Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I had to steel myself against this psychic devastation - to see your father on the street. It's hard enough to pick up somebody you don't know from the streets, and then to actually have other people pick your father up - it was psychically devastating.
I like what they're doing. I think they're doing a good job, and I know that a lot of people are upset by them. These are great young men and women, and they're bold, and they are saying to America, "Something's going to change." I'm very proud of them.
Character starts with the alphabet. Letters: words: sentences Character is a function of language—a collection of errors and deviations that resonate with certain behaviors. As with every other element in fiction, it is a record of a writer’s decisions.
But what of life whose bitter hungry sea Flows at our heels, and gloom of sunless night Covers the days which never more return? Ambition, love and all the thoughts that burn We lose too soon, and only find delight In withered husks of some dead memory.
It is always painful fo part from people whom one has known for a very brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity. But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable.
Marco Polo had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-colored pearls in the mouths of the dead. A sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that the diver brought to King Perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned for seven moons over its loss.
Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.
In the years afterward, I fled whenever somebody began to understand me. That has subsided. But one thing remained: I don't want anybody to understand me completely. I want to go through life unknown. The blindness of others is my safety and my freedom.
Did I ever mention I used to be a delivery driver too? I was. I can read a map. What’s more, using a brilliant mixture of zen navigation, Aristotelian logic, and pure rage I can get you your package and/or delicious sandwich relatively close to on-time.
We all try to camouflage the monotony. But it takes a lot of energy. To insist on being special all the time. When we're so much like one another anyway. Our triumphs are the same. Our pain. Try for a moment to feel what relief there is in the ordinary.
'Greek Street' is a very strange beast. I think of it as 'The Long Good Friday' meets 'Agamemnon.' A way of using those fantastically rich stories from Greek tragedy to take a look at our world and to explore some of the things I think about this world.
A phoenix, Beirut seems to always pull itself out its ashes, reinvents itself, has been conquered numerous times in its 7,000-year history, yet it survives by both becoming whatever its conquerors wished it to be and retaining its idiosyncratic persona.
If you ask me if I’m imagining it again, I’m going to punch you out, Dead Man Walking.” Michael raised his eyebrows and glanced at Eve. “He doesn’t sound crazy.” “Er,” she clarified, “crazier. He sounds like he’s back to normal, which is baseline crazy.
There is a new codeword going round school. DFS. It means 'desperate for sex.' It sounds like you are talking about the furniture shop. For the record, I'm certainly DFS. In fact I am permanently shopping in DFS with no hope of getting out of the store.
Not to write, for many of us, is to die. We must take ares each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout. The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory.
I think that if a real princess was lost in this modern world and she could be whatever she wanted, she would be a musician,' Blanche said slowly. 'A violinist, or a harpist. That would be the only place where she could find solace for her lost kingdom.
When you look at yourself and feel dissatisfaction about any part of you, you will continue to attract feelings of dissatisfaction, because the law mirrors back to you exactly what you are holding inside. Be in awe and wonder at the magnificence of you!
When you have a pile of bills that you have no idea how you are going to pay, you cannot focus on the bills, because you will continue to attract more bills. You have to find a way that works for you to focus on prosperity, despite the bills around you.
The difference between someone who is struggling and someone who has a fabulous life comes down to one thing -- love. Those who have a great life imagine what they love and want, and they feel the love of what's they're imagining more than other people.
Of course I'm a fake. We're all fakes on this whole world, pretending to be something we're not. We are not just bodies walking around, not just atoms, molecules. We are unkillable, undestroyable ideas of the IS, no matter how much we believe otherwise.
Science fiction has always been a means for political comment. H.G. Wells' 'The War of the Worlds' wasn't about a Martian invasion - it was a critique of British colonialism, and... 'The Time Machine' is really an indictment of the British class system.
We absolutely do some of the best science in the world in Canada, across a broad spectrum of disciplines: quantum computing in Waterloo, paleontology in Alberta, neuroscience at the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health in Vancouver, and many more.
Twitter has allowed the conversation to broaden and become more inclusive. At times, the conversation is really tense but that's because we're talking about really important issues. It's not going to be easy but at least the conversations are happening.
I fell even more deeply in love with Tolkien's legendarium after studying Old English literature at uni, as I got a sense of the historical events and cultures that Tolkien used to create his world. My favourite of his imaginary locations is Lothlorien.
Deceit and falsehood, whatever conveniences they may for a time promise or produce, are, in the sum of life, obstacles to happiness. Those who profit by the cheat distrust the deceiver; and the act by which kindness was sought puts an end to confidence.
So how are you supposed to learn how to drive with this guy yapping at you? My brothers were the ones who got to practice. So when you have to get on the expressway, you're afraid. That's what I think. That's why I take back routes on two-lane highways.
You couldn't see the key around my neck: it hung too low under both collars. But if I leaned in close, I could make it out, buried deep beneath. Out of sight, hard to recognize, but still able to be found, even if I was the only one to ever look for it.
Once 'Walk Two Moons' received the Newbery Medal, I decided to write full-time. Partly because there seemed to be an audience out there who wanted to read what I wanted to write, and partly because I could now support myself financially through writing.
It has long been known to me that certain objects want you as much as you want them. These are the ones that become important, the objects that you hold dear. The others fade from your life entirely. You wanted them, but they did not want you in return.
My mother always said that the strongest steel is forged by the fires of hell. That which doesn't kill us doesn't have to make us bitter, unless we let it. Those fires show us what we can survive and clear the field for new growth. For a better harvest.
Stop it. This is serious! (Selena) Serious? Please. I’m standing out here on my twenty-ninth birthday, barefoot and in jeans my mother would burn, holding a stupid book to my chest in an effort to summon a Greek love-slave from the great beyond. (Grace)
Oh, by the way, is this your armor? (Grace) It is, or was. (Julian) Can we keep it? (Grace) If you like. Why? (Julian) ’Cause, ooo baby, you are one hot tamale in that getup. This outfit alone will get you laid at least four or five times a day. (Grace)
What? It's not my fault I stab all the fanged people. They shouldn't look like Daimons. (Tabitha) I didn't look like a Daimon, but you stabbed me. (Valerius) Yeah, well, you looked like a lawyer so I had to kill you. It was a moral imperative. (Tabitha)
Don’t you have something to do? (Sin) If not for the fact it would result in your breaking every bone in my body and making me cry for Mommy, I’d be calling some cops. As it stands, I think my neck is best served by trying to talk sense into you. (Kish)
Is there a phone I can use? (Talon) In the kitchen. (Sunshine) Could you please bring it to me? (Talon) It’s not cordless. I always lose those things or I drop them someplace and break them. The last one I had ended up drowning in the toilet. (Sunshine)
The nice girl thinks she's giving up something to get something better in return. She gives up control over her own life. When the time comes for her to get what she expected, she winds up disappointed. In addition to being empty-handed, she's depleted.
Another woman approached me while I was having lunch at the Russian Tea Room in New York and told me that the reason she had become a lawyer was because she had read 'Rage of Angels'. To me, that kind of feedback has more meaning than any sales figures.
Any ritual is an opportunity for transformation. To do a ritual, you must be willing to be transformed in some way. The inner willingness is what makes the ritual come alive and have power. If you aren't willing to be changed by the ritual, don't do it.
So this was different. I was amazing now - to them and to myself. It was like I had been born to be a vampire. The idea made me want to laugh, but it also made me want to sing. I had found my true place in the world, the place I fit, the place I shined.
About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was a part of him - and I didn’t know how potent that part might be - that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.
Honey lamb, there are a lot of things in this world I feel insecure about. Religion. Our national economic policies. What color socks to wear with a blue suit. But I've got to tell you that my performance in that hotel room last night isn't one of them.
Memories are like fireflies darting across the surface of my mind, showing me here and there images so sharp and vivid that I catch my breath in wonder before the vignette disappears, sinking like a pebble into the quicksand of regret and recrimination.
"I don't know how to say it exactly. Only... I want to die as myself. Does that make any sense?" he asks. I shake my head. How could he die as anyone but himself. "I don't want them to change me in there. Turn me into some kind of monster that I'm not."
As we ride the elevator Gale finally says “You're still angry.” “And you're still not sorry,” I reply. "I will stand by what I said. Do you want me to lie about it?” he asks. “No, I want you to rethink it and come up with the right opinion,” I tell him.
Another factor is the post-9/11 security mentality, which views sunlight as toxic and imagines that somehow bin Laden is dependent upon our government documents, a "fact" that has never, ever been supported to my knowledge. So, that's the second factor.
The most human thing about anyone is a thing he learns and ... and earns. It's a thing he can't have when he's very young; if he gets it at all, he gets it after a long search and a deep conviction. After that it's truly part of him as long as he lives.
By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.
As the son of a feminist mother, I grew up with the idea that work was a sort of salvation for women as it would give them freedom from the domestic grind. Now it seems work is a form of slavery, undertaken out of apparent compulsion rather than choice.
The manager, in today's world, doesn't get paid to be a steward of resources, a favored term not so many years ago. He or she gets paid for one and only one thing: to make things better (incrementally and dramatically), to change things, to act - today.
We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know nothing of the people on my father's side; I know only that some of them came from Nepal