Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Surmise is the gossamer that malice blows on fair reputations, the corroding dew that destroys the choice blossom. Surmise is primarily the squint of suspicion, and suspicion is established before it is confirmed.
I love long sentences. My big heroes of fiction writing are Henry James and Proust - people who recognise that life doesn't consist of declarative statements, but rather modifications, qualifications and feelings.
Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won't cheat, then you know he never will.
It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty.
The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things.
I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future . . . I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of time, an abstract perceiver of the world.
High standards generally -- about workmanship and creation of objects, about what is owed in friendship, about the quality of art and much else -- far from being snobbish, are required to maintain decency in life.
Fools measure actions, after they are done, by the event; wise men beforehand, by the rules of reason and right. The former look to the end, to judge of the act. Let me look to the act, and leave the end with God.
The only real way to develop strategy is to use a process where one goes to ‘primary knowing,’ tapping into source and then listening deeply, moment to moment as the path unfolds—walking the path as it is created.
When I was a crusade director in British Columbia, all of our meetings were at 9:03. Somebody said 'That's ridiculous. Why did you do that?' It's because you remember it. You've never been to another 9:03 meeting.
On this day there was soon wind enough and to spare. The same might have been said of the sea. The Spray was in the midst of the turbulent Gulf Stream itself. She was jumping like a porpoise over the uneasy waves.
Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.
It's a shame you know," he called over his shoulder. "What's a shame?" Duncan asked. "That I didn't capture her first." Duncan smiled. "Nay, Edmond, it was a blessing. God's truth, I would have taken her from you.
I'm afraid of the general things that everyone is afraid of: a bump in the night that could be a cat or Death dragging his sickle across the room; losing my health; becoming homeless, never meeting George Clooney.
I grew up having the library as the best place ever. I spent a lot of weekends there as a kid - my parents would drop me off and leave me there all day. I would just sit in the back and read whatever I could find.
I've never worked with a co-author before [Alison McGhee]. Writing for me is a pretty scary thing, so it was a huge comfort to have someone in the room working with me. It became less like work and more like play.
I had it in my head when I was in college that I wanted to be a writer, but it took me a long time to commit to being a writer. Up until then, I had worked one dead-end job after another while writing on the side.
Perhaps patriarchy's greatest psychological weapon is simply its universality and longevity. ... Patriarchy has a still more tenacious or powerful hold through its successful habit of passing itself off as nature.
Empathy isn't as hard as it sounds because people have a lot of the same feelings. And it helps to understand other people because then you can actually care about them sometimes. And help them. And have a friend.
Could you please put this--could you all put these--could you get dressed, please?" The woman only bestowed a serene smile on me. "We are as the Goddess requires." "The Goddess requires you to be naked on my lawn?
Got your text,” he said when I climbed out. “How much did it hurt?” “Not at all,” I said. “Apparently, I can’t get a tattoo because I’m a witch.” “I could have told them-” He stopped. “Oh, you said witch.” “Ha-ha.
Evolution does not isolate us from the rest of the Kosmos, it unites us with the rest of the Kosmos: the same currents that produced birds from dust and poetry from rocks produce egos from ids and sages from egos.
And what gift of America to the rest of the world is actually most appreciated by the rest of the world? It is African American jazz and its offshoots. What is my definition of jazz? Safe sex of the highest order.
Perhaps there is an idea among Japanese students that one general difference between Japanese and Western poetry is that the former cultivates short forms and the latter longer ones, gut this is only in part true.
Literary success of any enduring kind is made by refusing to do what publishers want, by refusing to write what the public wants, by refusing to accept any popular standard, by refusing to write anything to order.
And then a new screen, one I had never seen before, never even heard of popped up. It gave me a choice. I could become the new Lord of Darkness myself, or I could take a gamble and be reincarnated. I chose wisely.
The essence of all slavery consists in taking the product of another's labor by force. It is immaterial whether this force be founded upon ownership of the slave or ownership of the money that he must get to live.
In former times the chief method of justifying the use of violence and thereby infringing the law of love was by claiming a divine right for the rulers: the Tsars, Sultans, Rajahs, Shahs and other heads of states.
Yankees don't understand that the Southern way of talking is a language of nuance. What we can do in the South is we can take a word and change it just a little bit and make it mean something altogether different.
Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned. If no individual or institution possesses the authority to act without of everybody else in the room, then nobody is at fault if anything goes wrong.
Let the corporations do as they please -- pillage the environment, falsify their advertising, rig the securities markets -- and it is none of the federal government's business to interfere with the will of heaven.
May I suggest that you all read? And often. Believe me, it's nice to have something to talk about other than the weather and the Queen's health. Your mind is not a cage. It's a garden. And it requires cultivating.
If this were a movie, I would bust a secret move so fierce the entire place would be razed to the ground. I'd finish with something snappy like "And don't forget my soda, punk" while I strolled off into the night.
Let him cry whoever feels like crying, for we were animals before we became reasoning beings, and the shedding of a tear, whether of forgiveness or of pity or of sheer delight at beauty, will do him a lot of good.
However vague they are, dreams have a way of concealing themselves and leave us no peace until they are translated into reality, like seeds germinating underground, sure to sprout in their search for the sunlight.
I get letters from adults saying that they love the books because they are more in-depth with characterization than the comics. The luxury of writing a whole novel is you can really explore who the characters are.
Writers 'get started' the day they are born. The minds they bring into the world with them are the amazing machines their stories will come out of, and the more they feed into it, the richer those stories will be.
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that. And living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on Earth.
Judaism is much more communal, and partly as a consequence of my religious switch, I am increasingly more suspicous of my previous view that what people do in the privacy of their own home is their business alone.
I worked more intensively hour after hour when I was starting out [writing]. More laboriously. I'd say quantity is important as well as quality, and if you're not producing enough, make a schedule and stick to it.
It's really daunting when you have just spent a lot of time on something to think about tossing it out. But once you've started something better that's working right, then it's pretty easy to let the first one go.
It used to be just CIA agents with ear-pieces who walked round with preoccupied, faraway expressions, and consequently regarded all the little people as irrelevant scum. Now, understandably, it's nearly everybody.
Meg, I give you your faults." "My faults!" Meg cried. "Your faults." "But I'm always trying to get rid of my faults!" "Yes," Mrs. Whatsit said. "However, I think you'll find they'll come in very handy on Camazotz.
He was jingling his keys in the pocket of his coat -- one of those barn coats described as rugged and classic and four hundred dollar that were usually worn by people who spend more time in Land Rovers than barns.
Joseph Beringer...dances around behind me singing some poorly rhymed and slightly dirty song about my [racing] odds at my skirts. 'I don't even wear skirts,' I snap at him. 'Especially,' he says, 'in my daydreams.
Calla readjusted, wrapping the silk around her other thigh instead. "Which one's he again? The pretty one?" Blue and Gansey exchanged a look. Blue's look said, I'm so, so sorry. Gansey's said, Am I the pretty one?
I didn't think I belonged here in her world, a boy stuck between two lives, dragging the dangers of the wolves with me, but when she said my name, waiting for me to follow, I knew I'd do anything to stay with her.
Stories twist and turn and grow and meet and give birth to other stories. Here and there, one story touches another, and a familiar character, sometimes the hero, walks over the bridge from one story into another.
From a purely tourist standpoint, Oxford is overpowering, being so replete with architecture and history and anecdote that the visitor's mind feels dribbling and helpless, as with an over-large mouthful of nougat.
When I was a physics major in the late 1970s, my very few fellow female students and I had high hopes that women would soon stand equal with men in science. But progress has proved slower than many of us imagined.