Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Does 'Jersey Shore' make me sad for humanity that this is what's passing for entertainment? Well, this is a business, and if that's what millions of people want to watch, I can't fault someone for producing it.
During seventy years of TV, the audience came to feel that the rules are, you can't kill the second lead on your TV show! Whatever's going to happen, it's all okay because there's no way they can kill the star.
It allows you to say things that sound very dramatic and get away with it. If you had characters in modern fiction say the same things as they're driving down the street in an Oldsmobile they'd sound ludicrous!
When we tell stories about things that are important - love, fear, beauty - we change the way people think about the world. Writers are, or should be, truth-tellers even when the stories themselves are fantasy.
As far as hypnosis is concerned, I had a very serious problem when I was in my twenties. I encountered a man who later became the president of the American Society of Medical Hypnosis. He couldn't hypnotize me.
When you find a man who knows his job and is willing to take responsibility, keep out of his way and don't bother him with unnecessary supervision. What you may think is cooperation is nothing but interference.
To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.
'Five, Six, Seven, Nate!' opens on my 13-year-old protagonist packing up a duffel bag and bidding his Midwestern town goodbye, heading off to start rehearsals for his New York City debut in 'E.T.: The Musical.'
The good news - and it is largely good news - is that everyone has a chance to stand out. Everyone has a chance to learn, improve, and build up their skills. Everyone has a chance to be a brand worthy of remark
A guru is one who tells you to throw away all the crutches that we have been made to believe are essential for our survival. He would ask you to walk, and he would say that if you fall, you will arise and walk.
Would you like to know your future? If your answer is yes, think again. Not knowing is the greatest life motivator. So enjoy, endure, survive each moment as it comes to you in its proper sequence -- a surprise.
Because love encompasses everything, nothing is unimportant, including tonight's dinner menu. Think about it for a minute. If you were pure love, the loving parent of all life, how would you want people to eat?
Through the 1990s, 'Reason' was a voice of 'dissident feminism,' upholding the equal dignity of both sexes and supporting the rights of individuals against a government that had gone mad over sexual harassment.
But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness.
Dance music ... stirs some barbaric instinct - lulled asleep in our sober lives - you forget centuries of civilization in a second, & yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room.
I will achieve in my life - Heaven grant that it be not long - some gigantic amalgamation between the two discrepancies so hideously apparent to me. Out of my suffering I will do it. I will knock. I will enter.
I have a feeling I shall go mad. I cannot go on longer in these terrible times. I shan't recover this time. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it but cannot fight any longer.
Je ne suis pas d'accord avec ce que vous dites, mais je d‚fendrai jusqu'... la mort le droit que vous avez de le dire/ I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it
The necessity of saying something, the embarrassment produced by the consciousness of having nothing to say, and the desire to exhibit ability, are three things sufficient to render even a great man ridiculous.
The Pride of every Jew finds cause to believe that the cause of their down fall is not their detestable politics, or ignorance of social graces, but the raft of God. They believe it took a miracle to undo them.
So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief, and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.
You know what made us the biggest, meanest, Big Mac eating, calorie-counting, world-dominating kick-ass powerhouse country in the history of the human race? The pursuit of happiness. Not happiness. The pursuit.
The Irish are hearty, the Scotch plausible, the French polite, the Germans good-natured, the Italians courtly, the Spaniards reserved and decorous - the English alone seem to exist in taking and giving offense.
I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began.
We should learn, by reflecting on the misfortunes which have attended others, that there is nothing singular in those which befall ourselves. [They have, are and will be experienced by others as well as worse.]
Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions - adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers - none can equal the Internet.
The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.
There is militaristic-hegemonic-plutocratic side of the U.S. which is getting out of hand and threatens to corrupt the whole republic. I remain a deeply concerned, committed admirer, but also a very worried one.
I'd prefer to include sex scenes alongside the adventure scenes and everyday-life scenes, as if they were all part of the same thing. Which of course they are. Sex is not discrete from the rest of our existence.
In countries like the U.S. and Great Britain, we exist in a wholly sexualized culture, where everything from cars to snack food are sold with a healthy slathering of sex to make them more commercially appealing.
I loved you because there was no other place for me to go. We were married because we did not know what else to do with each other. You never knew me, nothing about me, what died inside me, what lived invisibly.
I haven’t prepared my speech yet,” I sighed and Tove stood up. “What should I say about him?” “Well, if you plan to say anything nice, you’re going to have to lie,” Tove muttered as he walked over to his closet.
My bohemianism consisted of not wanting to get involved with the stupid stuff that I thought people wanted you to get involved with... namely America... Dwight Eisenhower, McCarthyism and all those great things.
The world always seems like it's going to hell when you're depressed. And, of course, it always is going to hell in some way. That's what makes it so hard to tell the difference between Armageddon and the blues.
One of the things that frequently gets lost in descriptions of depression is that the depressed person often knows that it is a ludicrous condition to feel so disabled by the ordinary business of quotidian life.
Psychologically, I will not have to seek far if I decide to kill myself, because in my mind and heart I am more ready for this than for the unplanned daily tribulations that mark off the mornings and afternoons.
Girls," their mother interjected, "you must both stop being strange - it is unattractive. And don't forget your hats. It would be absolutely the end for me if you two came down with freckles at a time like this.
I've always said, since I got to know him and wrote about him, that he's the generation he least appeals to is his own and I think in many ways he was born middle-aged and that's become apparent in recent years.
Money makes people bold and cosmopolitan; if you are poor, you are naturally conservative. Its not easy to be a bohemian when you have to worry about what is going to happen with you and with your next paycheck.
What keeps India safe really is the heroism of millions of poor Indians who every day reject the allure of terrorism. What keeps India safe is just the courage of poor Indians, not the actions of its government.
When women are seen with pen in hand, they are met immediately with shrieks commanding a return to that life of pain which their writing had interrupted, a life devoted to the women's work of needle and distaff.
I know that when Terry and I were together, 10 years ago, he did not appreciate it when people would ask him what it is like being partnered with a celebrity. Precisely because it suggested that he had no value.
What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?
I thought, I can't do advertising any more, so I was downloading all these PDF applications from community colleges. And I thought, I'll become a paramedic. I'll get a two-year associate degree, if I can get in.
The life story of the five main characters and the secondary characters around them allows Jonathan Franzen to present the full impetus and extent of the world picture of the West at the end of the 20th century.
The mystics are the only ones who have gained a glimpse into what is possible when this same capacity [for creation] is used primarily in the service of the individual himself instead of for the creation of art.
By relaxation, I don't mean falling asleep in front of the TV set or unwinding with friends. The kind I'm talking about is a quieting of mental activity and withdrawal of body and mind from external stimulation.
To me, God is an intelligent, loving, conscious energy and why do I say that? Well you need energy to create. You have to have a source. It's undifferentiated energy which has intelligence or it couldn't create.
The mind and body are not separate units, but one integrated system. How we act and what we think, eat, and feel are all related to our health. Physicians should be capable of teaching this behavior to patients.
My first novel, 'The Tiger's Daughter,' embodies the loneliness I felt but could not acknowledge, even to myself, as I negotiated the no man's land between the country of my past and the continent of my present.