Quotes by Writers - Page 32

No one knows what he can do until he tries.
Publilius Syrus
...What does the blessing of heaven mean? We know the kirin is just an animal, not a mythical creature."It has become a symbol now.... That is the way human beings deal with the world.
Lian Hearn
Don't let the devil hear you, minister, The devil has such good hearing he doesn't need things to be spoken out loud, Well, god help us then, There's no point asking him for help either, he was born stone-deaf.
José Saramago
It’s the process of being minimized, invalidated, silenced. It’s the process of being subjected to whatever someone else thinks I owe them. It’s the process of being used, examined, explored, and thrown away. It’s the process of being convinced to comply with the orders of someone who does not see me as their equal, someone who sees nothing wrong with the notion that I’m somehow lesser than they are. Rape isn’t about sex; it’s about all those other things. It’s about power.
Agnostic Zetetic
The greatest mistake you can make is to be continually fearing you will make one.
Elbert Hubbard
A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain - a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space .... Therefore we must judge a weird tale not by the author's intent, or by the mere mechanics of the plot; but by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point... The one test of the really weird is simply this - whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim.
H.P. Lovecraft
The only way to know God, the only way to know the other, is to listen. Listening is reaching out into that unknown other self, surmounting your walls and theirs; listening is the beginning of understanding, the first exercise of
Tony Hendra
The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest.
Romain Rolland
...And suddenly, from behind me, I hear the metaphysically abrupt arrival of the office boy. I feel like I could kill him for barging in on what I wasn't thinking. I turn around and look at him with a silence full of hatred, tense with latent homicide, my mind already hearing the voice he'll use to tell me something or other. He smiles from the other side of the room and says 'Good afternoon' in a loud voice. I hate him like the universe. My eyes are sore from imagining.
Fernando Pessoa
Awakening is not a thing. It is not a goal, not a concept. It is not something to be attained. It is a metamorphosis. If the caterpillar thinks about the butterfly it is to become, saying ‘And then I shall have wings and antennae,’ there will never be a butterfly. The caterpillar must accept its own disappearance in its transformation. When the marvelous butterfly takes wing, nothing of the caterpillar remains.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
Aldous Huxley
The gods help those who help themselves.
Marcus Terentius Varro
Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.
Alan W. Watts
Humor is the whole truth.
Frigyes Karinthy
And yet we knew, for a certainty, that when first emissaries of Earth went walking among the planets, Earth's other sons would be dreaming not about such expeditions but about a piece of bread.
Stanisław Lem
The other good thing was that I had enough rank to strong-arm Marjit into confessing that she'd been the one who'd told everything to Pa about my first invisibility cap, which was how Pa knew to come steal it. Unfortunately, since my rank in the surface world hung off Pa's, I did NOT have enough rank to take him to task for stealing my cap. So I just put him to sleep during a fancy dinner, so that he went facedown into the sour soup. Just the once. It eased my ire terrifically.
Merrie Haskell
Instead of the calendrical terms Monday, Tuesday and so forth, we cheerfully offer the following surrogates. Use them freely and often, for their use honors us all. For Sunday, please use Sunshine. For Monday. pleasy use Monty. For Tuesday, please use Toes. For Wednesday, please use Wetty. For Thursday, please use Thurby. For Friday, please use Fribs. For Saturday, please use Satto-gatto.
Mark Dunn
Never argue with a fool, people might not notice the difference
Niq Mhlongo
Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerales.
Samuel Johnson
And if a diversion is needed, why not arrest a general? Arthur Dillon is a friend of eminent deputies, a contender for the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Front; he has proved himself at Valmy and in a halfdozen actions since. In the National Assembly he was a liberal; now he is a republican. Isn’t it then logical that he should be thrown into gaol, July 1, on suspicion of passing military secrets to the enemy?
Hilary Mantel
For myself I think that one wrong does not right the other, and forgiveness cannot be won with useless tears or alms to the Church.
José Rizal
Your external circumstances may change, toil may take the place of rest, sickness of health, trials may thicken within and without. Externally, you are the prey of such circumstances; but if your heart is stayed on God, no changes or chances can touch it, and all that may befall you will but draw you closer to Him. Whatever the present moment may bring, your knowledge that it is His will, and that your future heavenly life will be influenced by it, will make all not only tolerable, but welcome to you, while no vicissitudes can affect you greatly, knowing that He who holds you in His powerful hand cannot change, but abideth forever.
Jean Nicolas Grou
Freedom or prison--what's the difference? A man must develop unwavering will power subject only to his reason.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Serena has spent her life fighting fiction the way good soldiers fight—intent on detecting its presence, harassing it, suppressing it—but I have to find a way to show her she’s mistaken her enemy, to explain to her that whoever suppresses fiction destroys life, and that everything disappears with it, all love, all desire. If the past is an invention, it’s not such a big deal. After all, the future’s an invention, and no one finds that hard to accept.
Enrique de Hériz
You have dwelt overmuch upon pain. Pain is a swift distress; it ends and is forgotten. Without memory and fear pain is nothing, a contradiction to be heeded, a warning to be taken. Without pain what would life become? Pain is the master only of craven men. It is in man's power to rule it.
H.G.Wells
Boys have penises and girls have vaginas. If they touch at the wrong time, you can make a baby or die.
Eugene Mirman
With no power to annul the elemental evil in him, though readily enough he could hide it; apprehending the good, but powerless to be it; a nature like Claggart’s, surcharged with energy as such natures almost invariably are, what recourse is left to it but to recoil upon itself and, like the scorpion for which the Creator alone is responsible, act out to the end the part allotted it.
Herman Melville
Oh! Did you hear that Haley Spencer asked him to homecoming?” she exclaimed. “Of course I didn’t. You’re my source of gossip, remember?
Rebecca Donovan
...I always took the rearmost seat in the classroom - it gave me a good view of things. And I must confess, the location taught me more about human nature and justice than could be learned from the professors' lectures.
Rohinton Mistry
In traveling, there is nothing like dissecting people's statements, which are usually colored by their estimate of the powers or likings of the person spoken to, making all reasonable inquiries, and then pertinaciously but quietly carrying out one's own plans.
Isabella L. Bird
Imagine a factory staffed by Alphas—that is to say by separate and unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned so as to be capable (within limits) of making a free choice and assuming responsibilities. Imagine it!
Aldous Huxley
Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times.
Niccolò Machiavelli
What makes the desert beautiful,' said the little prince, 'is that somewhere it hides a well...
Antoine De Saint Exupery
What kind of songs do you like? she asked."The ones that remind me of you," I said.
Faraaz Kazi
If we live we live if we die we die if we suffer we suffer if we are terrified we are terrified. There is no problem about it.
Alan Watts
Why write about the past? Well, there's more of it.
John Cleese
If we resist our passions it is more from their weakness than from our strength.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Gaara: Can Sasuke come out to Die? Kakashi: Not Now.Gaara:.............Gaara: How 'bout now?
Masashi Kishimoto
I grew up in Germany. Europe is far more liberal than America. Even most conservative right-wing parties over there are to the left of the US Democrats on many issues. For example, it wouldn't occur to even the most right-wing party in Europe to oppose universal healthcare. But this isn't a book about politics. It's about sex and drugs. You know, the good stuff.
Oliver Markus Malloy
Memories help make us who we are.(Taken from novel...A Very English Affair)
Faith Mortimer
Creativity comes from applying things you learn in other fields to the field you work in.
Aaron Swartz
... science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy.
Aldous Huxley
The routines of almost all famous writers, from Charles Darwin to John Grisham, similarly emphasise specific starting times, or number of hours worked, or words written. Such rituals provide a structure to work in, whether or not the feeling of motivation or inspiration happens to be present. They let people work alongside negative or positive emotions, instead of getting distracted by the effort of cultivating only positive ones. ‘Inspiration is for amateurs,’ the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work.
Oliver Burkeman
Everything is permitted, Nothing is true.
Oliver Bowden
I stay away from natural foods. At my age I need all the preservatives I can get.
George Burns
Almost always we are bored by people to whom we ourselves are boring.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Sometimes in life confusion tends to arise and only dialogue of dance seems to make sense.
Shah Asad Rizvi
I make up as little as possible. I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of the people involved there, and I try to run up all the accounts side by side to see where the contradictions are and to look where things have gone missing. And it's really in the gap - it's in the erasures - that I think the novelist can best go to work because inevitably in history in any period, we know a lot about what happened, but we may be far hazier on why it happened. And there's always the question, why did it happen the way it did? Where was the turning point?
Hilary Mantel
In the religious myths, the creative will appears personified in God, and man already feels himself guilty when he assumes himself to be like God, that is, to ascribe this will to himself. In the heroic myths on the contrary, man appears as himself, creative and guilt for his suffering and fall is ascribed to God, that is, to his own will. Both are only extreme reaction phenomena of man wavering between his Godlikeness and his nothingness, whose will is awakened to the knowledge of its power and whose consciousness is aroused to terror before it.
Otto Rank
I want to towel off, leave my heart on this beach and walk the sand into a lake of stars, while never looking back.
A.P. Sweet
i witness the birth of the moon and her servants walking the night sky pulling us into their wake
A.P. Sweet
He was a breath of fresh air after the heart wrenching storm that had engulfed me.
Rebecca Donovan
My whole life I’ve been ordered about. Now I shall give the orders.” I’ve never seen Felicity so wounded. “Not me,” she says. “I never ordered you about.” “Oh, Fee.” The old Pippa surfaces for just a moment, hopeful and childlike. She pulls Felicity to her. Something I cannot name passes between them, and then Pip’s lips are on Fee’s in a deep kiss, as if they feed on one another, their fingers entwined in each other’s hair. And suddenly, I understand what I must have always known about them—the private talks, the close embraces, the tenderness of their friendship. A blush spreads across my neck at the thought. How could I not have seen it before?
Libba Bray
Myth is what we call other people's religion.
Joseph Campbell
The high domed ceiling put me in mind of a skull, a brain, a mind. What did that make us, the readers?
Lia Mills
I do not believe that I should only write about what I know but that I should write also of the other.
Felisberto Hernández
The other night I was lying in bed, looking up at the stars, and I wondered, 'Where the hell is my roof?
Steven Wright
It might, too, have been the singular cold that alienated me; for such chilliness was abnormal on so hot a day, and the abnormal always excites aversion, distrust, and fear.
H.P. Lovecraft
maybe if people weren't so careless, then nothing would need to be caged.
A.S. King
But if one doesn't really exist, one wonders why..." she hesitated."Why one makes such a fuss about things," Anthony suggested. "All that howling and hurrahing and gnashing of teeth. About the adventures of a self that isn't really a self—just the result of a lot of accidents. And of course," he went on, "once you start wondering, you see at once that there is no reason for making such a fuss. And then you don't make a fuss—that is, if you're sensible. Like me," he added, smiling.
Aldous Huxley