Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To walk, we have to lean forward, lose our balance and begin to fall. We let go constantly of the previous stability, falling all the time, trusting that we will find a succession of new stabilities with each step.
I think in some way it's like that for all of us, living with the ghosts of things that used to be, or never were. We're all of us haunted by yesterday, and we got no choice but to keep marching into our tomorrows.
Stock market corrections, although painful at the time, are actually a very healthy part of the whole mechanism, because there are always speculative excesses that develop, particularly during the long bull market.
We know one another's faults, virtues, catastrophes, mortifications, triumphs, rivalries, desires, and how long we can each hang by our hands to a bar. We have been banded together under pack codes and tribal laws.
Life is one long struggle to disinter oneself, to keep one's head above the accumulations, the ever deepening layers of objects ... which attempt to cover one over, steadily, almost irresistibly, like falling snow.
Let all who build beware The load, the shock, the pressure Material can bear. So, when the buckled girder Lets down the grinding span, The blame of loss, or murder, Is laid upon the man. Not on the Stuff - the Man!
I worry that people think you have to go to a university to be a good writer, which is categorically untrue. I don't think I learned how to write at Oxford. I did not go to any creative writing classes or anything.
Good sense alone is a sedate and quiescent quality, which manages its possessions well, but does not increase them; it collects few materials for its own operations, and preserves safety, but never gains supremacy.
Every government is perpetually degenerating towards corruption, from which it must be rescued at certain periods by the resuscitation of its first principles, and the re-establishment of its original constitution.
Once you accept your own death, all of a sudden you're free to live. You no longer care about your reputation. You no longer care except so far as your life can be used tactically to promote a cause you believe in.
I've learned a lot about stage-managing for illustration. Sometimes you have to delete characters from a scene just to keep from overcrowding the image. I've also learned to making big-scale design decisions early.
Buyers of powerful cars place a high premium on the exhaust note, and manufacturers spend a lot of money getting it right. At the same time, high-end cars are expected to filter out the sounds of the mundane world.
My own kids were with me in Berlin when Germany was reunited, and they were with me in Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed. We talked about these things at the dinner table, at their schools, with their friends.
Many go through life afraid of numbers and upset by numbers. They would rather amble along through life miscounting, miscalculating and, in general, mismanaging their worldly affairs than make friends with numbers.
I think I prefer writing books because the work of art begins and ends with you - it's easier to know if you're doing it right, as opposed to writing a play and then waiting around for somebody else to complete it.
You know, I've walked this earth for over eleven thousand years, my lady. I have seen things in my life that are unimaginable to you, and you ask me if I doubt you? Lady, I doubt the very air you breathe. (Acheron)
Because I have no boobs. My ears stand out, and I have freckles all over me. (Grace) Boobs? (Julian) Breasts. (Grace) You have very nice breasts. (Julian) Thanks. What about you? (Grace) I have no breasts. (Julian)
The depth and strength of our character is defined by our moral code. People only reveal themselves when they're thrown out of the usual conditions of their lives. That's when the truth of who they are is revealed.
What four realms? (Amanda) Time, space, earth, and dreams. (Talon) Okay, now that is scary. Some of you guys walk through time? (Amanda) And space and dreams. (Talon) Ah. So Rod Sterling was a Were-Hunter? (Amanda)
All I did was go to sleep. There shouldn’t be anything safer than that. (Kiara) Spoken like a true civilian. Trust me, princess, that’s the most dangerous thing anyone does…Well, that, and go to the can. (Nykyrian)
If Apollo caught sight of him outside or near a window during the light of day, Talon would be nothing more than a strip of fried bacon on the sidewalk. Extra-crispy Celt didn’t appeal to him in the least.’ (Talon)
The fork was invented sometime in the fifteenth century, I believe.” “Really?” she asked. “Were you there?” His features blank, he looked up and asked, “What, for the invention of the fork or the fifteenth century?
in the traditional family structure of Persia ... one simply cannot discard close relatives just because one does not like them; rather one has to accommodate them, make allowances and accept them, like misfortune.
I admire Freud a great deal as a person and thinker. Despite everything, I find his work very, very rich, but I think that for women he has been absolutely disastrous. And even more so, everyone who came after him.
If you get trapped in your head and out of your body during the writing process, it's very easy to make wrong turns. You have to really be in touch with your heart rather than your head to write the novel you want.
The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.
As you get closer to equality, you get more pornography. True patriarchal societies like Saudi Arabia do not allow pornography because women are not allowed to turn their bodies into a commodity; women are chattel.
Men are losing power in their daily lives, but manliness is still iconic of power. This creates incredible turbulence around masculinity and incredible confusion around gender norms that's only going to accelerate.
Leon, no offense, but you don't exactly look like a hockey player." "I told 'em I was a goalie. That's where they put the guy who can't skate, right? Just like in baseball when they put the worst player at catcher.
We are made of memories and formed by experience. I keep wondering what kind of people we would be, and what kind of world this would be, if when bad things happened we could erase them, or somehow make them sweet.
Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Gandhi — all these peopled described themselves as quiet and soft-spoken and even shy. And they all took the spotlight, even though every bone in their bodies was telling them not to.
It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel.
Panem et Circenses" translates into 'Bread and Circuses.' The writer was saying that in return for full bellies and entertainment, his people had given up their political responsibilities and therefore their power.
I knew it. In this way, Peeta's not hard to predict. While I was wallowing around on the floor of that cellar, thinking only of myself, he was here, thinking of me. Shame isn't a strong enough word for what I feel.
See that little girl? I wanted to marry her mother, but she ran off with a coal miner," "A coal miner? Why did she want a coal miner if she could've had you?" "Because when he sings...even the birds stop to listen.
Truth is as straight as an arrow, while a lie swivels all over the place. You can hide Truth under a doormat, but eventually the mat will rise very high with Time -- forcing it to reveal all the truths it conceals.
You didn't see him watching you dance with your dad. His eyes got all shiny. I thought he was going to cry. And on the way up here, in the elevator, he tried to play it off, but I could totally tell he was nervous.
I think there's a sort of, you know, very thin way of reading this that says, well, Barack Obama is biracial thus that gives him some understanding of both white America and black America, but that's not really it.
One of the things we tell ourselves as African-Americans is if we work hard, play by the rules, we do start back a little ways, but if we can be twice as good, somehow we can escape history and heritage and legacy.
Even though I'm surrounded by pupils, there is the invisible screen screen between us, and behind the glass wall I am screaming - screaming in my own silence, screaming to be noticed, to be befriended, to be liked.
A man has only a limited number of ways in which he can express strong emotions or violent passions. He uses the same gestures as when what he feels is only petty and unimportant. He utters the same ordinary words.
The discriminations that are found in the Muslim majority countries are more Cultural than Islamic. .... I have always said to the Muslim women, please do not nurture the victim mentality. Stand up for your rights.
The world is a great mirror. It reflects back to you what you are. If you are loving, if you are friendly, if you are helpful, the world will prove loving and friendly and helpful to you. The world is what you are.
It befell in the days of Uther Pendragon, when he was king of all England, and so reigned, that there was a mighty duke in Cornwall that held war against him long time. And the duke was called the duke of Tintagil.
Love is...like a spring coming up out of the ground of our own depths. "I am gift." All that I am is something that's given, and given freely. Being doesn't cost anything. There's no price tag, no strings attached.
I sit in places like Costa Coffee in Banstead and write rubbish. I need a deadline. I think about the 44 tour dates and keep imagining standing in front of all these people. Then every day I write 15 jokes minimum.
The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.
That old saying about opportunity only knocking once is as archaic as the flat-earth theory and as patently untrue. Opportunity knocks all the time - and it rings your doorbell, calls you up, and sends you e-mails.
Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?
What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.