Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.
Faith, it is evident, may be relied on to produce sustained action and, more rarely, sustained contemplation.
Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.
In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage, to know who we are and where we came from.
The point about love, the essential point, was that we loved what we loved. We did not choose. We just loved.
To learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the others.
that Englishman who came to challenge me three or four months ago, and whom I killed to stop him bothering me
In this world, all--men, women, and kings--must live for the present. We can only live for the future for God
To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.
He was beginning to understand: You were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.
One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood.
The radio was an improvement on the telegraph but it didn't have the same exponential, transformative effect.
The people only understand what they can feel; the only orators that can affect them are those who move them.
Speak to Him often of your business, your plans, your troubles, your fears - of everything that concerns you.
One of the more fantastic possibilities is that man will be able to make biological carbon copies of himself.
It smelled pretty rank, but I was getting used to the smell of death, as much as anyone could get used to it.
There was something almost painful about that, the intensity of being so vulnerable and so intimate with him.
I became a part of the Civil Rights movement early on and that has really shaped a great deal of my thinking.
Weak and oppressed nations are fundamentally spiritual; strong nations are, as a rule, chiefly materialistic.
I changed my name when we became aware of the African revolution and the whole question of our African roots.
I'm generalizing wildly, but academic books find safety in explanations that reduce the chaos of social life.
A government, for protecting business only, is but a carcass, and soon falls by its own corruption and decay.
When people have peace, they hate it and long for excitement, and when they have excitement, they want peace.
Literature is not made of ideas and it's not made of concepts, of psychological analysis. It's made of words.
What I think," Chatty says, "is that if a man loves a woman more than a woman loves a man, then they're even.
I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.
We have met and hated, fought and died before - you and I. Kepta to Garin People of the Crater. Andre Norton.
The annihilation of a woman's personality, individuality, will, character, is prerequisite to male sexuality.
...In every realm of male expression and action, violence is experienced and articulated as love and freedom.
The great thing in prayer is to feel that we are putting our supplications into the bosom of omnipotent love.
The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep out of me.
I tend to find the ecstasy hidden in ordinary joys, because I did not expect those joys to be ordinary to me.
People accuse me of glamorizing mental illness. Looking back sometimes, that's true. But I don't feel guilty.
Ugly is very popular this year...I had a feeling these clothes were deigned by someone who didn't like women.
Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping.
It's often been said that I'm an extremely depressing, cynical writer. I've never known what to make of that.
the distinction between talent and genius is definite. Talent combines and uses; genius combines and creates.
Don't underestimate the power of events that happened a long time ago. That is the tragic flaw of modern man.
With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.
John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.
Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.
As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.
Religion is the finger pointing to God. People are too busy licking the finger to notice where it's pointing.
If I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.
Love is pointless. It’s the same sad sad story of with the same inevitable ending of miserable deterioration.
Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.
Simple ignorance has in its time been complimented by the names of most of the vices, and of all the virtues.
I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.
Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.
I was in advertising for years. That was cushy, you know? It's pretty cushy in a lot of ways, but I hated it.