Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To the people who love you, you are beautiful already. This is not because they're blind to your shortcomings but because they so clearly see your soul. Your shortcomings then dim by comparison. The people who care about you are willing to let you be imperfect and beautiful, too.
Y2K hype taps our native discomfort with the realities of a dynamic, evolving social order. It elevates personal, local contact over the impersonality of the 'extended order' of trade and technological networks. It suggests that we can wipe the slate clean and start from scratch.
He was a thorough good sort; a bit limited; a bit thick in the head; yes; but a thorough good sort. Whatever he took up he did in the same matter-of-fact sensible way; without a touch of imagination, without a sparkle of brilliancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type.
I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts.
It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself.
For it is a curious fact that though human beings have such imperfect means of communication, that they can only say 'good to eat' when they mean 'beautiful' and the other way about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep any experience to themselves.
I delight in the diffusion of learning; yet, I must confess it, I am most gratified and transported at finding a large quantity of it in one place; just as I would rather have a solid pat of butter at breakfast, than a splash of grease upon the table-cloth that covers half of it.
Really the writer doesn't want success. . . . He knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall - Kilroy was here - that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see.
I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.
One has a responsibility to clean up one's space and make it livable as far as one's own resources go. That includes not only material resources, but psychological resources: the commitment of time and a portion of your mind to something when you'd rather be doing something else.
I don't think life offers any greater experience than the joyful sense of recognition when one finds in a new acquaintance a real friend, or when an old relationship deepens into friendship, or when one finds an old friendship intact despite the passage of years and many absences.
The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
Feel this moment, see it with a willingness to experience it deeply, whether it be good, bad, or indifferent. Emotionally and feelingly be fully present, right here, vulnerable, with your heart. Just be present. Don't live from your conditioned mind, live from unconditional truth.
The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
I've had years of bizarre hallucinogenic magical experiences in which I believed I had communicated with entities that may well have been disassociated parts of my own personality or conceivably some independent entity of a metaphysical nature. Both would seem equally interesting.
I see the difficulty of kids in going to university, the difficulty of kids in schools getting arts education, so that the arts and drama and the creative arts are extracurricular. They aren't: they are at the centre, and they are the equipment we so desperately need in the world.
In this deeply nuanced portrait of an American family, Bret Anthony Johnston fearlessly explores the truth behind a mythic happy ending. In Remember Me Like This, Johnston presents an incisive dismantling of an all-too-comforting fallacy: that in being found we are no longer lost.
I probably have less revision than those who have that wonderful rush of story to tell - you know, I can't wait to tell you what happened the other day. It comes tumbling out and maybe then they go back and refine. I kind of envy that way of working, but I just have never done it.
Any man will follow any feminine looking thing down any dark alley; I've always wanted to see a man beaten to a shit bloody pulp with a high-heeled shoe stuffed up his mouth, sort of the pig with the apple; it would be good to put him on a serving plate but you'd need good silver.
But he is an Italian," was Umberto's sensible reply. "He doesn't care if you break some law a little bit, as long as you wear beautiful shoes. Are you wearing beautiful shoes? Are you wearing the shoes I gave you?...principessa?" I looked down at my flip-flops. "I guess I'm toast.
A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.
Dogwalker is a book of fiction, with characters based on the types of people who truly exist in the world. I've seen them and know them - some of them I know really well. Although the stories are sometimes gritty and unsettling, my hope is that in the end they hit a positive note.
Infinite toil would not enable you to sweep away a mist; but by ascending a little, you may often look over it altogether. So it is with our moral improvement: we wrestle fiercely with a vicious habit, which could have no hold upon us if we ascended into a higher moral atmosphere.
So that's what I'm here to become. And suddenly, this word fills me with a brand of sadness I haven't felt since childhood. The kind of sadness you feel at the end of summer. When the fireflies are gone, the ponds have dried up and the plants are wilted, weary from being so green.
Folly consists not in committing Folly, but in being incapable of concealing it. All men make mistakes, but the wise conceal the blunders they have made, while fools make them public. Reputation depends more on what is hidden than on what is seen. If you can’t be good, be careful.
Even when I try to stir myself up, I just get irritated because I can't make anything come out. And in the middle of the night I lie here thinking about all this. If I don't get back on track somehow, I'm dead, that's the sense I get. There isn't a single strong emotion inside me.
Love is the kind of thing that's already happening by the time you notice it, that's how it works, and no matter how old you get, that doesn't change. Except that you can break it up into two entirely distinct types -- love where there's an end in sight and love where there isn't.
Feelings aroused by the touch of someone's hand, the sound of music, the smell of a flower, a beautiful sunset, a work of art, love, laughter, hope and faith - all work on both the unconscious and the conscious aspects of the self, and they have physiological consequences as well.
If we had no hope - for a cure, for winning the lottery, for falling in love, for the end of war, for being free of abuse, or for having food, warmth, clothing, and shelter - we would have no reason to go on. What you hope for doesn't matter, but rather the essence of hope itself.
I believe the reason we sleep is not just to allow our body to rest but that it is to allow this inner wisdom to speak to us through symbols. This includes the body or somatic problems as well as psychological ones. Dreams and drawings are useful in diagnosing physical conditions.
All societies have these cases. There are many, many crime cases that remain famous from the times of the Romans. The Bible is full of crime stories. You can almost flip to a page. Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers is a crime story. The Bible is full of crime stories.
If you look at wrestling when I started to get my big break back in 1992, I changed wrestling from the cartoons of Hulk Hogan and Iron Sheik and the matches with the leg drop and the hand behind the ear and the playing to the crowd. They were just cartoon characters if you ask me.
Don't be ashamed to weep; 'tis right to grieve. Tears are only water, and flowers, trees, and fruit cannot grow without water. But there must be sunlight also. A wounded heart will heal in time, and when it does, the memory and love of our lost ones is sealed inside to comfort us.
...with a cat you stand on much the same footing that you stand with a fine and dignified friend; if you forfeit his respect and confidence the relationship suffers. The cat, it is well to remember, remains the friend of man because it pleases him to do so and not because he must.
Don't we all look back in longing, those of us who had happy childhoods? Because the greatest loss we ever know is not the loss of family or place or money, it is the loss of innocence. There is forever a hollow place in our hearts once we realize that darkness rings the campfire.
Across the narrow beach we flit, One little sand-piper and I; And fast I gather, bit by bit, The scattered drift-wood, bleached and dry, The wild waves reach their hands for it, The wild wind raves, the tide runs high, As up and down the beach we flit, One little sand-piper and I.
But I am sure that I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round...as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely.
Night, like a giant, fills the church, from pavement to roof, and holds dominion through the silent hours. Pale dawn again comes peeping through the windows: and, giving place to day, sees night withdraw into the vaults, and follows it, and drives it out, and hides among the dead.
Fledgeby deserved Mr. Alfred Lammle's eulogium. He was the meanest cur existing, with a single pair of legs. And instinct (a word we all clearly understand) going largely on four legs, and reason always on two, meanness on four legs never attains the perfection of meanness on two.
An important factor to note is that it's rare for anyone to sell a first novel written before they turned 30-35; long-format fiction tends to require a bunch of experience of human life that takes time to acquire. So your average mid-career novelist is in their forties to fifties!
Lasting love has to be built on mutual regard and respect. It is about seeing the other person. I am very interested in relationships and, when I watch couples, sometimes I can sense a blindness has set in. They have stopped seeing each other. It is not easy to see another person.
The terrifying breakdown of social cohesion in the American city, in spite of intense institutionalized police surveillance equipped with every sophisticated aid to public control, illustrates that social behaviour depends upon mutual responsibility rather than upon the policeman.
An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play.
Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you're called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can't ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn't written anything for a year.
This is just one of those annoying and unjust differences between you and your younger sibling...I was probably fifteen before I could go to a friend's house without giving mom an FBI dossier on the people; Bex can practically hitchhike on the freeway with a mere "Have fun, honey.
Generally, old media don't die. They just have to grow old gracefully. Guess what, we still have stone masons. They haven't been the primary purveyors of the written word for a while now of course, but they still have a role because you wouldn't want a TV screen on your headstone.
Hey, this is terrific!" he said. "Someone down there is trying to kill us!" "Terrific," said Arthur. "But don't you see what this means?" "Yes. We are going to die." "Yes, but apart from that." "Apart from that?!" "It means we must be on to something!" "How soon can we get off it?
You will come to a place where the streets are not marked. Some windows are lighted. but mostly they're darked. But mostly they're darked. A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin! Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in? How much can you lose? How much can you win?
The influences that have lifted the race to a higher moral level are education, freedom, leisure, the humanizing tendency of a better-supplied and more interesting life. In a word, science and liberalism . . . have accomplished the very things for which religion claims the credit.
If our extinction proceeds slowly enough to allow a moment of horrified realization, the doers of the deed will likely be quite taken aback on realizing that they have actually destroyed the world. Therefore I suggest that if the Earth is destroyed, it will probably be by mistake.