Quotes by Writers - Page 7

It was what she imagined doing heroin would be like: terrible for you but impossible to resist.

Libby Schmais

He believed he understood, for the first time, why people say life is a dream: if you live long enough, the events of a lifetime, like the events of a dream, cannot be communicated, simply because they are of no interest to anyone.Human beings themselves, after death, become figures in a dream to the survivors , they fade away and are forgotten, like dreams that were once convincing, but which no one cares to hear about. There are parents who find in their children a receptive audience, with the result that in the child's credulous imagination they find a last semblance of life, which quickly dims out as if they had never existed. ...

Adolfo Bioy Casares

I have nothing to do with him,” L said. “To be completely accurate, I do not even know B. He is simply someone I am aware of. But none of this affects my judgment. Certainly, I was interested in this case, and began to investigate it because I knew who the killer was. But that did not alter the way I investigated it, or the manner in which my investigation proceeded. Naomi Misora, I cannot overlook evil. I cannot forgive it. It does not matter if I know the person who commits evil or not. I am only interested in justice.”“Only... in justice…” Misora gasped. “Then... nothing else matters?” “I wouldn’t say that, but it is not a priority.”“You won’t forgive any evil, no matter what the evil is?” “I wouldn’t say that, but it is not a priority.”“But...”Like a thirteen-year-old victim. “There are people who justice cannot save.” Like a thirteen-year old criminal. “And there are people who evil can save.”“There are. But even so,” L said, his tone not changing at all, as if gently admonishing Naomi Misora. “Justice has more power than anything else.”“Power? By power... you mean strength?”“No. I mean kindness.” He said it so easily.

NisiOisiN

You see, dear—I think there are two types of people in the world. Those who divide the world up into two kinds of people... and those who don't.

Tony Hendra

I do not wish to be a coward like the father of mankind and throw the blame upon a woman.

Ouida

I'm amazed at how [police officers] don't want to come to court. They want to make the case and they want it to get prosecuted, but they don't want to come testify. Sorry, but the ultimate way of writing your report is telling it to a jury. When I was a defense lawyer, I used to think all police officers were liars, but now I find that there are only a few. Most of them are pretty straightforward and do a good job. But there are some, and if I know that they are liars or I know they tend to exaggerate, I try to take that into consideration when I'm dealing with their cases.

Mark Baker

It’s all I’ve seen, all I’ve been through,” I said, “that makes it damn nearly impossible for me to say anything. I’ve lost the knack of making sense. I speak gibberish to the civilized world, and it replies in kind.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

People wonder when you're allowed to call yourself a writer. I think maybe the answer is when you recognize that is work." - Nina MacLaughlin, 'With Compliments

Manjula Martin

Words rich in meaning can be cheap in sound effects.

Dejan Stojanovic

Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional world of ours - watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern's tower, and make a little heap of dust of it.

Herman Melville

Information wants to be free.

Stewart Brand

Audubon considered it a bad day if he didn’t shoot a hundred birds. “It’s amazing that his name has become synonymous with conservation.

Meryl Sawyer

Nana...how come being happy and making your dreams come true are two different things? Even now, I still don't know why...

Ai Yazawa

Henry's universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual. Broken reeds are seldom good mixers. They're far too busy with their ideas, their sensuality and their psychosomatic complaints to be able to take an interest in other people - even their own wives and children. They live in a state of the most profound voluntary ignorance, not knowing anything about anybody, but abounding in preconceived opinions about everything.

Aldous Huxley

The story of Andrew Ewing is partly one of rags to riches – but there is more to it than that, since his business success was combined with a generosity of spirit that led him to give away a fortune in pursuit of his ultimate ambition to die a poor man.

Bill Scott

Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it.

George Sand

Your destiny - by hook or crook, by this way or that, at some corner or nook - will catch up with you.

Fakeer Ishavardas

Reasons are whores.

Leonard Michaels

How could the human mind progress, while tormented with frightful phantoms, and guided by men, interested in perpetuating its ignorance and fears? Man has been forced to vegetate in his primitive stupidity: he has been taught stories about invisible powers upon whom his happiness was supposed to depend. Occupied solely by his fears, and by unintelligible reveries, he has always been at the mercy of priests, who have reserved to themselves the right of thinking for him, and of directing his actions.

Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach

Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.

Aldous Huxley

In the lie of truth lies the truth.

Dejan Stojanovic

Let's see," mused the dragon, "that doesn't tell us much, does it? What sort of a word is this? Is it an epithet, do you think?"Gawaine could do no more than nod."Why, of course," exclaimed the dragon, "reactionary Republican.

Heywood Broun

...if he had married Mrs. Albert Grantham for her money I freely admit that no man marries without a reason and with her it would have been next to impossible to think up another one....

Rex Stout

Men know that women are an overmatch for them and therefore they choose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.

Samuel Johnson

We magistrates find that reason is the easiest thing in the world to dispense with; banished from our law courts as it is from our heads, we delight in trampling it underfoot, and that is what makes our judicial sentences such masterpieces, since (although commonsense never presides in them) those sentences are carried out with as much firmness as if people knew what they actually meant.

Marquis de Sade

I need you to just trust me for now without knowing all the answers.

J.M. Richards

For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.

Herman Melville

Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect

George Sand

Angels, fairies, gods, hell-heaven, "mediating" messiahs, demons, spirits etc. - are but your cultural-isms. Free be of these prisons.

Fakeer Ishavardas

Men argue nature acts.

Voltaire

With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs, and we live off crusts that we call cakes, like poor children who make-believe they’re happy.

Fernando Pessoa

I, too, head for the Baths of Caracalla,thinking—with my old, magnificentprivilege of thinking…(And let there still be a god in me that thinks,lost, weak, and childish,yet whose voice is so humanit is almost a song.) Oh, to leavethis prison of poverty!To be free of the yearningthat makes these ancient nights so splendid!He who knows yearning, and he who does not,have something in common: man’s desires are humble.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

The years are going by us like huge birds, whom Doom and Destiny and the schemes of God have frightened up out of some old gray marsh.

Lord Dunsany

The world and the friends that lived in it are shadows: you alone remain real in this drowsing room.

Aldous Huxley

...an animal, at the end of a few months, is what it will be all its life; and its species, at the end of a thousand years, is what it was in the first of those thousand years. Why is man alone subject to becoming an imbecile?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

There was a photograph of Trout. He was an old man with a full black beard. He looked like a frightened, aging Jesus, whose sentence to crucifixion had been commuted to imprisonment for life.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Her eyes burn like a match head striking my flesh with ferocity and precision to ignite the night with a divinorum induced dream.

A.P. Sweet

I can't imagine a life without a story.

Banana Yoshimoto

A critic is a man created to praise greater men than himself, but he is never able to find them.

Richard Le Gallienne

All of life is a meditation, most of it unintentional.

Joseph Campbell

Who is apt on occasion to assign a multitude of reasons when one will do? This is a sure sign of weakness in argument.

Harriet Martineau

Music has the power to stop time. When I listen to songs, I'm transported back to the moment of their birth, which is sometimes even before the moment of my birth. Old songs, rock or soul or blues, still connect with me because the human emotions in them, whether jealousy or rage or hope, are recognizably similar to the emotions that I'm feeling now. But I'm feeling all of them, all the time, and so the songs act like a chemical process that isolates certain feelings at certain times: maybe one song helps illuminate the jubilation and one helps illuminate the sorrow and one helps illuminate the resignation. Music has the power to stop time. But music also keeps time.

Ahmir Questlove Thompson

Write if you will: but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be—if there is to be a world. Write about all the things that men have written about since the beginning of writing and talking—but write to a point. Work hard at it, care about it. Write about our people: tell their story. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don’t pass it up. Don’t pass it up. Use it. Good luck to you. The Nation needs your gifts. Lorraine Hansberry speech, “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” given to Readers Digest/United Negro College Fund creative writing contest winners, NYC, May 1, 1964.

Lorraine Hansberry

To all my enemies, I will destroy it.

Frankie Boyle

I travel, always arriving in the same place.

Dejan Stojanovic

What people resist the most about spiritual healing is changing their minds.

S. Kelley Harrell

He moved closer to her, his face just inches away from her. They stood motionless. Jason looked deep into her eyes. He tore away her barriers and locked eyes. His nose two inches away, he slightly tilted his face and looked at her lips. She slightly turned her face at the opposite angle.

Mark A. Cooper

I live in a constellation of intimates, and the shape of us is a family. We touch base and check in, with each other and also—I am so gratified to report—they sometimes check in with one another. Correspondences have sprung up and friendships have started to form beyond my influence. Family has begun to take on a transitive property as well.

S. Bear Bergman

The difference between weakness and wickedness is much less than people suppose and the consequences are nearly always the same.

Lady Marguerite Blessington

And sometimes we die to prove that we lived.

Fábio Moon

We have less reason to be surprised or offended when we find others differ from us in opinions because we very often differ from ourselves.

Samuel Johnson

Mothers took their mothering so seriously now. Their frantic little faces...Ponytails swinging. Eyes fixed on the mobile phones held in the palms of their hands like compasses.

Liane Moriarty

It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out - it's the grain of sand in your shoe.

Robert Service

You sit beside the sorcerer, your love, and unzip your ribs. Tucked under your heart is a small oak box, plain and unvarnished. You offer it to the sorcerer. 'I brought this for you.

A. Merc Rustad

On the right, a brigade of trolls. On the left, squabling civil servants. Invasion of zombies. Have I managed to summarize the zeitgeist now?

Martijn Benders

I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

It was not often that Flay approved of happiness in others. He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt. But on an occasion such as this it was different, for the spirit of convention was being rigorously adhered to, and in between his ribs Mr. Flay experienced twinges of pleasure.

Mervyn Peake

Death swallows death.

Dejan Stojanovic

I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Property monopolized or in the possession of a few is a curse to mankind.

John Adams

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