Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The use of a thing is only a part of its significance. To know anything thoroughly, to have the full command of it in all its appliances, we must study it on its own account, independently of any special application.
It will be! the mass is working clearer! Conviction gathers, truer, nearer! The mystery which for Man in Nature lies We dare to test, by knowledge led; And that which she was wont to organize We crystallize, instead.
There is nothing by which men display their character so much as in what they consider ridiculous... Fools and sensible men are equally innocuous. It is in the half fools and the half wise that the great danger lies.
The true, prescriptive artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless artist, following blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The one leads to the highest peaks of art, the other to its lowest depths.
Nixon in 1968, unlike Obama 2008, was elected as a minority president with only 43 percent of the vote. Yet, in 1972, he won what, in some measures, was the most lopsided election in American history with 61 percent.
Vice presidents are at times tasked with issuing direct broadsides against enemies while the top guy stays above the fray. But never before has a vice president served as an attack dog against his own party's voters.
As the Republican nominee, it was Romney's job to find a way to speak to some of those groups of voters and offer practical solutions to their difficulties that both resonated with them and sounded plausible to them.
Getting to the top of any given mountain was considered much less important than how one got there: prestige was earned by tackling the most unforgiving routes with minimal equipment, in the boldest style imaginable.
I think I understand that religious faith which makes the holy brave and strong; my strength is just somewhere else--it's in myself...I do not fear what may await me, though I'm equally confident that nothing awaits.
I think that cheap music often does make you dream more than more serious music, whether that's serious music by Beethoven or Miles Davis or Pink Floyd... if the Floyd ever did serious music, which I seriously doubt.
"My insides don't match up with my outsides." "Do anyone's inside and outsides match up?" "I don't know. I'm only me." "Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside."
I believe books will never disappear. It is impossible for it to happen. Of all man's diverse tools, undoubtedly the most astounding are his books... If books were to disappear, history would disappear. So would man.
I remember laughing with relief that the same old adolescent boredom goes on from generation to generation. ...the words took me back to my own years of stagnancy, and that terrible waiting for life to begin. [p. 68]
I think a lot of the most interesting immigrant writing involves stepping outside of that old, dreary binary. Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker is a great example. Same goes for Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior.
It was failing part of my Ph.D. that led me into novel-writing. By then I was 29, had remarried and had a second baby. It struck me that I'd lost my path in life and I felt frustrated. That's when I started to write.
There," she said. She rocked him back and forth. "There, you foolish, beautiful boy who wants to change the world. There, there. And who could keep from loving you? Who could keep from loving a boy so brave and true?
If memory serves me correctly, and it doesn't always, Kate [DiCamillo] and I met in the fall of 2001 at the former Figlio's restaurant in Minneapolis. We were laughing within a minute of meeting - always a good sign.
Especially when you're faced with hard times, you need to remember that life is either tragedy or comedy. For me, that's what the magic is. Life has remarkable, surprising moments that get you through the hard times.
I have to. I've been fighting it all night. I'm going to lose. My battle is as futile as a woman feeling the first pangs of labor and deciding it's an inconvenient time to give birth. Nature wins out. It always does.
It was quite risky to open the book with one of my quieter stories; I'm kind of trying, I think, to lure readers into a false sense of security and then assault them with a couple really loud, really strange stories.
You won't even take your bow? Are you planning to throttle a moose with your bare hands, then?" "I've a knife in my boot," she said, and then wondered, for a moment, if she could throttle a moose with her bare hands.
Katsa didn't think a person should thank her for not causing pain. Causing joy was worthy of thanks, and causing pain worthy of disgust. Causing neither was neither, it was nothing, and nothing didn't warrant thanks.
It was a strange monster, for beneath its exterior it was frightened and sickened by its own violence. It chastised itself for its savagery. And sometimes it had no heart for violence and rebelled against it utterly.
but sometimes one person can hold you up in life, keep you standing, and without that hand to hold, you can find yourself free-falling no matter how strong you used to be, no matter how hard you try to remain steady.
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too. And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.
What geography can give all Middle Westerners, along with the fresh water and topsoil, if they let it, is awe for an Edenic continent stretching forever in all directions. Makes you religious. Takes your breath away.
Artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are supersensitive. They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas, long before more robust types realize that any danger is there.
If it works out, it's the best thing in the world. If it doesn't work out, it's like having your heart torn out and chopped up into little pieces while you watch. It leaves a big hollow space that never really heals.
[Roland] jerked back too fast to see, and his fist was suddenly connecting with my chin. I didn't pass out, but my body went limp. Part of me was screaming silently. The other part was saying, 'Oh, what pretty trees.
When someone dies, you don't get over it by forgetting; you get over it by remembering, and you are aware that no person is ever truly lost or gone once they have been in our life and loved us, as we have loved them.
Night. Heavenly delicious sweet night of the desert that calls all of us to love her. The night is our comfort with her coolness and darkness. On wings, on feet, on our bellies, out we all come to glory in the night.
What if evil doesn't really exist? What if evil is something dreamed up by man, and there is nothing to struggle against except out own limitations? The constant battle between our will, our desires, and our choices?
The further humans move from hunters to horticulturists to agriculturists to urbanisation to industrialists, the further the sacred recedes, first to heaven, then condensed to monotheism and finally it dies in irony.
The grand surprise has really been the fact that being an author, which to me had always implied being a private person, actually requires you to be a public person as well, and those are two separate entities to me.
I'm truly, 100% guided by the characters and my Muse. If one of the characters suddenly decided to do something very different, I'd just go with it. It's much easier to let the Muse drive than for me to try to steer.
If you write for the New Yorker, you always get people critiquing your grammar, you can count on it. So, because a lot of New Yorker readers are kind of, you know, amateur grammarians and so you do get a lot of that.
I didn't become a good writer until I learned how to rewrite. And I don't just mean fixing spelling and adding a comma. I rewrite each of my books five or six times, and each time I change huge portions of the story.
You never know where you're going to find the same thoughts in another brain, but when it happens you know it right off, just like you were connected by a small electrical wire that suddenly glows red hot and sparks.
My father said once that if I didn't have my mother's ginger hair, I wouldn't blush or curse as easily. Which I though was unfair. I hardly ever curse or blush, even though I've had plenty of days that required both.
Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone
We'll always need printed books that don't mutate the way digital books do; we'll always need places to display books, auditoriums for book talks, circles for story time; we'll always need brick-and-mortar libraries.
Apparently the pro-choice types who jump up and down in the street demanding that you keep your rosaries off their ovaries are entirely relaxed about the government getting its bureaucratics all over your lymphatics.
July 24, 6:03 A.M. The laundry was warm and the rafters were firm, and Michael Holzapfel jumped from the chair as if it were a cliff... Michael Holzapfel knew what he was doing. He killed himself for wanting to live.
I record my radio show, and my staff makes me a nice lunch in the kitchen, usually fish - whatever's freshest and line-caught - and a salad. I drink water and herbal tea, a blend of catnip, elderberry, and horehound.
Friends, show me a man who hates himself, and I'll show you a man who hates his neighbours more! He'd have to – you wouldn't grant anyone else something you can't have for yourself – no love, no kindness, no respect!
All that matters to me as a reader are characters. I want characters to be real, authentic, and rounded. I will be digging into characters for at least a month. Who they are. What they are like. Outside of the story.
If he hadn't been my father I would have loved the spectacle he created-one performance following quickly upon another-like a versatile old vaudevil-lian with his audience (wife and children) in the palm of his hand.
Seek for the endless life in the world, because with death, there remains neither the seeker nor the sought! The other world is altogether an illusion! Stop deceiving yourself; seek for the endless life in the world!
Whatever your objective in life may be, never use violence to get it! Violence belongs to the Land of Evil; once you enter there, your face and your heart is forever sealed with the devilish ugliness of the violence!
God has not any Holy Book; but Man has many Holy Book writers! Producing Holy Books is a cosmic crime against God! God has not spoken yet! He has been silent for billions of years, because He is out of this universe!