Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
No one who passively endures an injustice against himself has the material in him to struggle for the rights of others. The one who patiently forbears becomes an accessory to the injustice done to others. He who resists the injustice which he himself meets can open up the way to a higher right for others.
The heart of the theater is the play itself, how it dramatizes life to make it meaningful entertainment. To achieve depth and universality, the playwright must subject himself to intense critique, to know human character and behavior, and finally to construct art from the most mundane of human experience.
The future depicted in a good SF story ought to be in fact possible, or at least plausible. That means that the writer should be able to convince the reader (and himself) that the wonders he is describing really can come true... and that gets tricky when you take a good, hard look at the world around you.
Nobody knows but you what it is that’s sacred to you as far as what you want to manifest in your life. You need to do it by your own chosen standards. Your life does not need to look like anybody else’s life. It’s a commitment that you’re making to a magnificent life measured by your own chosen standards.
My great-grandmama told my grandmama the part she lived through that my grandmama didn't live through and my grandmama told my mama what they both lived through and my mama told me what they all lived through and we were suppose to pass it down like that from generation to generation so we'd never forget.
From the equilibrium and spontaneous order of Adam Smith and his heirs, from invisible-handed markets and perfect competition, supply and demand, and rewards and punishments, I was pushed to theories of disequilibrium and disorder, and information and noise, as the keys to understanding economic progress.
I've had that situation where I start writing somebody really miserable, and in order to make the story come alive, I have to give them a vote of confidence, make him vulnerable or wounded. But in real life, you often meet people who, in that particular moment, actually shouldn't get a vote of confidence.
... anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high, the air heavy or clear and anybody is as there is wind or no wind there. It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink and the way they learn and everything.
The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.
I might inform those humanitarians who have a nightmare of new and needless babies (for some humanitarians have that sort of horror of humanity) that if the recent decline in the birth-rate were continued for a certain time, it might end in there being no babies at all; which would console them very much.
The ocean was one of the greatest things he had ever seen in his life—bigger and deeper than anything he had imagined. It changed its color and shape and expression according to time and place and weather. It aroused a deep sadness in his heart, and at the same time it brought his heart peace and comfort.
The main object of the novel is to represent life. . .The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life - that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience.
I don't care about anything but you, and that's enough for the present. I want you to be happy--not to think of anything sad; only to feel that I'm near you and I love you. Why should there be pain? In such hours as this what have we to do with pain? That's not the deepest thing; there's something deeper.
My father ain't in Europe; my father's in a better place than Europe." Winterbourne imagined for a moment that this was the manner in which the child had been taught to intimate that Mr. Miller had been removed to the sphere of celestial reward. But Randolph immediately added, "My father's in Schenectady.
To control the production of wealth is to control human life itself. To refuse man the opportunity for the production of wealth is to refuse him the opportunity for life; and, in general, the way in which the production of wealth is by law permitted is the only way in which the citizens can legally exist.
Still - and for all Obama's heavy hinting to the contrary - Islam has no "human rights." The ideas of individual rights and the dignity of man are distinctly Western, an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. And while dialogue is dignified; dhimmitude is not, even if it achieves a desired, if temporary, effect.
My first experiences of Colorado travel have been rather severe. At Greeley, I got a small upstairs room at first, but gave it up to a married couple with a child, and then had one downstairs no bigger than a cabin, with only a canvas partition. It was very hot, and every place was thick with black flies.
I understand the most profound and simplest Truth of all: Any time any of us reaches out, any time we pour even a drop of love, compassion, simple human decency (no matter how small; how seemingly insignificant) into the sea of earthly existence - we are, each and every one of us - the being called Mercy.
Anyone who sets foot into the 'Watchmen' universe and isn't just a little nervous should be given a few days of electroshock therapy. I've always considered 'Watchmen' to be one of the best graphic novels ever written, and when it came out back in 1986 I was as blown away as everyone else. Just masterful.
Writing's not precious to me. It's not a thing that requires specific environment. You know, it's my job. Just like anybody with a job, you have to do your job when you don't feel like it, regardless of how good or bad the conditions are, regardless of how good or bad you might feel on any particular day.
I've always found the rhetoric of mainstream civil rights leaders and organizations to be far too timid, accommodationist, and gradualist. It always seemed to me that they behaved like meek and gentle supplicants begging the oppressor for a few crumbs of justice, for a few molecules of citizenship rights.
It was through my hashtag #girlslikeus where I connected with other trans women on Twitter and Tumblr. We had challenging conversations, courageous personal revelations, and shared insights and experiences, and just had fun. The hashtag tethered me to many women in my community in impactful, lasting ways.
The most recent incarnation of [Bob] Dylan has been the traveling journeyman/ charlatan who sings roots music, snarls dark lyrics that make "All Along the Watchtower" sound like a Disney tune, hosts an old-school radio show, and turns up in some unusual places, like ads for Chrysler and Victoria's Secret.
I never knew how much we consumed. It seems as if we are all appetite, as if a human being is simply a bundle of needs to drain the world. It’s no wonder there are wars, no wonder the earth and water and air are polluted. It’s no wonder the economy collapsed, if Eva and I use so much merely to stay alive.
He: What’s the matter with you? Me: Nothing. Nothing was slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they will say surprised in the way that they are forever surprised, "but there was nothing the matter with her.
Getting Richard Norris his new face wasn't easy. For starters, doctors needed a donor who wasn't just a favorable blood match but also had the proper skeletal features and skin color - they calculated only a 14 percent chance they'd find one. Then there was the epic surgery that took a team of 150 people.
It is really very important while you are young to live in an environment in which there is no fear. Most of us, as we grow older, become frightened; we are afraid of living, afraid of losing a job, afraid of tradition, afraid of what the neighbours, or what the wife or husband would say, afraid of death.
The British Airways steward announced that the in-flight movie would be Chariots of Fire. 'Is that the only one?' I asked. 'We are also showing Gandhi,' he replied. 'Where do I have to sit to see it?" I responded. 'I'm sorry, sir, but Gandhi is only showing in first class.' The irony seemed to escape him.
Nature! We live in her midst and know her not. She is incessantly speaking to us, but betrays not her secret. We constantly act upon her, and yet have no power over her. Variant: NATURE! We are surrounded and embraced by her: powerless to separate ourselves from her, and powerless to penetrate beyond her.
You are inhuman brutes determined to rob us of our spiritual consolations and sweep away the moral foundations of our civilization, and on the other: You are obscurantist ignoramuses who'd like to shut down progress and drag us all back to the 16th century, with kings and priests telling us what to think.
Almost nothing worthwhile is easy, and it's hard to just jump in and be good at something difficult right off the bat... The only reliable way to succeed at anything is to actually do it, repeatedly, with concentrated effort. True for individuals, and true for organizations. Athletes, artists, businesses.
I always thought the point of life was something richer than that. Something full of great tragedy or comedy, reversal of fortune, ecstasy, that kind of thing. But no, contemporary urban theorists seem satisfied with the merely livable, which always sounds to me like the merely survivable, the not so bad.
Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.
In the critic's vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future." -- Essay: "Kafka and his Precursors
For me, writing is a job. I do not separate the work from the act of writing like two things that have nothing to do with each other. I arrange words one after another, or one in front of another, to tell a story, to say something that I consider important or useful, or at least important or useful to me.
The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images up into the mind - whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity: for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves.
A movie is better than real life because in the movies only the bad guys die. Or you can pick the good movies where the bad guys die and only those. If you get tricked and a good person dies in the movie then you can rewrite it in your head so the good person lives and the part about death is superfluous.
I'm not particularly good at page layouts. I make an effort to stay out of the way of the artist. What I'll try to express instead is, 'What we're going for here on this page is the idea of the containment of these women's bodies. So I want them framed as though they're bursting out of the panel borders.'
When people say there is a 'reason' for the depression, they insult the person who suffers, making it seem that those in agony are somehow at fault for not 'cheering up.' The fact is that those who suffer - and those who love them - are no more at fault for depression than a cancer patient is for a tumor.
I think a diversity of expression can only be good, so I think the more that people write about their experience, use their imagination to deal with their experience, you know, I think that's going to be good for not only for those authors but also for people who are interested in trying to understand it.
He said, ‘The moment I began to love you was the moment when you saw your fiddle smashed on the ground, and you turned away from me and cried against your horse. Your sadness is one of the things that makes you beautiful to me. Don’t you see that? I understand it. It makes my own sadness less frightening.
If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side! If it is not the right way, then show me another way; but if I stagger and lose the way, you must help me, you must keep me on the true path, just as I am ready to support you.
I dare say you never even spoke to Time!" "Perhaps not," Alice cautiously replied; "but I know I have to beat time when I listen to music." "Ah! That accounts for it," said the Hatter. "He won't stand a beating. Now, if only you kept on good terms with him, he'd do almost anything you like with the clock.
Perhaps this is how girls fall -- not in some crime of enchantment at the hands of a wicked ne'er-do-well, a grand before and after in which they are innocent victims who have no say in the matter. Perhaps they simply are kissed and want to kiss back. Perhaps they even kiss first. And why should they not?
What is your personal carrying capacity for grief, rage, despair? We are living in a period of mass extinction. The numbers stand at 200 species a day. That's 73,000 a year. This culture is oblivious to their passing, feels entitled to their every last niche, and there is no roll call on the nightly news.
I live on the margin of just about everything. I'm a marginal person, and I think that is where I've become comfortable. I'm marginally there in my native life. I can do as much as I can, but I'm always German, too, you know, and I'm always a mother. That's my first identity, but I'm always a writer, too.
If a man is endowed with a noble and courageous soul, if he is painstaking, proud, ambitious, without meanness, of a profound a deep-seated intelligence, I dare assert that he lacks nothing to be neglected by the great and men in high office, who fear, more than other men, those whom they cannot dominate.
The reason it's worth standing up for punctuation is not that it's an arbitrary system of notation known only to an over-sensitive elite who have attacks of the vapours when they see it misapplied. The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.
For the past several generations we've forgotten what the psychologists call our archaic understanding, a willingness to know things in their deepest, most mythic sense. We're all born with archaic understanding, and I'd guess that the loss of it goes directly along with the loss of ourselves as creators.
More than anything, the journal wanted. It wanted more than it could hold, more than words could describe, more than diagrams could illustrate. Longing burst from the pages, in every frantic line and every hectic sketch and every dark-printed definition. There was something pained and melancholy about it.