to avoid drinking myself to death."
Writing 'The Noonday Demon' turned me into a professional depressive, which is a weird thing to be. A class at the university I attended assigns the book and invited me to be a guest lecturer.
One of my major shortcomings - I'm vindictive. I don't know why that is. Even in petty things in my life I tend to strike back. It's a lot more pleasurable a sensation than feeling threatened.
Readable, faithful, accurate-what more could you ask for in a modern translation of the Bible? GOD'S WORD Translation is a great version for enhancing your love for God's Word. I recommend it.
It is a notable circumstance that mothers who are themselves open to severe comments as to their, moral character, are generally most solicitous as to the virtuous behavior of their daughters.
...the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse
Anyone can have a good day. The question is what do you do on a bad day. That's when you're being tested. In a very tangible sense, a bad day shows your innermost essence more than a good day.
Adventure should be 80 percent 'I think this is manageable,' but it's good to have that last 20 percent where you're right outside your comfort zone. Still safe, but outside your comfort zone.
Sometimes it's hard for us to believe, really believe, that God cares and wants good things for us and doesn't just want us to go off and give everything up and become missionaries in Burundi.
In other words, my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me. It does not end until I show how I (and the hundreds of thousands like me) have transformed America.
Flair was a tricky guy to work with when I worked with Ric. When he was champion, we had much better matches, and the moment the title got switched, we seemed to screw up my match every night.
Afflictions sent by providence melt the constancy of the noble minded, but confirm the obduracy of the vile, as the same furnace that liquefies the gold, hardens the clay Charles Caleb Colton.
I want to escape from myself. For when I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face, as happens to be my case at present, my blankness is inconceivable--indescribable--my misery amazing.
Opening her eyes again, and seeing her husband's face across the table, she leaned forward to give it a pat on the cheek, and sat down to supper, declaring it to be the best face in the world.
So now that the illusion of infinite growth is being exposed, the corresponding ballooning entitlements that enticed the larger public to become complicit in the illusion are becoming unglued.
When I do get to chow down on a book, I try to read ones that are nothing like what I'm writing. So, as I'm currently working on a space opera (of sorts) I'm mostly indulging in urban fantasy.
In my world death will come chasing. In your world it will start whispering in your ear to destroy yourself. I know this because it started whispering to me when I was in the detention center.
I write in the novel's afterword that our recent wars "finish not with victory or defeat but with a calendar draw-down date and a presumption that we shall never be reconciled with the enemy".