Quotes by Writers

Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations.
Faith Baldwin
Man's attitude toward great qualities in others is often the same as toward high mountains - he admires them but he prefers to walk around them.
Moritz Saphir
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
For acting thus you will remain innocent among the hissings of the serpents, and like a sweet strawberry you will receive no venom from the contact of venomous tongues.
Francis de Sales
Knowing themselves to be faultless, they make it their mission to detect the myriad faults in others, against which they wage incessant tongue.
Heron Carvic
Even as individuals become families and families become communities, and communities become nations, so eventually must the nations draw together in peace.
Marjorie Watts
Maybe he'd never come across anybody as well versed at objectifying body parts as I was. In my defense, this was an occupational hazard; one of the tricks of my trade was the ability to work with whatever was at hand. Over the years I'd learned to pinpoint my focus to the width of a pubic hair if there was nothing else to work with. (...) Before my eyes -or, more precisely, in my mind- Rasher became Lovely Bum Man.
Aiden Shaw
The Ritz Hotel was grand, sophisticated, and established, unlike me. The only thing we had in common was façade. Mine may not have been as ornate but it was equally phony. I was presenting myself as an escort; I advertised as one, negotiated like one on the phone, and I identified as one to whoever was interested. I even simulated sex for escort rates.
Aiden Shaw
Maybe he'd never come acrross anybody as well versed at objectifying body parts as I was. In my defense, this was an occupational hazard; one of the tricks of my trade was the ability to work with whatever was at hand. Over the years I'd learned to pinpoint my focus to the width of a pubic hair if there was nothing else to work with. (...) Before my eyes -or, more precisely, in my mind- Rasher became Lovely Bum Man.
Aiden Shaw
Once undressed I felt less exposed. (...) Naked was my uniform. (...) There was no pressure to conform.
Aiden Shaw
The principal error that befalls those who want to depict men is to suppose that they have a fixed character rather than a life that is but a tissue of contradictions: the more deeply one studies them, the less one dares to delineate them.
Charles Pinot Duclos
I’m chasing after that Holy Shit effect.If this sounds arrogant, that’s because it is. If you don’t believe in your own greatness, no one else will. You’re limited only by your doubts, your fears, and your desire to fit in rather than stand out.And there’s room in this world for all of us to stand out.
Kevin Hart
But the vain man did not hear him. Vain men never hear anything but praise.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken, themselves to errour. Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.
Samuel Johnson
So might we ourselves look down into some rock-pool where lowly creatures repeat with naive zest dramas learned by their ancestors æons ago.
Olaf Stapledon
The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it; for, however absurd it may be thought to boast an honour by an act which shows that it was conferred without merit, yet most men seem rather inclined to confess the want of virtue than of importance.
Samuel Johnson
Cancer doesn’t give a shit how much you want to live. If it wants to kill you, it will.
A.S. King
The various worms eat one's body after its death; conversely, cancer cells eat one's body, when it breathes, since the failure of medical research.
Ehsan Sehgal
The greatest of empires, is the empire over one's self.
Publilius Syrus
The curve of man’s knowledge of himself ascends until the 17th century, declines gradually afterwards, in this century it finally plummets
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
My one regret was that I never photographed the bat before we drank it.
A.S. King
Why are you drinking? - the little prince asked.- In order to forget - replied the drunkard.- To forget what? - inquired the little prince, who was already feeling sorry for him.- To forget that I am ashamed - the drunkard confessed, hanging his head.- Ashamed of what? - asked the little prince who wanted to help him.- Ashamed of drinking! - concluded the drunkard, withdrawing into total silence.And the little prince went away, puzzled.'Grown-ups really are very, very odd', he said to himself as he continued his journey.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
...being aware that the sacred quality hidden in the experience of eroticism is something impossible for language to reach (this is also due to the impossibility of experiencing of re-experiencing anything through language), Bataille still expresses it in words. (Mishima on Bataille)
Georges Bataille
Attaining consciousness is connected with the gradual liberation from mechanicalness, for man is fully and completely under mechanical laws.
P.D. Ouspensky
Notice that your judgments of what exists are the same kind of judgments you make about how to live your life. There aren't two kinds of things we do: judge what exists and decide what we want to do about it. Fundamentally, there is one kind of thing we do: live our lives. And we can reflect on this activity more or less abstractly.
Eric Kaplan
I have been considering the possibility that the facts that can be ascertained about this cheese fail to satisfy because the facts themselves mask a metaphysical truth that can be known only through the transcendent, poetic expression of the cheddar. That is, though the world itself can never truly be known, one might begin to know some truth about the world through a metaphysical cheese
Mark Beauregard
Can you really believe that a drop of urine is an infinity of monads, and that each of these has ideas, however obscure, of the universe as a whole?
Voltaire
Philosophy is about everything when I say everything I mean both something and nothing. Something is what we can perceive and nothing is beyond our senses.
Mark D. Ekperi
Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.
Aldous Huxley
Here, in a few words, you’ve said all you need to say. People stand by each other, but they don’t talk. It’s remarkable. I’ve investigated the extraordinary history of these walls. I think I’m the only person who knows that it’s the stones, the stones alone that set the tone here.
Jacques Yonnet
In response to a tactless question he once said to me, ‘What do you expect? This lousy neighbourhood gave me the come-on. I couldn’t resist.
Jacques Yonnet
Old Hubert must have had a premonition of his squalid demise. In October he said to me, ‘Forty-two years I’ve had this place. I’d really like to go back home, but I ain’t got the energy since my old girl died. And I can’t sell it the way it is now. But anyway before I hang my hat up I’d be curious to know what’s in that third cellar of mine.’The third cellar has been walled up by order of the civil defence authorities after the floods of 1910. A double barrier of cemented bricks prevents the rising waters from invading the upper floors when flooding occurs. In the event of storms or blocked drains, the cellar acts as a regulatory overflow.The weather was fine: no risk of drowning or any sudden emergency. There were five of us: Hubert, Gerard the painter, two regulars and myself. Old Marteau, the local builder, was upstairs with his gear, ready to repair the damage. We made a hole.Our exploration took us sixty metres down a laboriously-faced vaulted corridor (it must have been an old thoroughfare). We were wading through a disgusting sludge. At the farend, an impassable barrier of iron bars. The corridor continued beyond it, plunging downwards. In short, it was a kind of drain-trap.That’s all. Nothing else. Disappointed, we retraced our steps. Old Hubert scanned the walls with his electric torch. Look! An opening. No, an alcove, with some wooden object that looks like a black statuette. I pick the thing up: it’s easily removable. I stick it under my arm. I told Hubert, ‘It’s of no interest. . .’ and kept this treasure for myself.I gazed at it for hours on end, in private. So my deductions, my hunches were not mistaken: the Bièvre-Seine confluence was once the site where sorcerers and satanists must surely have gathered. And this kind of primitive magic, which the blacks of Central Africa practise today, was known here several centuries ago. The statuette had miraculously survived the onslaught of time: the well-known virtues of the waters of the Bièvre, so rich in tannin, had protected the wood from rotting, actually hardened, almost fossilized it. The object answered a purpose that was anything but aesthetic. Crudely carved, probably from heart of oak. The legs were slightly set apart, the arms detached from the body. No indication of gender. Four nails set in a triangle were planted in its chest. Two of them, corroded with rust, broke off at the wood’s surface all on their own. There was a spike sunk in each eye. The skull, like a salt cellar, had twenty-four holes in which little tufts of brown hair had been planted, fixed in place with wax, of which there were still some vestiges. I’ve kept quiet about my find. I’m biding my time.
Jacques Yonnet
Sunset’s the best time to take a stroll down Mouffetard, the ancient Via Mons Cetardus. The buildings along it are only two or three stories high. Many are crowned with conical dovecotes. Nowhere in Paris is the connection, the obscure kinship, between houses very close to each other more perceptible to the pedestrian than in this street.Close in age, not location. If one of them should show signs of decrepitude, if its face should sag, or it should lose a tooth, as it were, a bit of cornicing, within hours its sibling a hundred metres away, but designed according to the same plans and built by the same men, will also feel it’s on its last legs.The houses vibrate in sympathy like the chords of a viola d’amore. Like cheddite charges giving each other the signal to explode simultaneously.
Jacques Yonnet
It’s splendid how much at home we feel at Pignol’s. A tacit complicity at every moment prevails among the regulars here. A process of self-selection operates: starving crooks, thirsty whores, witless grasses working for low-grade cops, middle- class types a bit too willing to conform (leaving aside the pound of black-market meat and the camembert without ration tickets) - all feel too ill at ease here. They’ve only got to stay away. Along with anyone else who doesn’t meet the requirements of this establishment: first and foremost, to keep your trap shut. The war? Past history. The Krauts? Don’t know any. Russia? Change at Reaumur. The police? There was a time when they were needed for directing the traffic. At Pignol’s, silence constitutes the most important, most difficult and lengthiest induction ordeal.After that, it’s a matter of imponderables. It works according to the rule of three: the people who don’t get along with the people that I get along with are people I can’t get along with. Syllogisms, of course. Now clear out!
Jacques Yonnet
Fortunately the City is vigilant. It too has its secret weapons. Since the summer it has released safety valves that form part of a wonderful mechanism, known only to itself. For the past three months we’ve noticed the most heartening appearance all over the place of eccentrics, more or less raving lunatics, cranks, and reinvigorating crackpots.
Jacques Yonnet
And there, until 1884, it was possible to gaze on the remains of a generally neglected monument, so-called Dagobert’s Tower, which included a ninth-century staircase set into the masonry, of which the thirty-foot handrail was fashioned out of the trunk of a gigantic oak tree. Here, according to tradition, lived a barber and a pastry-cook, who in the year 1335 plied their trade next door to each other. The reputation of the pastry-cook, whose products were among the most delicious that could be found, grew day by day. Members of the high-ranking clergy in particular were very fond of the extraordinary meat pies that, on the grounds of keeping to himself the secret of how the meats were seasoned, our man made all on his own, with the sole assistance of an apprentice who was responsible for the pastry.His neighbor the barber had won favor with the public through his honesty, his skilled hairdressing and shaving, and the steam baths he offered. Now, thanks to a dog that insistently scratched at the ground in a certain place, the ghastly origins of the meat used by the pastry-cook became known, for the animal unearthed some human bones! It was established that every Saturday before shutting up shop the barber would offer to shave a foreign student for free. He would put the unsuspecting young man in a tip-back seat and then cut his throat. The victim was immediately rushed down to the cellar, where the pastry-cook took delivery of him, cut him up, and added the requisite seasoning. For which the pies were famed, ‘especially as human flesh is more delicate because of the diet,’ old Dubreuil comments facetiously.The two wretched fellows were burned with their pies, the house was ordered to be demolished, and in its place was built a kind of expiatory pyramid, with the figure of the dog on one of its faces. The pyramid was there until 1861.But this is where the story takes another turn and joins the very best of black comedy. For the considerable number of ecclesiastics who had unwittingly consumed human flesh were not only guilty before God of the very venial sin of greed; they were automatically excommunicated! A grand council was held under the aegis of several bishops and it was decided to send to Avignon, where Pope Clement VI resided, a delegation of prelates with a view to securing the rescindment if not of the Christian interdiction against cannibalism then at least of the torments of hell that faced the inadvertent cannibals. The delegation set off, with a tidy sum of money, bare-footed, bearing candles and singing psalms. But the roads of that time were not very safe and doubtless strewn with temptation. Anyway, the fact is that Clement VI never saw any sign of the penitents, and with good reason.
Jacques Yonnet
You might have liked the United States more,”” she said. “They’ve got more stuff. And if your spaceship is broken, they can probably fix it better.
Nnedi Okorafor
I have a map of the United States... Actual size. It says, 'Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile.' I spent last summer folding it. I hardly ever unroll it. People ask me where I live, and I say, 'E6.
Steven Wright
With faith one attains and realises peace and harmony. With doubt one destroys and gains freedom to move ontowards.
Fazal Inayat-Khan
Aye, aye, it must be so. I've oversailed him. How, got the start? Aye, he's chasing ME now; not I, HIM--that's bad
Herman Melville
With the help of fanzines and close attention to the text of the game you can actually learn to speak Tsolyanu while wondering why the school still makes you learn French–it's not like you're going to use it.
Mark Barrowcliffe
It's almost relaxing to know I'll die fairly soon, as it's a comfort not to obsess about my next orgasm.
Donald Hall
I was obsessed. I couldn't stop myself. It was not healthy, but I couldn't stop. I didn't feel like there was anything else in my life to stop for. We all have periods of our life when we're trapped doing something we hate and we develop habits that have nothing to do with our long-term goals to fill the downtime, right? I hope you identify with that idea. It's the only way I can explain becoming so emotionally invested in a video game that I would get in my car and drive around town sobbing if my internet went out.
Felicia Day
I began to understand that the most worthwhile obsession is an obsession that is actually independent of the object of fixation. The object is only borrowed as a pretext, a means, an environment, through which or in which the obsessed person can project his own eternal and essential hunger, thus fulfilling the requirements of death--the dissolution of the ego for something, anything, that exists independently outside of one's self. Perhaps that obsession should be controlled. At some point the most mundane catalyst, a skirt or fallen leaf, is enough to provoke a series of captivating chain reactions, while at another time much more important objects will inspire only an absurd indifference.
Phạm Thị Hoài
...an obsession is a way for damaged people to damage themselves more.
Mark Barrowcliffe
Action comes from keeping the heat on. No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.
Saul D. Alinsky
This is the world as it is. This is where you start.
Saul D. Alinsky
However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it's beautiful?...Simplify, simplify.
William Zinsser
The reader is someone with an attention span of about 30 seconds.
William Zinsser
Movies and television may be influencing writers to write more visually, using immediate scenes with specific points of view to put their stories across. But fiction can always accomplish something that visual media will never be able to match....One of the great gifts of literature is that it allows for the expression of unexpressed thoughts: interior monologue.
Renni Browne
Did I tell you what happened at the play? We were at the back of the theatre, standing there in the dark, when all of a sudden I feel one of 'em tug at my sleeve, whispers, "Trudy look!" I said, "Yeah, goosebumps. You definitely got goosebumps. You like the play that much?" They said it wasn't the play that gave 'em goosebumps, it was the audience!I'd forgot to tell them to watch the play; they'd been watching the audience! Yeah, to see a group of people sitting together in the dark, laughing and crying at the same things...well that just knocked 'em out! They said, "Trudy, the play was soup, the audience, art."So they're taking goosbumps back with 'em into space. Goosebumps! Quite a souvenir. I like to think of them out there in the dark, watching us. Sometimes we'll do something and they'll laugh. Sometimes we'll do something and they'll cry. And maybe, one day we'll do something so magnificent, the whole universe will get goosebumps.
Jane Wagner
Their bodies lay flatly on the rocks, and their eyes regarded him with evil interest: but it does not appear that Mr. Fison was afraid, or that he realized that he was in any danger. Possibly his confidence is to be ascribed to the limpness of their attitudes. But he was horrified, of course, and intensely excited and indignant at such revolting creatures preying upon human flesh. He thought they had chanced upon a drowned body. He shouted to them, with the idea of driving them off, and, finding they did not budge, cast about him, picked up a big rounded lump of rock, and flung it at one.And then, slowly uncoiling their tentacles, they all began moving towards him - creeping at first deliberately, and making a soft purring sound to each other.
H.G.Wells
People who have monsters recognize each other. They know each other without even saying a word.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
She hated seeing monsters smile. Monsters should growl and snarl and be done with the pretenses.
Faith McKay
I don't want your love unless you know I am repulsive, and love me even as you know it.
Georges Bataille
Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.
Hilary Mantel
I have learned it’s best to face down the trouble. Otherwise it will grow into a monster. We don’t have time for monsters.
Mark Andrew Poe
You speak of the hand of Fatma, my friends, but you do not know the terrible power of this hand, the hand of monsters that menace you and seduce you with their subterranean access, their metallic splintering, their inhuman grotesqueness of idols.
Georges Limbour