Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was studying English, as you will, in the day, and five nights a week, I would be at the cinema. That continued throughout my 20s, which was also the 1980s - there was a lot of really good films coming out then.
As Dutch elm disease spread across Britain in the 1970s, the country fell into mourning. When the sentinel trees that framed our horizons were felled, their loss was a constant topic of sad and angry conversation.
I'm a big lover of America. I love the people, but also the weird berms, the strange little high schools tucked away in different places, and just the whole geography and the psychological apparatus of Americans.
We must pass like smoke or live within the spirit's fire; For we can no more than smoke unto the flame return If our thought has changed to dream, our will unto desire, As smoke we vanish though the fire may burn.
The first moments of sleep are an image of death; a hazy torpor grips our thoughts and it becomes impossible for us to determine the exact instant when the 'I,' under another form, continues the task of existence.
Correctitude implies nowadays a formal or fastidious use of words; and what is wanted is not so much the correct as the living use of words. It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word.
Did the Almighty, holding in his right hand truth, and in his left hand search after truth, deign to proffer me the one I might prefer, in all humility, but without hesitation, I should request search after truth.
There are all kinds of ways to challenge ourselves. Some people do it by climbing a mountain or scuba diving. The most profound and challenging ordeals is to drink Ayahuasca. It is in a way the ultimate adventure.
Here are the bills again, I always dread them a little. They are familiar presences: first in the mail box, then in the bill drawer, now on the desk. Services Rendered. "My life is dependent on services rendered."
you cannot make a person believe anything unless that person has already had a conscious or unconscious vision of the same thing; you have no conviction of truth unless you have already apprehended it intuitively.
Very much indeed of what we call moral education is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion.
Recreation is not a secondary concern for a democracy. It is a primary concern, for the kind of recreation a people make for themselves determines the kind of people they become and the kind of society they build.
Kindness and a caring mind are two separate qualities. Kindness is manners. It is superficial custom, an acquired practice. Not so the mind. The mind is deeper, stronger, and, I believe, it is far more inconstant.
In everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.
If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever—something I couldn't afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they're seventeen.
It's like the Tibetan Wheel of the Passions. As the wheel turns, the values and feelings on the outer rim rise and fall, shining or sinking into darkness. But true love stays fastened to the axle and doesn't move.
A Mother's love is something that no one can explain, It is made of deep devotion and of sacrifice and pain, It is endless and unselfish and enduring come what may For nothing can destroy it or take that love away
one sex of voice in public matters, and that we could in no way so increase the attention , the intelligence and the devotion which may be brought to the solution of social problems as by enfranchising our women .
Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel.
I suppose that there are many novels that are set during the summer because it's a lonely time of year. Friends come and go, comfort comes and goes, which makes it a perfect time of year to indulge in melancholia.
Human beings were human beings anatomically for several hundred thousand years, wandering around, hunting and gathering. And then suddenly, at the same time they started painting in caves they started multiplying.
We tend to hold that popping medicine in our mouths and swallowing is the extent of our involvement in the healing process. We believe that if we get better, it's because the medicine worked magic, not the person.
I have a feeling of complete balance. The sea, the house, the loneliness, the light. Everything is clearer. Much more precise. I have the feeling that I am living on a limit, and I'm crossing that limit sometimes.
I mean most girls are so dumb and all. After you neck them for a while, you can really watch them losing their brains. You take a girl when she really gets passionate, she just hasn't any brains. -Holden Caulfield
If you find that not many of the things you asked for have come, and not perhaps quite so many as sometimes, remember that this Christmas all over the world there are a terrible number of poor and starving people.
There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
La mort, mon fils, est un bien pour tous les hommes; elle est la nuit de ce jour inquiet qu'on appelle la vie. Bernstein Death, my son, is a good for all; it is the night of this worrisome day that one calls life.
I often think of death. True. Suicide is a reasonable option. True. My sins are unpardonable. I stare at the question. My sins are unpardonable. I stare at the question. My sins are unpardonable. I leave it blank.
For a very long time, I wrote a book a year, and was eager and willing to do it, to put bread on the table, to have my work out there. Now I must write a book every two years, and that's never enough time, either.
One of the ironies of being a professional writer is that, if you are even moderately successful, the very traits that let you succeed as a writer are not much help when the time comes to head out as 'The Author.'
Homeopathy - an invention of the Father of Lies! I have tried it and found it wanting. I would swallow their whole doles' medicine chest for sixpence, and be sure of finding myself neither better nor worse for it.
I just remember how cool and exciting and crazy it seemed when Marvel was giving this new 'Ultimate Spider-Man' title to this crime writer Brian Michael Bendis who had never really done any superhero stuff before.
[Bob] Dylan's many quotations from classic American roots music (that song is from an album aptly titled Love and Theft) join the aging poet to a tradition that preceded him and hopefully will outlive him as well.
He thought of the mouldering child, which laid its withered thin arms around his soul, as if it were his own, and to whom Death had given as much as a god gave to Endymion, — sleep, eternal youth, and immortality.
The truth is I am inventing the maybe. I can only make the choices I make, so why torture myself with what I might have done, when all I can handle is what I have done? The Maybe Islands are hostile to human life.
There are so many versions of Batman that I love so much from different artists that I had to almost stop trying to draw those versions and get past that and just draw the Jeff Lemire version of Batman eventually.
When I first seriously decided to become a cartoonist would have been '99/2000, right before 9/11. I've been writing and illustrating stories in the world post-9/11 since then, watching the world change around me.
A jellyfish is little more than a pulsating bell, a tassel of trailing tentacles and a single digestive opening through which it both eats and excretes - as regrettable an example of economy of design as ever was.
There aren't a lot of ironclad rules of family life, but here's one: No matter how much your parents deny it - and here's betting they deny it a lot - they have a favorite child. And if you're a parent, so do you.
Heimat. The word mean home in German, the place where one was born. But the term also conveys a subtler nuance, a certain tenderness. One's Heimat is not merely a matter of geography; it is where one's heart lies.
There's no use in asking what if. No one could ever give you the answers. I try, I really do, but it's hard for me to accept this way of thinking. I'm always wondering about the what-ifs, about the road not taken.
Just like Lara Jean in my book 'To All the Boys I've Loved Before,' I used to write letters to boys I was in love with - letters full of emotion and longing and also recrimination - but they were for my eyes only.
Don't confine yourself to a select group of friends, often known as a clique. Cliques by definition leave people out. Lock yourself into one, and you'll never know how many terrific friendships you may be missing.
I would say if you want to write, write what you care about. I think that's the most important thing. I think if you write what you care about, you stand a better chance of having the reader care about your story.
When our emotional health is in a bad state, so is our level of self-esteem. We have to slow down and deal with what is troubling us, so that we can enjoy the simple joy of being happy and at peace with ourselves.
V-Day...if you need this one day in a year to show everyone else you truly care for "your loved one" I think it's quite stupid. I hate this commercialism. It's all artificial, and has nothing to do with real love.
I hear from a lot of young women, you know, I don't want to call myself a feminist because I don't want to get in an argument with someone. And it's just not cool; like it's not a cool thing to be associated with.
Libraries really are wonderful. They're better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.
Peace means something different from 'not fighting'. Those aren't peace advocates, they're 'stop fighting' advocates. Peace is an active and complex thing and sometimes fighting is part of what it takes to get it.
I always find myself loathing what I've just been before - the person who was living in the apartment that I just left, the person I was a year before. I constantly have the feeling of shedding skins and changing.