Quotes by Writers - Page 149

He had in his Bronx apartment a lodger less learned than himself, and much fiercer in piety. One day when we were studying the laws of repentance together, the lodger burst from his room. "What!" he said. "The atheists guzzles his whiskey and eats pork and wallows with women all his life long, and then repents the day before he dies and stands guiltless? While I spend a lifetime trying to please God?" My grandfather pointed to the book. "So it is written," he said gently.—"Written!" the lodger roared. "There are books and there are books." And he slammed back into his room.The lodger's outrage seemed highly logical. My grandfather pointed out afterward that cancelling the past does not turn it into a record of achievement. It leaves it blank, a waste of spilled years. A man had better return, he said, while time remains to write a life worth scanning. And since no man knows his death day, the time to get a grip on his life is the first hour when the impulse strikes him.
Herman Wouk
It is beautiful to express love and even more beautiful to feel it.
Dejan Stojanovic
I drop to the curb like childhood leaving a body.
Lidia Yuknavitch
What did I do to make Mommy leave?”“You didn’t do anything. This isn’t your fault.”“Then why?” she’d wailed.“I don’t know,” her daddy had said, and he looked so sad.“It isn’t fair!”“No, it isn’t, baby. Not by a mile. The world’s only as fair as you can make it. Takes a lot of fight. A lot of fight. But if you stay in here, in your own little cave, that’s one less fighter on the side of fair.
Libba Bray
Fighting makes us feel alive, until it kills us. If it doesn’t kill us, the pain of sitting alone with ourselves, quietly, under constant assault by our own thoughts and memories of war can easily be enough to make us wish we’d died in battle instead.
Agnostic Zetetic
The peaceful splendour of the night healed again. The moon was now past the meridian and travelling down the west. It was at its full, and very bright, riding through the empty blue sky.
H.G.Wells
The body is more than the temple of the soul. It’s the grounded celebration of its rapture.
S. Kelley Harrell
Oh! how near are genius and madness! Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them.
Denis Diderot
But we all had an agreement to let each other get away with everything! That's Capitalism!
Matt Groening
What a relief, Nadya thought; in that light he would not be able to tell that she had been crying."You mean if it weren't for the blackout you wouldn't have come?" Dasha took up Shchagov's tone, flirting unconsciously, as she did with every unmarried man she met."By no means, never. In bright light women's faces are deprived of all their charm; it reveals their spiteful expressions, their envious glances, their premature wrinkles, their heavy cosmetics."Nadya shuddered at the words "envious glances"—it was as if he had overheard their argument.Shchagov went on:" If I were a woman, I would make it a law that lights be kept low. Then everyone would soon have a husband."Dasha looked disapprovingly at Shchagov. He always talked that way, and she didn't like it. All his phrases seemed memorized, insincere.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Numbers are important to the life, you better stay good at arithmetics.
Ahtizaz Wani
After all, one travels in order for things to happen and change; otherwise you might as well stay at home.
Nicolas Bouvier
It is not enough to succeed a friend must fail.
La Rochefoucauld
Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance.
Samuel Johnson
The last time I saw you, you were wearing a white cotton shirt. You were standing upright with your wife on the lawn, in the sunlight, in front of the chateau, at my brother’s wedding. You shared in the enthusiasm of the ceremony. For my part, I felt distanced from it. I didn’t recognize my family in this mundane get-together. You didn’t seem put off by the bourgeois ceremony, or by my brother’s choice to have his love approved by third parties, even when these were distant third parties. You didn’t have the sad and absent look you normally took on at public gatherings. You smiled, watching the people, a little tipsy from the wine and the sun, chatting on the large lawn between the white stone façade and the two-hundred-year-old cedar tree. I often wondered, after your death, if that smile, the last one I saw from you, was mocking, or if instead it was the kindly smile of someone who knew that soon he would no longer partake in earthly pleasures. You didn’t regret leaving these behind, but neither were you averse to enjoying them a little longer.
Édouard Levé
Humanity, let us say, is like people packed in an automobile which is traveling downhill without lights at terrific speed and driven by a four-year-old child. The signposts along the way are all marked 'Progress.
Lord Dunsany
If you desire it, you must punish yourself for the sake of learning, seek every advantage in keeping up with the other clerks and in excelling them. You must study with the fervor of the blessed or the cursed.
Noah Gordon
Pedantry crams our heads with learned lumber and takes out brains to make room for it.
Charles Caleb Colton
This self-reliance, this direct dealing with the world, seemed to him, even in the height of his concern, unwomanly, a deeper injury to his own abandoned assumptions than any he had contemplated.
H.G.Wells
I’ve seen a lot of stuff… maybe I’ve seen too much. I see most humans in a bad light because I’ve seen what they can do, how evil they can be… I’ve seen the Holocaust and I’ve seen Jonestown, I’ve seen the Vietnam War and I’ve seen Hiroshima… I’ve seen the Chernobyl disaster… I’ve seen the World Trade Center attack… I’ve been alive too long, over a hundred years is a long time to be alive,” Alecto sighed, staring at the cigarette he was holding.
Rebecca McNutt
There are things, also, that are memories as essential and structural as bones in toes and fingers.
A.S. Byatt
We all know what we have to do what the inkling provokes us. We have to do the right thing. We have to make that extra push out of bed, or off the sofa. We must just do it.
Mark Andrew Poe
The ocean was a molten gold. A drum roll sent the crowd into a frenzied cheering which reached a fevered pitch when the ocean swallowed the sun in a kinetic bolt of color representing the entire spectrum of light. Matt studied Shelly as she watched awed. The child-like delight on her face was captivating.
Meryl Sawyer
Thy silence, then that voices thee.
Herman Melville
Mandy smiled cheerfully at an overweight kid in a gold sweater and pink skirt who was chasing her little brother around along the boardwalk. When she was that age, on sunny days she’d be out on the boardwalk with Jud and Wendy, buying rainbow sorbet from the ice cream shop and placing paper boats into the harbour. She felt like a ghost, drifting past the shell of her own childhood.
Rebecca McNutt
Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment and because books were scarce and difficult to reproduce...As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.
Aldous Huxley
The trouble with specialists is that they tend to think in grooves.
Elaine Morgan
It is said that no man is a hero to his valet. That is because a hero can be recognized only by a hero.
Goethe
The living together for three long rainy days in the country has done more to dispel love than all the perfidies in love that have ever been committed.
Arthur Helps
The excellence of the soul is understanding; for the man who understands is conscious, devoted, and already godlike.
Hermes Trismegistus
I kiss her. I kiss her and kiss her. I try not to bite her lip. She tastes like vodkahoney.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Comb his Facebook page. See if he has a Twitter account. Follow up on every Google lead. I want to know what makes him tick, what makes him the man he is.
Faith Sullivan
A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
And the pine trees that smell so wonderfully of spicy power. Shall I never see a mountain pine again? Really that would be no misfortune. To forgo something: that also has its fragrance and its power.
Robert Walser
Where did the stereotypical image of the reclusive author in a bathrobe and slippers, indulging in vices and spending hours before a typewriter, even come from? I don't know about you, but most writers don't have the luxury of doing any of this. Otherwise we'd have no life experience and nothing to write about, anyway.
Rebecca McNutt
In the next instance Graham claimed her lips in a demanding, yet gentle kiss
Lia Davis
Children are very nice observers, and they will often perceive our slightest defects. It general those who govern children forgive nothing in them, but everything in themselves.
François Fénelon
...Cast yourself upon, abandon yourself to this Christ who lived that life of utter surrender to God that He might prepare a new nature which He could impart to you and in which He might make you like Himself.
Andrew Murray
In another place was a vast array of idols—Polynesian, Mexican, Grecian, Phoenician, every country on earth I should think. And here, yielding to an irresistible impulse, I wrote my name upon the nose of a steatite monster from South America that particularly took my fancy.
H.G.Wells
Wow, I miss Latin. So much fun - all those exciting verbs that don't come unit the end of the sentence. It's like a movie trailer for language.
Libba Bray
There is certainly no greater happiness than to be able to look back on a life usefully and virtuously employed to trace our own progress in existence by such tokens as excite neither shame nor sorrow.
Samuel Johnson
I have no doubt that they'll tell you a lot of kind things about me when my back is turned. They may not have been behind the door when God passed out the pretty faces, but Heaven only knows where they were when He divided up the gratitude.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Travel is like adultery; one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one's own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live...in our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.
Anatole Broyard
The note is the same, I fancy, be the octave high or low.
Rebecca Harding Davis
At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
Herman Melville
Something went greatly wrong in our collective history and the starting point of it was the industrial revolution. Our school systems are focussed on a single objective: to produce model citizens for society in order to feed this machine and prevent its breakdown. That’s why our school systems have no interest in developing models that actually require and stimulate useful values in people, such as courage or imagination or inventiveness. None of these are taught in our schools, on the contrary the system focuses on memorizing. Memorizing is a way of overloading the mind with mental baggage it doesn’t really need. Besides being horribly dull and stiffening the effect of 20 years of abundant memorization training is modern man: an unimaginative creature stuffed with useless knowledge and unable to clean his mind of this information dirt: our school systems are purposely constructed to deliver mental automatons that are unable to think creatively.
Martijn Benders
Don't mark up the Library's copy, you fool! Librarians are Unprankable. They'll track you down! They have skills!
Charles Ogden
Who are you?" I asked."You know who I am," he replied. "I'm yours."~Clea / Sage, pg. 105
Hilary Duff
Ambition is enthusiasm with a purpose.
Frank Tyger
Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.
José Saramago
Life is made up of sobs sniffles and smiles with sniffles predominating.
o.henry
The longer we dwell on our misfortunes the greater is their power to harm us.
Voltaire
As he turns around and her eyes meet his, she lets go off the breath that she had been holding back. All the words she had practised to say when the moment arrived, dissolve at the tip of her tongue. All the things she wanted him to know escape her in the thick blanket of nostalgia that wraps itself around her.
Faraaz Kazi
To do for yourself the best that you have it in you to do—to grit your teeth and clench your fists in order to survive the world at its harshest and worst—is, by that very act, to be unable to let something be done for you and in you that is more wonderful still. The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed
Frederick Buechner
There had been no enemies, just one single adversary, herself; her future had been killed by her own imprudence, by the reckless Salina pride; and now, just at the moment when her memories had come alive again after so many years, she found herself even without the solace of being able to blame her own unhappiness on others, a solace which is the last protective device of the desperate.
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
It seems that life, in order to maintain itself, must revolt every so often against man's ceaseless attempts to master its irrational forces with his mind.
Otto Rank
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
Alan W. Watts
When my turn on the program comes, I am not nervous at all—because all this is happening out of time, out of space. I am, for a moment, a figure of my own fantasy, and I play my appointed role as if I were in the movies.
Eva Hoffman
Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?
Stanisław Lem
Are we looking for the absolute truth or the absolute feeling? Or the answer that best suits our personal needs?
Noah Cicero