Quotes by Writers - Page 51

It's kind of like... It's kind of like playin' a basketball game. I am there and the other player is there, and it's just the two of us and I put the other player's body in my van. And I am the winner.
Chris Onstad
All that can best be expressed in words should be expressed in verse, but verse is a slow thing to create; nay, it is not really created: it is a secretion of the mind, it is a pearl that gathers round some irritant and slowly expresses the very essence of beauty and of desire that has lain long, potential and unexpressed, in the mind of the man who secretes it. God knows that this Unknown Country has been hit off in verse a hundred times...Milton does it so well in the Fourth Book of Paradise Lost that I defy any man of a sane understanding to read the whole of that book before going to bed and not to wake up next morning as though he had been on a journey.
Hilaire Belloc
A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.
Aldous Huxley
Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories.
Lord Dunsany
Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.
Hilary Mantel
Did you slip in some cheese? Did it make you hate cheese, which you had previously loved? Why not sue a cheese-maker? Sue him for all the cheese he's got, drive him out of the cheese-making business!Did you burn your face with an iron? Why not sue Prometheus, the god that invented fire? Or an Iron Age chieftain, for having the temerity to popularise the metal.
Stewart Lee
Ability is sexless.
Christabel Pankhurst
[T]here is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
Herman Melville
It seems improbable, unless one knows how obstinately, purposefully and unerringly any stricken animal will find its way to the same place where in the past it has endured suffering and recovered.
Georgi Vladimov
He did not waste time in a vain search for a place in history.
Dejan Stojanovic
He hadn’t altogether gotten it himself until this moment of seeing straight through to the soul of her.
Rebecca Goldstein
Money isn't everything. It's the only thing.
Rebecca McNutt
If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself – not as a stranger in the world, not as something here unprobational, not as something that has arrived here by fluke - but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental.
Alan W. Watts
There is no failure except in no longer trying.
Elbert Hubbard
It is important never to separate love and knowledge, compassion and wisdom. A wisdom without compassion is closed upon itself and does not bear fruit. A compassion without wisdom is a madness and a cause of suffering.
Jean-Yves Leloup
If you are feeling stressed out, stop and take 10 deep breaths...it really does help! Then focus your mind on one thing and one thing only; things are only overwhelming when you look at them all at once.
B. Dave Walters
Never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game.
Hilary Duff
It's failure that gives you the proper perspective on success.
Ellen DeGeneres
The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin. I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember anything. It was the first of a long series of outrages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass.
Frederick Douglass
Well, I must endure the presence of two or three caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies. It seems that they are very beautiful.And if not the butterflies– and the caterpillars– who will call upon me? You will be far away. . . as for the large animals– I am not at all afraid of any of them. I have my claws.”And, navely, she showed her four thorns. Then she added:“Don’t linger like this. You have decided to go away. Now go!”For she did not want him to see her crying. She was such a proud flower. . .
Antoine De Saint Exupery
He crept up, and touched the face of the boy. "Didst thou dream that I should be faithless and forsake thee? I— a dog?" said that mute caress.
Ouida
Vocation” comes from the Latin vocare (to call) and means the work a man is called to by God.There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of society, say, or the superego, or self-interest.The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need to do and (b) that the world needs to have done. If you find your work rewarding, you have presumably met requirement (a), but if your work does not benefit others, the chances are you have missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work does benefit others, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you are unhappy with it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren’t helping your customers much either.Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s hunger meet.
Frederick Buechner
What is the good of being an island, if you are not a volcanic island?
Wyndham Lewis
I hold the biscuits in front of his face and he stands up."What do I have to do?" he says."Nothing," I say. "They're for you.""Are they poisoned?" he says."No," I say."Eat one," he says.So I do."Probably the others are poisoned," he says. "Eat a fraction of each."I eat a corner off each biscuit. He looks at the reminders suspiciously, then sniffs them."I'm not sure it's worth it," he says. "How I wish you'd never come. Perhaps you've left the poison off of just those corners."I begin to realize I'll doubt whatever information he gives me."Lick the entire biscuit," he says. "Then give them to me."So I lick each biscuit."Both sides," he says.I lick both sides of each biscuit. I give him the wet biscuits and he cracks them open and sniffs them. Then he puts them in his pocket. "What do you want?" he says. "Now that you've failed to poison me to death.
George Saunders
People want to do something to make the world a better place. They will help when they are invited to.
Clay Shirky
The reason people use a crucifix against vampires is because vampires are allergic to bullshit.
Richard Pryor
Do not go gentle into that good night,Old age should burn and rave at close of day;Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas
We all do things we desperately wish we could undo. Those regrets just become part of who we are, along with everything else. To spend time trying to change that, well, it's like chasing clouds.
Libba Bray
A person is not like a thing that you put down in one place and leave, a person moves, thinks, asks, questions, doubts, investigates, probes, and while it is true that, out of a long habit of resignation, he sooner or later ends up looking as if he has submitted to the objects, don't go thinking that this apparent submission is necessarily permanent.
José Saramago
We are often more treacherous through weakness than calculation
François de La Rochefoucauld
The slaves in Rome were incapable of leisure and so their masters gave them entertainment to keep them pacified.
Oliver DeMille
There are worst things in life than kissing boys.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
I remembered Daemon's feather soft kisses on my cheek, and I remembered the clouds parting and the sun shining on a cold February day in Ireland. And as my baby girl was laid on my chest and my husband held my hand, I saw my best friend Kat walk into the sun kissed part in the clouds, hand in hand, along with the last regrets of my past.
Rebecca Boucher
Science [is] that wonderfully convenient personification of the opinions, at a certain date, of Professors X, Y, and Z....
Aldous Huxley
However deep our devotion may be to parents or to children it is our contemporaries alone with whom understanding is instinctive and entire.
Vera Brittain
If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man's soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.
Quentin Crisp
He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.
Samuel Johnson
And when it comes, her kiss is like something not so much felt as found.
Libba Bray
It was a kiss that had sneaked in through an open window, a kiss that lay folded in a paper giraffe, in the silences between 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, in the pits of the mini mangoes and here, now, at least, it was set free. And the rightness of it, the feeling of longing and belonging, made me want to hold on to it forever. I wanted Damian to keep kissing me, keep kissing, keep kissing, until every other kiss had been erased, until this was the only kiss.
Leylah Attar
No one stepping for the first time into a room made of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror--at the cluster or the vastness, the stillness, the mocking reminder of everything one doesn't know, the surveillance--and some of that overwhelming feeling may cling on, even after the rituals and conventions are learned, the geography mapped, and the natives found friendly.
Alberto Manguel
Life do your worst; we are plump of knee and mild of eye, we are douce, glib and blithe; we inherit the semi, while others inherit the wind.
Hilary Mantel
One cannot get rid of a good education, nor, unfortunately, of a bad one, which often is such because one has not wanted to defray the expenses of a good one.
Denis Diderot
No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it
Fernando Pessoa
My dad’s contentment is all that matters to me. When he’s laughing, I’m laughing. When he’s happy, I’m happy. I would give up my soul for him. To me, nothing else but his happiness matters.
Rebecah McManus
Ironically, girls who don't think so much about their family and are a little bit self-centred are not only happier themselves but also maintain good relationships with their families.
Farahad Zama
All men are born truthful and die liars.
Vauvenargues
You know, all poetry may be a cry of generalised love, for this, or that, or the universe - which must be loved in its particularity, not its generality, but for its universal life in every minute particular. I have always supposed it to be a cry of ;unsatisfied love; - and so it may be indeed - for satisfaction may surfeit it and so it may die. I know many poets who write only when in an exalted state of mind which they compare to ;being in love;,when they do not simply state, that they are in love, that they seek love - for this fresh damsel - or that lively young woman - in order to find a fresh metaphor, or a new bright vision of things in themselves. And to tell you the truth, I have always believed I could diagnose this state of ;being in love; which they regard as ;most particular;, as inspired by item, one pair of black eyes or indifferent blue, ;item;, one graceful attitude of body or mind, ;item;, one female history of some twenty-two years from, shall we say 1821-1844 – I have always believed this ;in love; to be of something of the most abstract masking itself under the particular forms of both lover and beloved. And Poet who assumes and informs both.
A.S. Byatt
As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
When I first accepted my own death, the world was intantly changed. It was a completely new sensation. It took something like this to finally open my eyes. Before, I had simply shut myself off so that I could not see, could not hear. What had I been doing all this time?
Mohiro Kitoh
Everything and nothing are the same in the Absolute.
Dejan Stojanovic
Mama, you don’t understand. It’s all a matter of ideas, and God is just one idea I don’t acept. It’s not important. I am not going out and commit crimes or be immoral because I don’t believe in God. I don’t even think about it. It’s just that I get so tired of Him getting credit for all the things the human race achieves through its own stubborn effort. There simply is no God! There is only Man, and it’s he who makes miracles!
Lorraine Hansberry
Terrell is weeping soundlessly, and despite the guard’s objection, he raises his hand up to the glass. Geraldine mimics him, lining her fingers up with his. It’s lonely to think that one little sheet of glass could create such a thick distance between them, but all the same, regardless of what he’s done, he’s still one of the closest friends she has.
Rebecca McNutt
You know what the worst thing about adults is? ...They're not always adults. But that's what I like about them.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves
Joseph Campbell
Openness to God demands our growing acceptance that we cannot create blueprints for our own lives. Though God’s character is unchanging, the ways of God are unpredictable, and there is a difference between arbitrariness and unpredictability.
Enuma Okoro
And to every man has been assigned a good and an evil angel; one assisting him and the other annoying him, from his cradle to his coffin.
Voltaire
The troops and their ladies had first drunk champagne. There were also remains of sandwiches, and I stepped on one, which I think was either cucumber or watercress. I scraped it off on the curbing, left it there for germs. I'll tell you this, though: No germ is going to leave the Solar System eating sissy stuff like that.Plutonium! Now there's the stuff to put hair on a microbe's chest.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
About their wedding on a beach of Nantucket, after nearly 50 years together as a couple: "After years of being who we truly were only in the privacy of our homes or with a few friends, we were out in the world, under the sky, no longer pretending.” - Norman Sunshine, co-author, Double Life
Norman Sunshine
The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events - that the world beyond the skins is actually an extension of our own bodies - and will end in destroying the very environment form which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends
Alan W. Watts
Wheels turning, the motorcycle’s roar grows steady, which, too, is a form of silence.
Roger Zelazny