Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The experience of watching great cinema - great art - is life enriching and spiritually uplifting no matter whether it's about as difficult as it gets, like 'Breaking the Waves,' or as light as it gets, like 'Jerry Maguire,' 'Election' or 'Toy Story.'
People ask me: "Why do you write about food, and eating, and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way the others do?" . . . The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry.
They rode out together from the shadows of the trees, leaving the Bala Hissar and the glowing torch of the burning Residency behind them, and spurred away across the flat lands towards the mountains... And it may even be that they found their Kingdom.
I like to take the time out to listen to the trees, much in the same way that I listen to a sea shell, holding my ear against the rough bark of the trunk, hearing the inner singing of the sap. It's a lovely sound, the beating of the heart of the tree.
During the long drag of years before our youngest child went to school, my love for my family and my need to write were in acute conflict. The problem was really that I put two things first. My husband and children came first. So did my writing. Bump.
You really didn't see the sadness or the longing unless you already knew it was there. But that was the trick, wasn't it? Everyone had their disappointment and their baggage; only, some people carried it in their inside pockets and not on their backs.
I remember [in teenage years] thinking there were a lot of check boxes out there to sort teens into appropriate molds, and they didn't seem to make check boxes for whatever it was that I had grown up into. I definitely explore that a lot in my novels.
Opportunities do not come with their values stamped upon them.... To face every opportunity of life thoughtfully, and ask its meaning bravely and earnestly, is the only way to meet supreme opportunities when they come, whether open-faced or disguised.
Big data will never give you big ideas... Big data doesn't facilitate big leaps of the imagination. It will never conjure up a PC revolution or any kind of paradigm shift. And while it might tell you what to aim for, it can't tell you how to get there
When Reason Breaks is infused with a rare blend of suspense and sensitivity, despair and hope. The poetic spirit of Emily Dickinson shines through the gloom of daily struggles faced by modern teens, as they discover the possibilities where they dwell.
Sartre said that wars were acts and that, with literature, you could produce changes in history. Now, I don't think literature doesn't produce changes, but I think the social and political effect of literature is much less controllable than I thought.
The love of their country is with them only a mode of flattering its master; as soon as they think that master can no longer hear, they speak of everything with a frankness which is the more startling because those who listen to it become responsible.
I support Alice Waters in her desire that there be a vegetable garden at the White House. I don't think they should rip up the Rose Garden, because that's something that I love. They should probably dig up another patch and grow some vegetables there.
Women are from their very infancy debarred those advantages with the want of which they are aftewards reproached, and nursed up in those vices which will hereafter be upbraided to them. So partial are men as to expect bricks when they afford no straw.
Soon I am seeing the blue-and-yellow flags that line the campus streets, and it makes me feel happy and sad at the same time to be back at La Salle--almost like looking at old pictures of people who have either died or with whom you have lost contact.
Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.
Looking for a saviour in the sky? Be serious! Know you still not that there ain't any saviour but science! Get rid of your cultural craps and your religious illusions! Be realist! In this universe, only the realists have the chance to save themselves!
If I did something to hurt Frankie and she said that I was never getting near her heart again, I’d spent the rest of my life trying anyway. That’s the difference between you and me, Tom. I’d go back to the moment it all fell apart and I’d start there.
She had me at Sweet Valley High. Gay playfully crosses the borders between pop culture consumer and critic, between serious academic and lighthearted sister-girl, between despair and optimism, between good and bad. . . . How can you help but love her?
Even almost a century after her death, Sarah Bernhardt, the French actress whose extraordinary personality, flamboyant life and passionate nature became a legend in her own lifetime, remains the byword among most people as the supreme theatrical star.
... In a free society, skeptics are the watchdogs against irrationalism - the consumer advocates of ideas. Debunking is not simply the divestment of bunk; its utility is in offering a better alternative, along with a lesson on how thinking goes wrong.
I grew up in rural Tennessee. There were no bookstores in the town, but the school had a little library and the town had a little library, each with a patient and enthusiastic librarian, and I raced into both as if they were doorways to another world.
Perhaps it is not without reason that we attribute facility in belief and conviction to simplicity and ignorance; for it seems to me I once learned that belief was sort of an impression made on our mind, and that the softer it is the less resistant t.
Books are pleasant, but if by being over-studious we impair our health and spoil our good humour, two of the best things we have, let us give it over. I, for my part, am one of those who think no fruit derived from them can recompense so great a loss.
The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.
If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and make it the object of our game; to turn it into a toy
The ethnocultural connotations of the burkini ban are very strong. It's as absurd as mandating that women have to go topless on the beach. If I were a woman, I definitely would not want to wear a burkini or a headscarf. But it's not about what I want.
I've realized that it's important to stop trying to think I'm any one thing. People are confused as to their identity and try to cling to one aspect of that identity to describe what they are: American, Republican, Muslim. These are really incomplete.
This means, in a way, that true light is dependent on the presence of other lights. Take the others away and darkness results. Yet the reverse is not true: take away darkness and there is only more darkness. Darkness can exist by itself. Light cannot.
I never talk about what I'm writing about currently, never. It's private work on your own, no need or obligation to talk about it. Writers are made into performers these days, including myself, but there are some instances in which I will not perform.
Everyone understands that love comes in many different packages and is used in many different ways. You cannot love beyond your years, nor can you fail to love beneath them... In other words, I think you get the love you need when you open your heart.
The masses do not see the Sirens. They do not hear songs in the air. Blind, deaf, stooping, they pull at their oars in the hold of the earth. But the more select, the captains, harken to a Siren within them...and royally squander their lives with her.
If you would make a man happy, study not to augment his goods; but to diminish his wants. One of the greatest services Christianity has rendered the world has been its consecration of poverty, and its elevation of labor to the dignity of a moral duty.
Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One
Dear Prince, I must leave you, but I will never forget you, and next spring I will bring you back two beautiful jewels in place of those you have given away. The ruby shall be redder than a red rose, and the sapphire shall be as blue as the great sea.
The best thing about religion is that it's so transparently absurd it can't possibly last forever. I'm convinced it will only take a small shift in human consciousness for it to be laughed off the planet, and I hope I'm still around when that happens.
The trick to going wherever you want unchallenged in a hospital is to walk briskly, nod to the people you know, and ignore the ones you don’t. The nod reassures everyone that you are known, the brisk pace that you have a mission and don’t want to talk
We have more brilliant fantasy novels than brilliant fantasy movies. Movies and TV are done by committee. But with a novel, it's really just one person running the show. That allows for a clarity and unity of vision that's pretty unique, artistically.
After I'd been in college for a couple years I'd read Shakespeare and Frost and Chaucer and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. I'd come to appreciate how gorgeous the English language could be. But most fantasy novels didn't seem to make the effort.
I want to serve. I love my country. I love service above self and I don't want my talents to go to waste. I also want to send a message to other men and women who've tripped over themselves, or over life: that you need to serve your time in purgatory.
Europeans still read rather than watching TV or listening to their clergyman tell them how to vote. The European magazines are far superior to American magazines in content and readership, but TV is taking a bite out of circulation now even in Europe.
The DCU Constantine has to be the guy we know and love, with his same failings - otherwise what's the point of using him? But as I'm writing him, he's younger and has perhaps been through a bit less than the battered, aging old sod we meet in Vertigo.
If, as Marshall McLuhan once taught us, the medium is the message, then Derfner's medium-this lovely, discursive amalgamation of wit and smarts-is indeed his message about how to stay happy, sane, and honest in whatever situation one finds oneself in.
I shy away from plot structure that depends on the characters behaving in ways that are going to eventually be explained by their childhood, or by some recent trauma or event. People are incredibly complicated. Who knows why they are the way they are?
I don't pay attention to auction prices. Nothing interests me less. One of the benefits of not being an artist is I don't have to navigate the social hierarchies of the art world as a person of desire. I don't need anything. I live in a different way.
If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
That's life for you," said MacDunn. "Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't hurt you no more.
Facts quite often, I fear to confess, like lawyers, put me to sleep at noon. Not theories, however. Theories are invigorating and tonic. Give me an ounce of fact and I will produce you a ton of theory by tea this afternoon. That is, after all, my job.
The best way to constrain Iran's potential movement towards nuclear capability is to have peace in the Middle East, peace between the Israeli and the Palestinians. To end the official war that still exists between Israel and Syria, Israel and Lebanon.
The seams, the laminae between the various worlds the past present and future as well as the living and the nonliving may not be as distinct and clear-cut as we have been taught or as our somewhat arbitrary clocks and calendars have led us to believe.