Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If we are a people who pray, darkness is apt to be a lot of what our prayers are about. If we are people who do not pray, it is apt to be darkness in one form or another that has stopped our mouths.
I love crossovers, I love Wonder Woman, and being able to bring the undisputed greatest warriors of the DCU and Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age together for the very first time is a dream come true.
When I was preparing for one term's work in the Botvinnik school I had to spend a lot of time on king and pawn endings. So when I came to a tricky position in my own games I knew the winning method.
If only one in 1,000 people that I talk to goes on to write a good book, that's one more good book that I've helped along... and maybe it will be a book I love myself five or 10 years down the line.
In English, we were still on the Introduction to Poetry Unit, and I'm not lying, if I ever meet Percy Bysshe Shelley walking down the streets of Marysville, I'm going to punch him right in the face.
When he sat alone in the darkness and cried and was done, all done with it, nothing had changed. His leg still hurt, it was still dark, he was still alone and the self-pity had accomplished nothing.
Travelling's not something you're good at. It's something you do. Like breathing. You can't work too much at it, or it feels like work. You have to surrender yourself to the chaos. To the accidents.
When I was really young, I wanted to grow up and be the sun. Which shows an early penchant for ambition or narcissism or grandiosity or delusion - all of which are bellwethers for becoming a writer.
While admiring the pleasing evidence of wealth, we become complicit in - or, at the very least, recognize the extent to which we, too, are beneficiaries of - an economic system we routinely deplore.
The once-science-fiction notion of hyper-connectivity - where we are all constantly connected to social networks and other bubbling streams of digital data - has rapidly become a widespread reality.
If I could turn back the clock, magically deleting my prostate cancer, the surgery I needed and its complications, would I do so? It seems an odd question. But I find it surprisingly hard to answer.
When [wines] were good they pleased my sense, cheered my spirits, improved my moral and intellectual powers, besides enabling me to confer the same benefits on other people. (Notes on a Cellar Book)
The idea is that what an artist lives through should broaden his notion of what it is possible for a human being to live through, and that new understanding should then get into and expand the work.
I am always considering the reader. Although this is admittedly kind of odd: Which reader? On what day? In what mood? For me, that "reader" is actually just me, if I had never read the story before.
Students need to be reminded that revision isn't merely making a few cosmetic changes. Revision is seeing and then reseeing our words and practicing strategies that make a difference in our writing.
Wait and see whether the religion of the Servile State is not in every case what I say: the encouragement of small virtues supporting capitalism, the discouragement of the huge virtues that defy it.
And it did for one wild moment cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other.
Modern science is necessarily a double-edged tool, a tool that cuts both ways. ... There is no doubt that a Zeppelin is a wonderful thing; but that did not prevent it from becoming a horrible thing.
Anyone who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed.
The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.
In the park I met other women and I started to get interested in their lives. I developed a lot of pressure to talk about women's lives, and children's lives, too. Children interest me tremendously.
Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
After this, I took private lessons in Italian from an elementary school teacher. He gave me themes to write about, and some of them turned out so well that he told me to publish them in a newspaper.
To long for love, to have experienced passion's deep pleasure, even once, is to understand the mercilessness of having a human body whose memory rides desire's back unanchored from season to season.
… Her heart remained empty once more, and the procession of days all alike began again. So they were going to follow one another, like this, in line, always identical, innumerable, bringing nothing!
The finest works of art are those in which there is the least matter. The closer expression comes to thought, the more the word clings to the idea and disappears, the more beautiful the work of art.
I love the night passionately... I love it with all my senses: I love to see it, I love to breathe it in, I love to open my ears to its silence, I love my whole body to be caressed by its blackness.
And taking her friend’s hand, she put it on her breast, on that firm round covering of a woman’s heart which the male often finds so satisfying that he makes no attempt to find what lies beneath it.
That’s what love’s all about. You’re the only one having those wonderful feelings, but you have to go it alone as you wander through the dark your mind and body have to bear it all. All by yourself.
I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.
But intolerant,narrow minds with no imagination are like parasites that transform the host,change form,and continue to thrive. They're a lost cause, and I don't want anyone like that coming in here.
I would never see her again, except in memory. She was here, and now she's gone. There is no middle ground. Probably is a word that you may find south of the border. But never, ever west of the sun.
According to his dad's journal, vampires had been through some of the worst epidemics in history. And apparently, during the days of the Black Plague, their biggest complaint had been rotten "food".
In all the new states of the Union, land monopolization has gone on at an alarming rate, but in none of them so fast as in California, and in none of them, perhaps, are the evil effects so manifest.
This is not a book in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will.
When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.
I'm not a fast writer, and I find the process of writing a first draft to be painful and frustrating. Usually, I start with a character, a premise, and some image that gives me a particular feeling.
A forecasting game is a kind of simulation, a kind of scenario, a kind of teleconference, a kind of artifact from the future - and more - that enlists the participants as 'first-person forecasters.'
All of us collect fortunes when we are children. A fortune of colors, of lights, and darkness, of movement, of tensions. Some of us have the fantastic chance to go back to his fortune when grown up.
I'm planning, you see, to try to confine myself to the truth. That's hard for an old, inveterate fantasy martyr and liar who has never hesitated to give truth the form he felt the occasion demanded.
I was sixteen then, and I'm seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I'm about thirteen. Sometimes, I act a lot older than I am--I really do. But people never notice it. People never notice anything.
Elves and Dragons! Cabbages and potatoes are better for me and you. Don't go getting mixed up in the business of your betters, or you'll land in trouble too big for you. ~Hamfast Gamgee (the Gaffer)
Orcs, and talking trees, and leagues of grass, and galloping riders, and glittering caves, and white towers and golden halls, and battles, and tall ships sailing, all these passed before Sam's mind.
This is no science, this is art, where equations fall away to elements like resolving chords, and where always prevails a symmetry either explicit or multiplex, but always of a crystalline serenity.
Place 5 percent to 10 percent of your total assets in gold bullion and selected gold and silver coins. No one knows with certainty whether the coming depression will be inflationary or deflationary.
I always like to think that I make movies that are like Nirvana songs. They have a slow verse and then they pop into high gear and then they go back into slow and then they pop into high gear again.
Science fiction always has had strains of pessimism and optimism weaving through its historical development, sometimes one dominating and then the other, usually depending on the state of the world.
According to all the experts, it's time for me to talk about what I'm going through... I can't. I'd need a new alphabet, one made of falling, of tectonic plates shifting, of the deep devouring dark.
I’ll be real discreet,” Tank said. As discreet as a six-foot-six, no-neck guy weighing three hundred and fifty pounds, all dressed in black SWAT clothes, with a Glock holstered at his side could be.
It's not like what I do, how I write, changes depending on the nature of the project. I give each story my all, regardless of if there are a few thousand people reading it or a few hundred thousand.