Quotes by Writers - Page 45

Shearwater sighed, like a whale in the night.
Aldous Huxley
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever i find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet... I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
Herman Melville
Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.
Hermann Broch
When I was small I dreamed of demons. I thought they were under my bed, but you said, it can't be so, you don't get demons our side of the river, the guards won't let them over London Bridge.
Hilary Mantel
We are all searching for someone whose demons play well with ours.
Faraaz Kazi
The contention that a standing army and navy is the best security of peace is about as logical as the claim that the most peaceful citizen is he who goes about heavily armed. The experience of every-day life fully proves that the armed individual is invariably anxious to try his strength. The same is historically true of governments. Really peaceful countries do not waste life and energy in war preparations, with the result that peace is maintained.
Emma Goldman
I leave marks on you, not the other way around.
Renee Rose
We had been hopelessly labouring to plough waste lands; to make nationality grow in a place full of the certainty of God… Among the tribes our creed could be only like the desert grass – a beautiful swift seeming of spring; which, after a day’s heat, fell dusty.
T.E. Lawrence
For the ancient Greeks, who lacked our social media, the only way to achieve mass duplication of the details of one's life in the apprehension of others was to do something wondrously worth the telling. Our wondrous technologies might just save us all the personal bother. Kleos is a tweak away.
Rebecca Goldstein
It’s even more awkward when we’re face to face with people. It used to be exciting to make plans with friends because you could sit and catch up and talk about what’s been going on in your lives. Now when you see someone there’s nothing left to say. You’ve already seen the pictures from their trip to Rio on Facebook. You’ve read their tweets about the latest diet they’re on. And they already texted you about the pregnancy scare. So you end up just sitting and staring at each other until you both start texting other people.
Ellen DeGeneres
Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.
Clay Shirky
For people who are not on a particular social networking site, it can seem like you're not even living on the same planet— you're essentially not functioning in the same frame.
Sharanya Haridas
I remember being a teenager and being ashamed of my musical tastes, at least some of them. My Brian Wilson and Beach Boys fandom, which is as important to me as anything else, was almost like a porn stash. Hide that shit, someone's coming! You couldn't look like me and be black in West Philadelphia and love the Beach Boys the way I did.
Ahmir Questlove Thompson
I was ashamed of myself for being ashamed of myself. I didn't like feeling like that.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
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
Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder. Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. And in the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
There Bomar is, wherever he is, spending a fortune every day on liquor and beautiful women and expensive playthings, when he could find peace of mind right here with us, for a mere twenty cents.--"Bomar
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
On the whole I consider the constant need for delight and diversion in completely new things to be a sign of pettiness, lack of inner life, of estrangement from nature, and of a mediocre or defective gift of understanding.
Robert Walser
But in spite of this material prosperity he was a slave. His work and his leisure consisted of feverish activity, punctuated by moments of listless idleness which he regarded as both sinful and unpleasant. Unless he was one of the furiously successful minority, he was apt to be haunted by moments of brooding, too formless to be called meditation, and of yearning, too blind to be called desire. For he and all his contemporaries were ruled by certain ideas which prevented them from living a fully human life.
Olaf Stapledon
Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.
John Ruskin
We always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Symbols are miracles we have recorded into language.
S. Kelley Harrell
What I have learned from the year past is something about miracles--miracles of healing and answered prayer and unexpected happy endings. Each came quietly and simply, on tiptoe, so that I hardly knew it had occurred.All this makes me realize that miracles are everyday things. Not only the sudden, great good fortune, wafting in on a new wind from the sky. They are almost routine, yet miracles just the same.Every time something hard becomes easier; every time you adjust to a situation which, last week, you didn't know existed; every time a kindness falls as softly as the dew; or someone you love who was ill grows better; every time a blessing comes, not with trumpet and fanfare, but silently as night, you have witnessed a miracle.
Faith Baldwin
Ain't that a sight? With all the things we know and learn, we still ain't touched the big mysteries -- where we come from, where we go next, why we even her. And when something truly miraculous happens, we run and hide in our caves. We deny.
Libba Bray
This was what was wrong with me. All this time I had been trying to figure out the secrets of the universe, the secrets of my own body, of my own heart. All of the answers had always been so close and yet I had always fought them without even knowing it. From the minute I'd met Dante, I had fallen in love with him. I just didn't let myself know it, think it, feel it. My father was right. And it was true what my mother said. We all fight our own private wars.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.
Quentin Crisp
What we believe spirit visitors to be influences how they affect our lives. What we believe ourselves to be dictates how we react to them.
S. Kelley Harrell
I dreaded an invasion of ghosts or, less likely, an invasion of the police.
Adolfo Bioy Casares
He knows different now. It's the living that chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives. Thomas More had spread the rumor that Little Bilney, chained to the stake, had recanted as the fire was set. It wasn't enough for him to take Bilney's life away; he had to take his death too.
Hilary Mantel
London was a city of ghosts, some deader than others. Thorne knew that in this respect, it wasn't unlike any other major city - New York or Paris or Sydney - but he felt instinctively that London was .... at the extreme. The darker side of that history, as opposed to the parks, palaces and pearly kings' side that made busloads of Japanese and American tourists gawk and jabber. The hidden history of a city where the lonely, the dispossessed, the homeless, wandered the streets, brushing shoulders with the shadows of those that had come before them. A city in which the poor and the plague-ridden, those long-since hanged for stealing a loaf or murdered for a shilling, jostled for position with those seeking a meal, or a score, or a bed for the night.A city where the dead could stay lost a long time
Mark Billingham
No, little one, George's ghost won't come back. Human beings don't have souls. No soul, no ghost. Simple.""How can you say that?" protested Mopple. "We don't know whether humans have souls or not.""Every lamb knows that your soul is in your sense of smell. And human beings don't have very good noses." Maude herself had an excellent sense of smell, and often thought about the problem of souls and noses."So you'd only see a very small ghost. Nothing to be afraid of.
Leonie Swann
Feb. 1, 1965Storm late at night, heavy rain, a thunderous racket, the windows shaking. I heard my name called. A woman’s voice in hell pleading with me to join her.
Leonard Michaels
For dreams, too, are ghosts, desires chased in sleep, gone by morning.
Libba Bray
There are various levels above and below the human through which the individual soul may pass in the course of its reincarnations—the angelic, the titanic, the animal, the purgatories, and the realm of the frustrated ghosts.
Alan W. Watts
People who ask you if you’ve ever seen a ghost are always people who believe in ghosts. They’re limbering up to tell their own ghost story. These are always remarkably tedious efforts about feeling as if someone had brushed past them but nobody being there. I always think that if you’re lying anyway you should at least make it interesting.
Frankie Boyle
They read a little bit, write a little, and especially agree with themselves on important moves, important information, important awards, important writers that they plan to enthrone forever in history through a variety of memberships and numerous prizes awarded under the influence of top bureaucrats who know everything, not only about literature, but also about secret conspiracies, the Masons that lurk in every corner to crucify someone, steal someone’s soul and sell it to an unknown devil, about whom only the chief bureaucrat possesses secret knowledge that he doesn’t share; about history, ghosts, missing continents; about who said what to whom in confidence.
Dejan Stojanovic
It occurred to me that if I were a ghost, this ambiance was what I'd miss most: the ordinary, day-to-day bustle of the living. Ghosts long, I'm sure, for the stupidest, most unremarkable things.
Banana Yoshimoto
We are the dead. We are the keepers of the stories. We hold the history of blood and promises. We are speaking. Are you listening? Will you hear?
Libba Bray
It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.
A.S. Byatt
At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.
Alberto Manguel
Every city is a ghost.New buildings rise upon the bones of the old so that each shiny steel bean, each tower of brick carries within it the memories of what has gone before, an architectural haunting. Sometimes you can catch a glimpse of these former incarnations in the awkward angle of a street or filigreed gate, an old oak door peeking out from a new facade, the plaque commemorating the spot that was once a battleground, which became a saloon and is now a park.
Libba Bray
There is indeed a great deal of futility amongst the human race which we do not commonly see, for it all forms part of our illusion; but let a man be much annoyed by something that others do, so that he is separated from them and has to leave them, and looks back at what they are doing, and he'll see at once all manner of whimsical absurdities that he had not noticed before; and Ramon Alonzo in the shade of his oak, waiting for the noon to go by, grew very contemptuous of the attitude that the world took up towards shadows.
Lord Dunsany
Love is love. It doesn't matter what kind it is.
Banana Yoshimoto
I used to think that people are were supposed to be more strange, and dirty, and full of all sorts of emotions, pity and nobility, with infinite layers of complications.
Banana Yoshimoto
Don't make the Divine a nincompoop's idea, of being a man-like entity. What you see here is merely a wandering whirlwind of Infinity.
Fakeer Ishavardas
Unborn, never died, ever alive - thus is the Ultimate Reality. Of God. And of the Universal Self. As too, your own.
Fakeer Ishavardas
Stand bloody tall - you're the All.
Fakeer Ishavardas
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
sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.
Georges Duhamel
I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money [not for purpose or passion]- has turned himself into a slave.
Joseph Campbell
What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.
Joseph Campbell
One person's crazyness is another person's reality
Tim Burton
... the world can give you these glimpses as well as fairy tales can--the smell of rain, the dazzle of sun on white clapboard with the shadows of ferns and wash on the line, the wildness of a winter storm when in the house the flame of a candle doesn't even flicker.
Frederick Buechner
Can you see the sunset real good on the West side? You can see it on the East side too.
S.E. Hinton
You can't make people right by making them feel wrong!
Nitya Prakash
Someone else doesn’t have to be wrong for you to be right.
Nitya Prakash
The soldiers in my life had raised the bar for bad guys.
Susan Abulhawa
There are things to be obtained by law and things to be obtained by claw
Agona Apell
The manager needs only a molehill to build a mountain, but the money-ger needs a full mountain to build another.
Agona Apell
One day Lal shahbaz was wandering in the desert with his friend Sheikh Bhaa ud-Din Zakariya. It was winter, and evening time, so they began to build a fire to keep warm. They found some wood, but then they realised they had no fire. So Baha ud- Din suggested that Lal Shahbaz turn himself into a falcon and get fire from hell. Off he flew, but an hour later he came back empty handed. "There is no fire in hell," he reported. "Everyone who goes there brings their own fire, and their own pain, from this world.
William Dalrymple