Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A day might just be twenty-four hours but sometimes getting through one seems as impossible as scaling Everest.
Whoever said that the past isn't dead had it backward. It's the future that's already dead, already played out.
My experiences growing up in both a Chinese American household and the Catholic Church define much of who I am.
You read 'Stalingrad' by Antony Beevor because you're interested in the Second World War or Russia or whatever.
In the city a funeral is just an interruption of traffic; in the country it is a form of popular entertainment.
A simile is like a pair of eyeglasses, one side sees this, one side sees that, the device brings them together.
It doesn't matter how many solar panels you install if you don't simultaneously shut down coal and gas burners.
The Enlightenment ideal, which all universities claim to endorse, is that everyone should think for themselves.
So here's something I know to be true, although it's a little corny, and I don't quite know what to do with it.
We confess our bad qualities to others out of fear of appearing naive or ridiculous by not being aware of them.
It's so difficult to write in motion and get rid of the past tense, and also to create a sense of impermanence.
The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.
Every man is important if he loses his life;and every man is funny if he loses his hat and has to run after it.
Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.
Family is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter.
A great man is not a man so strong that he feels less than other men; he is a man so strong that he feels more.
Where there is no desire or pursuits, there is no wholeness. But there are satisfying lesser states, fragments.
If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.
My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust forever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.
God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed - that is the meaning of evolution.
I like big, open, spare landscapes. There's lots of room. Nobody bothers you... I feel as if I can think there.
She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.
I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.
Be orderly and disciplined in daily life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wild and violent in my art.
We breathe love as we breathe air; we hold it in ourselves as we hold our thoughts. Nothing more exists for us.
Weak thoughts and feelings often feel strong but remember, real strength is never anxious, cruel, or punishing.
I am willing to walk toward, and then through, whatever may be seen in the moment as being greater than myself.
Don't believe what the spiritual sharks and clever carnival hustlers tell you about fearless living - they lie.
I stood staring, not as yet realising that this was death leaping from man to man in that little distant crowd.
The third peculiarity of aerial warfare was that it was at once enormously destructive and entirely indecisive.
Alone-- it is wonderful how little a man can do alone! To rob a little, to hurt a little, and there is the end.
In these days of widespread illiteracy, functional illiteracy... anything that keeps people stupid is a felony.
A person remains immature, whatever his age, as long as he thinks of himself as an exception to the human race.
When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.
Whoa!" he says with a smile. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes deepen. "Chicken salad a la George Orwell!
A label doesn't make something so. A label is just a word. It's what a person does that makes them who they are
Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it leads him.
Whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist. To make living itself an art, that is the goal.
I don't want to be a vampire' she told herself. But in her dreams, she kind of did.-Tana Bach-page 29-chapter 4
I am not very good at sticking to outlines, and I double back all the time to revisit scenes and change things.
The eye is the inlet to the soul, and it is well to beware of him whose visual organs avoid your honest regard.
All my life, I have made it complicated, but it is so simple. I love when I love. And when I love, I am myself.
When I get to where I can enjoy just lying on the rug picking up lint balls, I will no longer be too ambitious.
Do not, under any circumstances, put this book down and turn on the teevee. The teevee debilitates our culture.
Drawing is the poet's written line, set down to see if there be a story worth telling, a truth worth revealing.
How doth the little busy bee Improve each shining hour, And gather honey all the day From every opening flower!
My books are written from personal experience, from memories, and from stories that come to me from all places.
At my age days dissolve like salt in water; the day's gone and I don't even know what I've done with the hours.
The short story form allows evocation, suggestion, implication. Its potency often lies in what it does not say.
It was the last game of the year and you were supposed to commit suicide or something if old Pencey didn't win.