Quotes by Writers - Page 8

I'm fascinated by idiots... Here's looking at you, kid!
Fakeer Ishavardas
No good work is ever done while the heart is hot and anxious and fretted.
Olive Schreiner
The existence of God is not subjective. He either exists or he doesn’t. It’s not a matter of opinion. You can have your own opinions. But you can’t have your own facts.
Ricky Gervais
I have tried to teach you the wonders of the spiritual world......I have tried to show how we mortals can attain such wisdom......and I've decided you're a pillock.]
Roger Kettle
Things will get easier, people's minds will change, and you should be alive to see it.
Ellen DeGeneres
There's no time to be modest. Reason will not work here. Without warning, I kiss Kartik. His lips, pressed firmly against mine, are a surprise. They are warm, light as breath, firm as the give of a peach against my mouth. A scent like scorched cinnamon hangs in the air, but I'm not falling into any vision. It's his smell in me. A smell that makes my stomach drop through my feet. A smell that pushes all thought out of my head and replaces it with an overpowering hunger for more.
Libba Bray
The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Writers are also sort of like vultures, but with fewer ethics.
Libba Bray
How to hold the dignity; one should prevent, to be a toy in the hands of others. Consequently, one stands independently with its dignity; otherwise toy stays toy for another's purpose and pleasure, nothing else.
Ehsan Sehgal
It was as if the rare joy that had formed in my heart was replaced by a pale shadow threatening to engulf me at that very moment. Victory didn’t matter now. She did!
Faraaz Kazi
Give us what belongs to us in peace, and if you don't give it to us in peace, we will take it by force.
Emma Goldman
In the tired hand of a dying man, Theodore Senior had written: "The 'Machine politicians' have shown their colors... I feel sorry for the country however as it shows the power of partisan politicians who think of nothing higher than their own interests, and I feel for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.
Edmund Morris
If you wish to reach the highest begin at the lowest.
Syrus
Writers haven't got any rockets to blast off. We don't even trundle the most insignificant auxiliary vehicle. We haven't got any military might. So what can literature do in the face of the merciless onslaught of open violence? One word of truth outweighs the whole world.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Why’d you want to kill yourself? Didn’t you feel anything, or didn’t it hurt you?” Mandy questioned, looking puzzled. “Yes, I suppose it did, … it was strange, it was sharp, that’s all I can think of to describe it… and cold, but not cold like ice, more like… I don’t know, like something much worse, something horrible… and it seemed like the ground was falling upwards, becoming the sky… for a moment it made me consider that it was just a dream, that I was on some sort of drug, and then I remember being overjoyed to see the sky was still above me, then just really sad, really tired… and then I don’t remember much else about it,” Alecto told her, glaring straight ahead at the sky with narrowed eyes. “I don’t mind, I’m not supposed to mind, anyway. Mearth already told me that eventually I would want to be dead, that it was inevitable… still, I sometimes wish that I could have done something good for other people in my life, it might have made up for all the bad stuff I’ve done.
Rebecca McNutt
No one reaches a high position without daring.
Syrus
Beware, then, of the long word that's no better than the short word: "assistance" (help), "numerous" (many), "facilitate" (ease), "Individual" (man or woman), "remainder" (rest), "initial" (first), "implement" (do), "sufficient" (enough), "attempt" (try), "referred to as" (called), and hundreds more. Beware of all the slippery new fad words: paradigm and parameter, prioritize and potentialize. They are all weeds that will smother what you write. Don't dialogue with someone you can talk to. Don't interface with anybody.
William Zinsser
Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day's end. They were manifesting as the earth's bright-colored nerve endings, the sun's descent urging them into activity, filling them individually with life nectar, the life nectar then being passed into the world, out of each beak, in the form of that bird's distinctive song, which was, in turn, an accident of beak shape, throat shape, breast configuration, brain chemistry: some birds blessed in voice, others cursed; some squeaking, others rapturous.
George Saunders
The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks.This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
We often forgive those who bore us but can't forgive those whom we bore.
La Rochefoucauld
And in friendship and still more here, in this central business of love, accident rules it seems to me almost altogether. What personalities you will encounter in life, and have for a chief interest in life, is nearly as much a matter of chance as the drift of a grain of pollen in the pine forest. And once the light hazard has blown it has blown, never to drive again.
H.G.Wells
The ocean sleeps. The ocean wakes. And the waking of the ocean is the waking of the soul. At midnight wakefulness springs from within the ocean.
Wasif Ali Wasif
Happiness is something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.
Aldous Huxley
I've been thinking about that book about the boys who crash on the island....Lord of the Flies what about it....You know how you said it wasn't a true measure of humanity since there were no girls and you wondered how it would be different if there had been girls...Maybe girls need an island to find themselves. Maybe they need a place where no one's watching them so they can be who they really are.
Libba Bray
I know that [civilized men] do nothing but boast incessantly of the peace and repose they enjoy in their chains.... But when I see [barbarous man] sacrifice pleasures, repose, wealth, power, and life itself for the preservation of this sole good which is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see animals born free and despising captivity break their heads against the bars of their prison; when I see multitudes of entirely naked savages scorn European voluptuousness and endure hunger, fire, the sword, and death to preserve only their independence, I feel it does not behoove slaves to reason about freedom.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
All dust is the same dust. Temporarily separated To go peacefully And enjoy the eternal nap.
Dejan Stojanovic
This is Communism's view of war. War is necessary. War is an instrument for achieving a goal.But unfortunately for Communism, this policy ran up against the American atomic bomb in 1945. Then the Communists changed their tactics and suddenly became advocates of peace at any cost.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
En su habitación del hotel la muerte, desnuda, está delante del espejo. No sabe quién es.
José Saramago
The way we think may be completely different, but you and I are an ancient, archetypal couple, the original man and woman. We are the model for Adam and Eve. For all couples in love, there comes a moment when a man gazes at a woman with the very same kind of realization. It is an infinite helix, the dance of two souls resonating, like the twist of DNA, like the vast universe.
Banana Yoshimoto
All, or the greatest part of men that have aspired to riches or power, have attained thereunto either by force or fraud, and what they have by craft or cruelty gained, to cover the foulness of their fact, they call purchase, as a name more honest. Howsoever, he that for want of will or wit useth not those means, must rest in servitude and poverty.
Walter Raleigh
For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming...
H.P. Lovecraft
You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
Alan W. Watts
The most successful critics are always scribbling things in their programs, largely because it gives them an important and industrious air. Also, it is interesting to try to figure out what you've written afterward. Last week, for instance, I made a very helpful note during the second act of a drama called "They Walk Alone." "Lanchstr get face stuck 1 these nights awful if," it seemed to say.
Wolcott Gibbs
By the hairy balls of Jesus
Hilary Mantel
The more words I have, the more distinct, precise my perceptions become--and such lucidity is a form of joy.
Eva Hoffman
After I lie there for a while, I realize that Dad isn't every going to do anything but be there to drive us home from the airport. And cook. And if I want something bigger to change, it's up to me. I'm scared shitless, yes. I'm doubtful, yes. But I'm angry. Angry that I am doing this because Dad can't. But then I sniff breakfast, and I know that Dad is doing what he can.
A.S. King
We are faithful as long as we love, but youdemand faithfulness of a woman without love, and the giving ofherself without enjoyment. Who is cruel there--woman or man?
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
How fate is stubborn and holds to habit.
Susan Abulhawa
Ramadan is not fasting. Ramadan is an Islamic feast where one stuffs oneself twice a day with food, and in between lets ones intestines dry out. To describe that process as 'fasting' seems rather ubiquitous to me. The amount of food transported into the body is probably exactly the same, but because of the dehydration the food is processed less effectively. As customs go, most customs are typically silly and Ramadan is no exception. I can accept such silliness when people keep it to themselves, but unfortunately one sees such a sharp rise in 'policing' others that even non Muslims are now experiencing violence because they are eating at daytime in the Ramadan period.
Martijn Benders
Perhaps there is nothing greater on earth than the sacrifice of youth and beauty, often of high birth, made by the gentle sex in order to work in hospitals for the relief of human misery, the sight of which is so revolting to our delicacy. Peoples separated from the Roman religion have imitated but imperfectly so generous a charity.
Voltaire
All men are by nature free; you have therefore an undoubted liberty to depart whenever you please, but will have many and great difficulties to encounter in passing the frontiers.
Voltaire
I lived in my head most of the time— a lonely and messed up place —and suddenly there was a higher force called Allah I could lean on. A companion, who'd travel with me this road less trodden... My life. Islam means surrendering yourself to God.
Fadia Faqir
It is well enough when one is talking to a friend to lodge in an odd word by way of counsel now and then but there is something mighty irksome in its staring upon one in a letter where one ought to see only kind words and friendly remembrances.
Mary Lamb
Even with the very best of intentions, even with the ambition of making the world a better place, when we cast judgment upon people whose lifestyles, beliefs, or predilections we dislike, we add to the emotional filth of hostility and make the world feel a little less safe for the folks we’re genuinely trying to help.
Agnostic Zetetic
Nothing is made, nothing disappears. The same changes, at the same places, never stopping.
Dejan Stojanovic
The photographer does the world a great disservice when she leaves her camera at home.
Mark Denman
While my chosen form of story-writing is obviously a special and perhaps a narrow one, it is none the less a persistent and permanent type of expression, as old as literature itself. There will always be a certain small percentage of persons who feel a burning curiosity about unknown outer space, and a burning desire to escape from the prison-house of the known and the real into those enchanted lands of incredible adventure and infinite possibilities which dreams open up to us, and which things like deep woods, fantastic urban towers, and flaming sunsets momentarily suggest.
H.P. Lovecraft
Busty’ Roberts had joined the Royal Artillery in 1914 and since then had steadily risen to the rank of Gunner. Now the crunch: someone with a perverted sense of humour made him a Lance Bombardier. Roberts went insane with power. The war now consisted of two people, him and Hitler.
Spike Milligan
..why sit on the sidelines of life at any age?
Dick Van Dyke
Assim é, mas a vantagem da igreja é que, embora às vezes o não pareça, ao gerir o que está no alto, governa o que está em baixo.
José Saramago
If you treat men the way they are you never improve them. If you treat them the way you want them to be you do.
Goethe
Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the least quivering of his own.
Herman Melville
But life is beautiful, Sariel!’ Gabriel said, trying to convince him. ‘Watch the sunrise sometime lying in the scented flowers of the field, or the shooting stars at the end of summer! Read a couple of really exciting books or lose yourself in the unselfconscious smiles of children. Have a swim in a clear mountain lake or take a run among trees clothed in autumn colours. If you can see the good in Earth, your own existence will become the richer for it!’‘That all sounds very well and good, but you haven’t convinced me,’ the deep-voiced angel murmured and Ariel laughed. ‘My friend, Gabriel was very gently trying to suggest that you should fall in love and that will better dispose you to the world!
A.O. Esther
Somewhere disappears the religion; however, exists the humanity and somewhere religion alive, but the humanity is dead while each religion teaches it, without that no one can be a human.
Ehsan Sehgal
Amazing? My heart fluttered. “But I don’t want Flash or Harry,” I murmured. “You want Spider-Man,” he finished for me, looking a little wistful. I shrugged. “And Peter Parker.” He looked at me, very seriously. “Then don’t settle,” he said.
J.M. Richards
We ran into lots of old friends. Friends from elementary school, junior high school, high school. Everyone had matured in their own way, and even as we stood face to face with them they seemed like people from dreams, sudden glimpses through the fences of our tangled memories. We smiled and waved, exchanged a few words, and then walked on in our separate directions.
Banana Yoshimoto
O guide my judgment and my taste,Sweet Spirit, author of the bookOf wonders, told in language chasteAnd plainness, not to be mistook. O let me muse, and yet at sightThe page admire, the page believe;"Let there be light, and there was light,Let there be Paradise and Eve!"Who his soul's rapture can refrain?At Joseph's ever pleasing taleOf marvels, the prodigious train,To Sinai's hill from Goshen's vale.The psalmist and proverbial seer,And all the prophets sons of song,Make all things precious, all things dear,And bear the brilliant word along. O take the book from off the shelf,And con it meekly on thy knees;Best panegyric on itself,And self-avouch'd to teach and please.Respect, adore it heart and mind.How greatly sweet, how sweetly grand,Who reads the most, is most refind'd,And polish'd by the Master's hand.
Christopher Smart
I bought a backscrabber. One more reason to have no need for a relationship.
Martijn Benders
Love is an act of endless forgiveness a tender look which becomes a habit.
Peter Ustinov
What is it that love does to a woman? Without it she only sleeps with it alone she lives.
Ouida