Quotes by Writers - Page 100

Greatness consists not in the holding of some future office, but really consists in doing great deeds with little means and the accomplishment of vast purposes from the private rants of life. To be great at all one must be great here, now, in Philadelphia.
Russell H. Conwell
Check the top 1000 books on Amazon. Most of them have a shirtless guy on the cover, because they're smutty "romance novels" (read: porn for women) about a girl being swept off her feet by one (or more) billionaire alpha-males. There are literally tens of thousands of books out there about shirtless billionaire alpha-male vampires who can't wait to mate with you. Lucky you! And women eat that shit up! Men, not so much. Men prefer to watch actual porn.
Oliver Markus
I honestly wish I could believe that things will end perfectly with one big bright happy ending. But these last few days have taught me that life isn't made up of shiny moments. Life is hard; it's gritty. One day you are filled with joy and the next, you are crawling through the muddy trenches with no inkling of when you might be able to climb your way back up again. ~Willow Mosby (Exposing ELE)
Rebecca Gober
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
John Adams
It is unthinkable in the twentieth century to fail to distinguish between what constitutes an abominable atrocity that must be prosecuted and what constitutes that "past" which "ought not to be stirred up.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.
Orson Welles
When we arrived at my home north of the city, my five-year-old son Magnus, brimming with the confidence he'd gained in two full weeks of kindergarten, opened the front door and asked John, "Is it true you live in a tent?""Yes, it is," John said."Why don't you have a house like everybody else?"John leaned in to meet Magnus' dubious stare. "Because I endeavor to remain flexible.
Mark Adams
One sin occurs, naturally; conversely, one happens unnaturally, having human permission, which poisons, and damages the moral values of the entire humanity, since it is the worst one.
Ehsan Sehgal
Theology: (15) Somebody made everything for some reason.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
…nostalgia is, by definition, the least authentic of all feelings.
Enrique de Hériz
The fundamental human experience is that of compassion.
Joseph Campbell
I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.
Emily Carr
Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept. Interest in space is diminished and interest in time falls almost to zero.
Aldous Huxley
Robot BoyMr. an Mrs. Smith had a wonderful life.They were a normal, happy husband and wife.One day they got news that made Mr. Smith glad.Mrs. Smith would would be a momwhich would make him the dad!But something was wrong with their bundle of joy.It wasn't human at all,it was a robot boy!He wasn't warm and cuddlyand he didn't have skin.Instead there was a cold, thin layer of tin.There were wires and tubes sticking out of his head.He just lay there and stared,not living or dead.The only time he seemed alive at allwas with a long extension cordplugged into the wall.Mr. Smith yelled at the doctor,"What have you done to my boy?He's not flesh and blood,he's aluminum alloy!"The doctor said gently,"What I'm going to saywill sound pretty wild.But you're not the father of this strange looking child.You see, there still is some questionabout the child's gender,but we think that its fatheris a microwave blender."The Smith's lives were now filledwith misery and strife.Mrs. Smith hated her husband,and he hated his wife.He never forgave her unholy alliance:a sexual encounterwith a kitchen appliance.And Robot Boygrew to be a young man.Though he was often mistakenfor a garbage can.
Tim Burton
Doubt breeds doubt.
Franz Grillparzer
Grief was a terrible and beautiful thing.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Maybe I write because I’ve learned to show certain parts of my heart on the page that I still struggle to capture in speech.
Common
Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.
Frederick Douglass
The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves but in our attitude towards them.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
All wisdom contracts then expands, contracts then expands. That is how consciousness evolves.
S. Kelley Harrell
A soul needs a purpose to live and so I concluded that my purpose was to kill everyone besides myself. I felt alive.--Gaara
Masashi Kishimoto
My soul is a pale, tenuous membrane..."That was pleasing: a thin, tenuous membrane. It had the right anatomical quality. Tight blown, quivering in the blast of noisy life. It was time for him to descend from the serene empyrean of words into the actual vortex. He went down slowly. "My soul is a thin, tenuous membrane...
Aldous Huxley
...the great floodgates of the wonder-world swung open...
Herman Melville
If liberty sang a song, little,as the larynx of a bird,nowhere would there remain a tumbling wall.
Ahmad Shamlou
If anyone accuses me of contradicting myself I reply: Because I have been wrong once or oftener I do not aspire to be always wrong.
Vauvenargues
Men like fun much more than they like clever
Mhairi McFarlane
To love deeply in one direction makes us more loving in all others.
Anne-Sophie Swetchine
...it was one of the best meals we ever ate.Perhaps that is because it was the first conscious one, for me at least; but the fact that we remember it with such queer clarity must mean that it had other reasons for being important. I suppose that happens at least once to every human. I hope so.Now the hills are cut through with superhighways, and I can't say whether we sat that night in Mint Canyon or Bouquet, and the three of us are in some ways even more than twenty-five years older than we were then. And still the warm round peach pie and the cool yellow cream we ate together that August night live in our hearts' palates, succulent, secret, delicious.
M.F.K. Fisher
To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.
Alan W. Watts
Sometimes a mind is just born late, coming through waves on a slower journey. You were never, in the end, alone. Isn’t it a blessing, what becomes from inside the alone.
Lidia Yuknavitch
What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow. Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives…. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I want to be the victim of his errors.
Marquis de Sade
I never tell my boyfriend that I'm busy when I'm not. No matter how effective they are, cheap techniques like that just don't agree with me. So it's always okay, it's always all right. In my opinion the surest way to hook a man is to be as open with him as possible.
Banana Yoshimoto
Pero me sobran motivos para ser feliz. Sobre todo cuando estoy en los brazos de mis tres misses. Son tres gentiles damas a las que se llega cuando las cosas adquieren una claridad inusitada: Miss Antropía, Miss Oginia y Miss Eria; pero no las comparto, como hago con el resto de mis mujeres.
Eusebio Ruvalcaba
…God is a giant quiltmaker. With an infinite variety of designs. And the quilt is grown so big and confusing, the pattern is impossible to see, the squares and diamonds and triangles don’t fit well together anymore, it’s all become meaningless. So He has abandoned it.
Rohinton Mistry
The story of Andrew Ewing is partly one of rags to riches – but there is more to it than that, since his business success was combined with a generosity of spirit that led him to give away a fortune in pursuit of his ultimate ambition to die a poor man.
Bill Scott
what you respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against his or her limitations
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its content. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into peace and safety of a new dark age.
H.P. Lovecraft
The resulting texts always took a narrative term, enigmatic at first but ultimately explicit and often premonitory. The semantic distribution of these basic elements diverted them from their original meaning, thus revealing their real significance. Henceforth, every form of writing will consist of an operation of decoding, of contamination, and of sense perversion. All this because all language is essentially mystification, and everything is fiction.
Brion Gysin
Friends are a second existence.
Baltasar Gracián
In every laugh, he hears her, in every tear, he sees her. Not a mere reflection, the complete 'her'.
Faraaz Kazi
Wisdom is only found in trudi.
Goethe
Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out what he has to do; and to restrain himself within the limits of his comprehension.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
He was still experimenting with kissing girls even though he said he'd rather be kissing boys. That's exactly what he said. I didn't know exactly what to think about that, but Dante was going to be Dante and it I was going to be his friend, I would just have to learn to be okay with it.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
You focus on a singer star,” I explained, as I searched for my spot. “Then you spin around, staring at that one star, until you can’t stand anymore.” I started spinning to demonstrate. “Then you lie down to watch the stars spinning above you while your star remains still.
Rebecca Donovan
I had a sneaking suspicion that time was not constant, but I guess I could never prove it. I suppose it didn’t really matter. I even had a theory that time didn’t go in straight line at all. I knew I was no Albert Einstein, but I had the sneaking suspicion that everything had happened, was happening, or would happen was really happening all the time. There was no past, present, and future. Everything was going on all at once and forever. If that was true, then each moment was eternity.
Mark A. Roeder
In a culture that is becoming ever more story-stupid, in which a representative of the Coca-Cola company can, with a straight face, pronounce, as he donates a collection of archival Coca-Cola commercials to the Library of Congress, that 'Coca-Cola has become an integral part of people's lives by helping to tell these stories,' it is perhaps not surprising that people have trouble teaching and receiving a novel as complex and flawed as Huck Finn, but it is even more urgent that we learn to look passionately and technically at stories, if only to protect ourselves from the false and manipulative ones being circulated among us.
George Saunders
Monsters were real. They wore human flesh and looked out from behind the eyes of seemingly benign people. You passed them on the street every day, never knowing they'd marked you as prey until it was too late.
Liana LeFey
The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight...[Breadmaking is] one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with one of the world's sweetest smells... there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour ofmeditation in a music-throbbing chapel. that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.
M.F.K. Fisher
To be able to dispense with good things is tantamount to possessing them.
Jean Francois Regnard
We often feel that we lack something, and seem to see that very quality in someone else, promptly attributing all our own qualities to him too, and a kind of ideal contentment as well. And so the happy mortal is a model of complete perfection--which we have ourselves created.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Whether you’ve never meditated before or you’ve been doing it religiously for years, it is always good to evaluate (or re-evaluate) your practice. Although I’ve been meditating and teaching it for years, I still enjoy reading new information about it, learning new techniques, and checking out new meditation recordings. There is always something to learn because there are as many ways to meditate as there are people who are doing it.
Liberty Forrest
Reading and writing are not education if they do not help people to be kind to all creatures
John Ruskin
Tell me, what kind of functions does pain have when one is convicted to 100 whippings in Saudie Arabia? You claim pain has a function, I claim that's scientific rubbish. The only thing pain really does is cause an instant reaction that is not rational and usually quite erratic. The famous example of the hand in boiling water, for example. You say it proves pain has a function. But exactly because of the spasmic reaction lots and lots of people will drop the bowl with boiling water over their entire bodies causing serious burns. So what was the 'function' of this pain? Pain and fear cause confusion and trauma. If pain actually did have a rational function, chronic pain would not exist.
Martijn Benders
Tell me, Nana,If for example we had been a love couple,Would a hug have been enough to wash away my sadness?Or then; does every single being carry this loneliness, like a burden?I wans't intending to monopolizing youI just wanted you to need me.
Ai Yazawa
Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I've discovered a new video game called owning my home.
Dan Harmon
Not that this deterred him and his friend Klapaucius from further experimentation, which showed that the extent of a dragon's existence depends mainly on its whim, though also on its degree of satiety, and that the only sure method of negating it is to reduce the probability to zero or lower. All this research, naturally enough, took a great deal of time and energy; meanwhile the dragons that had gotten loose were running rampant, laying waste to a variety of planets and moons. What was worse, they multiplied. Which enabled Klapaucius to publish an excellent article entitled "Covariant Transformation from Dragons to Dragonets, in the Special Case of Passage from States Forbidden by the Laws of Physics to Those Forbidden by the Local Authorities.
Stanisław Lem
I die, as I have lived, a free spirit, an Anarchist, owing no allegiance to rulers, heavenly or earthly.
Voltairine de Cleyre
Sergeant Boyle was an Earthling. He was the only Earthling on the expedition. In fact, he was the only creature from the Milky Way. The other members were from all over the place. The expedition was a joint effort supported by about two hundred galaxies. Boyle wasn't a technician. He was an English teacher. The thing was that Earth was the only place in the whole known Universe where language was used. It was a unique Earthling invention. Everybody else used mental telepathy, so Earthlings could get pretty good jobs as language teachers just about anywhere they went. The reason creatures wanted to use language instead of mental telepathy was that they found out they could get so much more done with language. Language made them so much more active. Mental telepathy, with everybody constantly telling everybody everything, produced a sort of generalized indifference to all information. But language, with its slow, narrow meanings, made it possible to think about one thing at a time -- to start thinking in terms of projects.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.