Quotes by Writers - Page 107

What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child.
Fernando Pessoa
How is it possible for one to own the stars?""To whom do they belong?" the businessman retorted, peevishly."I don't know. To nobody.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Everything that ever happened is just stories now, Earl. But it was all very real to people while it was happening. Wasn't it?
Terry Moore
On nights like this when the air is so clear, you end up saying things you ordinarily wouldn’t. Without even noticing what you’re doing, you open up your heart and just start talking to the person next to you—you talk as if you have no audience but the glittering stars, far overhead.
Banana Yoshimoto
Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.
Joseph Campbell
Change, I've come to understand, rises up like nausea: the promise of relief is what makes it bearable.
Durga Chew-Bose
You can't appreciate home until you've left it money till it's spent your wife till she's joined a woman's club nor Old Glory till you see it hanging on a broomstick on the shanty of a consul in a foreign town.
o.henry
Beauty belongs to the sphere of the simple, the ordinary, whilst ugliness is something extraordinary, and there is no question but that every ardent imagination prefers in lubricity, the extraordinary to the commonplace
Marquis de Sade
I aim to make the fiction flexible so that it bends itself around the facts as we have them. Otherwise I don’t see the point. Nobody seems to understand that. Nobody seems to share my approach to historical fiction. I suppose if I have a maxim, it is that there isn’t any necessary conflict between good history and good drama.
Hilary Mantel
Adversity leads us to think properly of our state and so is most beneficial to us.
Samuel Johnson
In some ways, I am able to feel more like a part of my family while I am missing them. It's normal to feel lonely when you are away from your loved ones, but it's queer to feel lonely while surrounded by family.
Rebecca Behrens
Cautious silence is the refuge of good sense
Baltasar Gracián
Flowers are so inconsistent!
Antoine De Saint Exupery
As per the law of karma, that which is your meat today, this dear beloved animal will make mincemeat of you tomorrow. In another birth.
Fakeer Ishavardas
Then you must reconcile yourself to the fact that something is always hurt by any change. If you do this, you will not be hurt yourself.
Roger Zelazny
Life is an unfinished art, few master it, most just bark.
Fakeer Ishavardas
It seems to me that few people walk their ways with deliberation, stopping every so often to delight in the seasons and in the simple, important, enduring things. Most of those I know are either rushing about blindly, almost headlong, or inching along, looking down. Both methods of progression are, in a spiritual sense, not progression at all, but symptoms of fear.No matter what has happened or what you fear will happen, you have to walk as though you were going somewhere—not in a hurry, not at a crawl, and certainly not running away from something toward you know not what.It cannot be said too often, or by too many people, that the path we follow must be taken a step at a time—never on the run, and never standing still, neither going backward nor marking time. Everyone hazards a guess at the future—his own, the future of those he loves, the future of the country and the world. Statisticians often come up with some amazing suggestions; so do computers; but no one really knows. Only He know, Who created this world in all its beauty, and our small selves, with it. And it's just as well that we don't know.
Faith Baldwin
That’s the attractive thing about war,” said Rosewater. “Absolutely everybody gets a little something.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Hey Alecto, film this!” she called out. With the slide being as tall as a two-storey house, it felt slightly risky being up there. “On second thought, why don’t you come up here? It’s a blast being up here.”“I don’t really like to be in high places,” said Alecto as he filmed her, the camera lens reflecting the entire playground, which was partially secluded by tall trees that cast otherworldly shadows dancing across the ground.“If you don’t like being in high places, then why’d you take so many drugs in the seventies?” Mandy questioned jokingly. “Do you want me to go up there and push you off the top of that slide?” Alecto threatened coldly.“You’d never do that, we’re best friends!” Mandy pointed out. She reached over and picked a bright red maple flower from one of the long branches of the trees, tossing it down to him. “Even in this failing 21st century, where people are cell phone addicts and crude humor and violence is the norm, even when society falls apart and drowns in its own mistakes, we’ll still be best friends!” She looked incredibly eccentric, never mind the fact that she was an adult woman wearing a trippy rainbow Pucci dress from the 1970’s, standing on top of a slide at a children’s playground. Alecto didn’t seem to mind, he just continued to film her with his camera like she’d asked him to.
Rebecca McNutt
What, then, is the government? An intermediary body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual communication, a body charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of freedom, both civil and political.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about
Rex Stout
We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of self.
Cyril Connolly
Anybody who hates dogs and babies can't be all bad.
Leo Rosten
Nothing ever really ends. That’s the horrible part of being in the short-story business—you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. ‘Millicent at last understands.’ Nobody ever understands.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
When women turn on women, and take cheap shots at their decisions purely to score political points it serves as proof that feminism, as a movement, is dead and no longer relevant or credible.
S.E. Cupp
Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
Lin Yutang
They say being in love and loving someone are two different things, right? I mean, you love your best friend, but you love your husband, right? Falling in love with someone is easy. It's loving when the newness has worn off, when life gets tough, when things get in the way, when physical passion is gone, that true love remains. When love can conquer it all.
Mia Asher
All history is one continuous pestilence. There is no truth and there is no illusion. There is nowhere to appeal and nowhere to go.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.
John Adams
The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.
Joseph Wood Krutch
When you have a goal, there will also be a result.
Mohiro Kitoh
Are all societies doomed to amnesia—or are there communities that have preserved their collective cultural memory?The world, which is the private property of a few, suffers from amnesia. It is not an innocent amnesia. The owners prefer not to remember that the world was born yearning to be a home for everyone.
Galeano Eduardo
About three things I was absolutely certain. First, Edwart was most likely my soul mate, maybe. Second, there was a vampire part of him -- which I assumed was wildly out of his control -- that wanted me dead. And third, I unconditionally, irrevocably, impenetrably, heterogeneously, gynecologically, and disreputably wished he has kissed me.
The Harvard Lampoon
There are very few men and women, I suspect, who cooked and marketed their way through the past war without losing forever some of the nonchalant extravagance of the Twenties. They will feel, until their final days on earth, a kind of culinary caution: butter, no matter how unlimited, is a precious substance not lightly to be wasted; meats, too, and eggs, and all the far-brought spices of the world, take on a new significance, having once been so rare. And that is good, for there can be no more shameful carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts.
M.F.K. Fisher
Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
One day My father taught me a ‎lesson "never compete with someone who sold the world for his ‎dream"... I have learned the lesson and decided to be this one so, no one can compete with me.
Ahmed El Sokkary
Although really society should not change, it should mutate. And, little by little, it is mutating...... Society is like the body of a chicken: the chicken's foot is hard and insensitive while the eye is very alive. And there are beings who embody the cells of the eyes and others who embody the cells of the feet, of the wings, or of the anus.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
The other thing you can do is write a strong personal essay which lets admissions people inside your life, your heart, and your world....Anyway, it can be hard to figure out what to write about, so here are a few suggestions:...5. Reasons it's wrong to be racist even though it makes sense to you.
Eugene Mirman
It was not often that Flay approved of happiness in others.
Mervyn Peake
The Great Magician is very clear when he says there will always be trouble in the world. As for any human today, in my book, that is a call to action. That’s a call to our own inner hero. That hero is inside all of us whether we be fat, skinny, tall, short, black, white, olive, or yellow. We all have the capacity to be heroes in this life.
Mark Andrew Poe
Think deeply about things. Don’t just go along because that’s the way things are or that’s what your friends say. Consider the effects, consider the alternatives, but most importantly, just think.
Aaron Swartz
I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.
Frederick Douglass
Don't be afraid of the dark.
Mark Andrew Poe
When Small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.
Lin Yutang
You know, there's a million fine looking women in the world, dude. But they don't all bring you lasagna at work. Most of 'em just cheat on you. (As Silent Bob)
Kevin Smith
I was only going to stay six months. I stayed three years, and I never stopped thinking about leaving. But when I left, I left my entire life behind. I have to explain to you why I no longer live in New York, but first I have to explain to myself why I stayed so long.
Eula Biss
The cafeteria in the Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital basement was the saddest place in the world—and forever it shall be—with its grim neon lights and gray tabletops and the diffuse foreboding of those who stepped away from suffering children to have a grilled cheese sandwich.
Aleksandar Hemon
For my part, I should prefer death to hopeless bondage.
Frederick Douglass
After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Aldous Huxley
A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.
Carl Reiner
When an idea is too weak to support a simple statement it is a sign that it should be rejected.
Vauvenargues
Aika often says that she is the only one capable of loving me the same way I am is the one capable of loving her, and no one will be able to stand my twisted personality other than her and for me to betray her is unthinkable and impossible
Cullen Thomas
The difference between having a job and having a vocation is that a job is some unpleasant work you do in order to make money, with the sole purpose of making money. There are plenty of jobs because there is still a certain amount of dirty work that nobody wants to do, and that therefore they will pay someone to do it. There is essentially less and less of that kind of work because of mechanisation. If you do a job with the sole purpose of making money, you are absurd, because if money becomes the goal–and it does if you work that way–you begin increasingly to confuse it with happiness or with pleasure. Yes, one can take a handful of crisp one dollar bills and practically water your mouth over it, but this is a kind of person who is confused like a Pavlov dog, who salivates on the wrong bell.
Alan W. Watts
He laid there realizing how thoroughly he'd removed himself from the world or obligations, how stupidly independent he'd become: he needed no one, knew no one, was not a part of anyone's life. He'd so thoroughly removed himself from the world of dependencies and obligations, he wasn't sure he still existed.
A.M. Homes
Beyond the queues, the vacancy screens listed jobs in a multitude of languages. Invariably, they were low-paid and short-term dead-ends. Nearby, people in headphones sat at a bank of machines: the blind and the illiterate force-fed with ‘opportunities’ by soothing machine voices. On the far wall, in large print, a poster declared: BEGGARS CANNOT BE CHOOSERS.
Mark Cantrell
[M]an has as much liberty as he is willing to take.
Emma Goldman
Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history or science, it is killed.
Joseph Campbell
What causes us to like new acquaintances is not so much weariness of our old ones or the pleasure of change as disgust at not being sufficiently admired by those who know us too well and the hope of being admired more by those who do not know so much about us.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Your first love is like your first language. No matter how many other languages you learn to speak, you can never be as good as in your first.
Ahmed Alibage
Of all our faults the one that we excuse most easily is idleness.
La Rochefoucauld