Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's so silly. All you do is get the heck out of your body when you die. My gosh, everybody's done it thousands of times. Just because they don't remember, it doesn't mean they haven't done it.
He was the tallest, thinnest, weariest boy I had ever seen in my life. He was brilliant. He had gorgeous brown eyes, and he had only two suits. He was completely unhappy, and I didn't know why.
End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.
It cannot be seen, cannot be felt, Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt, It lies behind stars and under hills, And empty holes it fills, It comes first and follows after, Ends life, kills laughter.
Ho! Ho! Ho! To the bottle I go To heal my heart and drown my woe Rain may fall, and wind may blow And many miles be still to go But under a tall tree will I lie And let the clouds go sailing by
I feel like I am walking in some amazing footsteps of writers who have come before me, like S.E. Hinton, Walter Dean Myers, Christopher Paul Curtis, Richard Peck and Kate DiCamillo, who I love.
Childhood, young adulthood is fluid. And it's very easy to get labeled very young and have to carry something through your childhood and into your adulthood that is not necessarily who you are.
Sudan is not really a country at all, but many. A composite layers, like a genetic fingerprint of memories that were once fluid, but have since crystallized out from the crucible of possibility
I regretted making a comment about Dave Eggers. I’ve never said anything about McSweeneys except that I admire what it is, and I think it’s great that they keep people interested in literature.
I would say the main thing is, don't just copy yourself, which is what a lot of sequels do. And in some cases, it works. Like James Bond movies. But James Bond is a different type of character.
I am not into this old-school way of doing things, where you kill characters, and you bring them back, and then you kill them again, and then you bring them back, and their deaths mean nothing.
Inspiration is very nice when you get it. It's like being given a present you weren't expecting. You don't hand the present back and say, 'My birthday's not till November.' You take it and run.
My private measure of success is daily. If this were to be the last day of my life would I be content with it? To live in a harmonious balance of commitments and pleasures is what I strive for.
If you were going to compete successfully in a white man's world, you had to learn to play the white man's game. It was not enough that an Indian be as good as; an Indian had to be better than.
Ranger locked eyes with me. "Please," he said. Tank and Hal were goggle-eyed. They weren't used to "please." I wasn't used to it either. But I liked it. Okay," I said. "Be careful. He's insane.
When Grandma Mazur is talking about the reason for the improved play of her 91-year-old bowling teammate, she said: "She's doing better now that we got her the longer tubing to her oxygen tank.
Reading a novel is just a much more involving and intimate experience than the act of watching a film. I mean, you literally get inside of a novelist's head, and you invest many hours to do so.
The best songs of this [modern] period - the apocalyptic "High Water," for example - return [Bob] Dylan to where he was in his first phase, updating and transforming American traditional music.
The pleasure of the table belongs to all ages, to all conditions, to all countries, and to all areas; it mingles with all other pleasures, and remains at last to console us for their departure.
It was good, too, to remember how hard a lot of people had to work to keep a kingdom running well, and that it was simply good manners to let them know, from time to time, how valued they were.
They stared at each other, wanting each other, drawn to each other, but their silent shout of love went unheard in the roar of misunderstanding, and the clatter of culturally ingrained beliefs.
Half of the time I don't know what they're talking about; their jokes seem to relate to a past that everyone but me has shared. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the language.
True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction--don't believe it. Like the universe, there is no end.
Organized religion is a very bad way of passing on spiritual values because it becomes so corrupted with political and repressive agendas which don't help anybody to develop their spirituality.
One of my favorite things about the DC Universe, growing up as a reader, was just how big it was and just how many characters and superheroes there were. And how many odd characters there were.
One expects decent people to stand up for the good of all. Decent people shut their doors and hide behind them as decent people do. Massacres could never happen if it weren't for decent people.
When you get everything you wanted, I think maybe you do have to be a little grateful for the people who got you there... whether or not they thought they were doing you any favors at the time.
There is an authentic biology of hope. Belief and expectation - the key elements of hope - can block pain by releasing the brain's endorphins and enkephalins, mimicking the effects of morphine.
If there is no order in your relationship with your wife, with your husband, with your children, with your neighbour - whether that neighbour is near or very far away - forget about meditation.
Even though my brother and I loved scrumping - we loved the act of climbing trees and grabbing fruit - there was always fear we would be caught. We feared we'd be imprisoned, sent to Australia.
With the growth of knowledge our ideas must from time to time be organized afresh. The change takes place usually in accordance with new maxims as they arise, but it always remains provisional.
For a few seconds Oskar saw through Eli's eyes. And what he saw was...himself. Only much better, more handsome, stronger than what he thought of himself. Seen with love." (Let the Right One In)
We have the knowledge, resources, and capabilities to make global capitalism work in a more inclusive and socially responsible manner while retaining - indeed enhancing - its economic benefits.
The 2004 presidential election that saw George W. Bush win with 51 percent of the vote was the last one Republicans will ever win with the overwhelmingly white and male coalition they have now.
To the contrary: His life hummed with meaning and purpose. But the meaning he wrested from existence lay beyond the comfortable path: McCandless distrusted the value of things that came easily.
If you have slightly pathological interest in all the components of places, it forces you to engage with them in a way that perhaps otherwise you wouldn't, and that's the only way I can put it.
She repeats things until they are true, or until she can't tell whether they are true or not. She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be.
I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
'Banshee' was kind of a lark. I was getting paid pretty well to write movies no one was making - and so I decided to try my hand at TV and get paid much less to actually get something produced.
Whether I'm writing a novel about a guy mourning the death of his father or whether I'm writing a show about people killing each other, you want to hear characters speak and be funny and witty.
There is nothing in the world that is not mysterious, but the mystery is more evident in certain things than in others: in the sea, in the eyes of the elders, in the color yellow, and in music.
It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.
Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.
I had no books at home. I started to frequent a public library in Lisbon. It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined.
To continue living, we have to die. That's the story of humanity - generation after generation - that we are going to die. There's nothing dramatic about death except that one loses one's life.
If the Spray discovered no continents on her voyage, it may be that there were no more continents to be discovered. She did not seek new worlds, or sail to pow-wow about the dangers of the sea.
A human being sheds its leaves like a tree. Sickness prunes it down; and it no longer offers the same silhouette to the eyes which loved it, to the people to whom it afforded shade and comfort.
It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.
Memory is identity....You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.
I remember when my mother pointed to a stone, and she said this was the kind of stone people used to place on the feet of the baby girls to stop them trying to climb away and unbind their feet.