Quotes by Writers - Page 53

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
Criticism, upon the right one, surpasses and prevails, nothing since it causes a sign of self-discredit.
Ehsan Sehgal
No weakness of the human mind has more frequently incurred animadversion, than the negligence with which men overlook their own faults, however flagrant, and the easiness with which they pardon them, however frequently repeated.
Samuel Johnson
To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.
Elbert Hubbard
If we had no faults we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.
Herman Melville
Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
All unrest is but the struggle of the soul to reassure herself of her inborn immortality.
Amos Bronson Alcott
It seems that life, in order to maintain itself, must revolt every so often against man's ceaseless attempts to master its irrational forces with his mind.
Otto Rank
You will have to pay for your choices much more than you realize.
Fatima Bhutto
On top of the world, or in the depths of despair.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Without a response, I just stand there like an idiot. Like she just slapped my brain out of my skull and I can’t think.
Rebecca A. Rogers
Humankind made these religions; that our brains are capable of doing that is neither something to take too seriously — because we also make poop, and we learned to flush that the fuck down the toilet — but it's also not something to totally disregard.
Dan Harmon
Your brain is all you are, Ms. Enslow, and there's nothing wrong with yours, whatever they might've tried to tell you.
S.J. Kincaid
I am grown up. That's why I cooked all this food!
Lena Dunham
The thing about girls? Suzanne said. Is we are more content-driven.
George Saunders
I just don't want to be around people who don't hate everything in their life right now.
Lena Dunham
Enjoy going through life as yourself.
Lena Dunham
I suddenly felt the way Cinderella might have felt if she hadn’t had that convenient midnight curfew: my feet were hurting, my hair was slipping free from its pins, and my makeup was getting all smudged from sweat. I was unbelievably tired, undeniably depressed, and I just wanted charming.
J.M. Richards
So I slap on that smile and pretend everything’s okay even though it’s not.
Libba Bray
Here's what I have to say about being married: someday you will look at him, hating him with every fiber of your being, wishing that he would die the most violent death possible. It will pass."--Hannah Horvath's dying grandmother
Lena Dunham
I always reminded myself that this wasn't exactly where I was meant to be, but pit stops are okay on the road of life, aren't they?
Lena Dunham
I wondered what it would be like, to love a girl, to know how a girl thinks, to see the world through a girl's eyes. Maybe they knew more than boys. Maybe they understood things that boys could never understand.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
In the past few decades quite a few people have suggested -- citing most often the offence of impossible proportions -- that Barbie dolls teach young girls to hate themselves. But the opposite may be true. British researchers recently found that girls between the ages of seven and eleven harbor surprisingly strong feelings of dislike for their Barbie dolls, with no other toy or brand name inspiring such a negative response from the children. The dolls "provoked rejection, hatred, and violence" and many girls preferred Barbie torture -- by cutting, burning, decapitating, or microwaving -- over other ways of playing with the doll. Reasons that the girls hated their Barbies included, somewhat poetically, the fact that they were 'plastic.' The researchers also noted that the girls never spoke of one single, special Barbie, but tended to talk about having a box full of anonymous Barbies. 'On a deeper level Barbie has become inanimate,' one of the researchers remarked. 'She has lost any individual warmth that she might have possessed if she were perceived as a singular person. This may go some way towards explaining the violence and torture.
Eula Biss
I’m a wild girl from a cursed line of women. I paw at the ground and run under the moon. I like the feel of my own body. I’m not a slut or a nympho or someone who’s just asking for it. And if I talk too loud it’s just that I’m trying to be heard.
Libba Bray
And I held her, this girl who had saved me and continued to save me every day.
A. Meredith Walters
You save me every single day. You are the one thing that makes me happy. You are the only thing I need.
A. Meredith Walters
This is the love of God, an alchemy that can turn enemies into children.
Mark Buchanan
I dont believe in learning from other peoples pictures. I think you should learn from your own interior vision of things and discover, as I say, Innocently, as though there had never been anybody.
Orson Welles
We are much harder on people who betray us in small ways than on people who betray others in great ones.
François de La Rochefoucauld
And there it was, on a shabby bed in a tawdry, ill-lighted bedroom, surrounded by a crowd of ignorant and excited people, broken and wounded, betrayed and unpitied, that Griffin, the first of all men to make himself invisible, Griffin, the most gifted physicist the world has ever seen, ended in infinite disaster his strange and terrible career.
H.G.Wells
A warning to you both - choose to follow me or oppose me and I will kill you.-Connor Kenway
Oliver Bowden
There is not a more powerful weapon upon this earth capable of inflicting more damage, pain and suffering than a betrayal of the heart.
Mark Boyer
When a man loves a woman, as our old troubadours used to say, even if he has heard or seen something that puts his beloved in a bad light, he should believe neither his ears nor his eyes, he should listen to his heart alone.
Marquis de Sade
[Alexander von] Humboldt showers us with true treasures.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It strikes me you might place your gifts better. Why should you send powder to a ruffian who will use it to commit crimes? But for the deplorable weakness every one here seems to have for the bandits, they would have disappeared out of Corsica long ago.""The worst men in our country are not those who are 'in the country.'""Give them bread, if it so please you. But I will not have you supply them with ammuni
Prosper Mérimée
In the violent scorn of her revolted pride, of her indignant honor, had she forgotten a lowlier yet harder duty left undone?In her contempt and dread of yielding to mere amorous weakness had she stifled and denied the cry of pity, the cry of conscience?To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite. To forgive wrongs darker than death or night. To defy power which seems omnipotent. To love and live to hope till hope creates from it's own wreck the thing it contemplates. Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent.This had been the higher, diviner way which she had missed, this obligation from the passion of the past which she had left unfulfilled, unaccepted.Now the misgiving arose in her whether she had mistaken arrogance for duty; whether, cleaving so closely to honor she had forgotten the obligation of mercy.
Ouida
I honor the father in his son, not the son in his father. Each one receives a reward or punishment for his deeds, but not for the acts of others.
José Rizal
Leave him with his God. I’m sure He’s as hard and unforgiving as Cain is. I don’t want to know about Cain’s God. If he is anything to be guided by, I’d rather be an atheist, thank you.
Olga Núñez Miret
What do you think of Cain’s affirmations?”“He never told a lie. If he says that God talks to him, he is convinced that God is talking to him.”“Do you believe he is a saint?”“God only knows, and never better said. He might be, but again, I have my own taste on the matter. I’m not keen on perfection, especially when it’s dressed up like hardness. I prefer the cracked plate, the slightly blunt spear…”“The imperfect human being.”“Yes. The gloriously imperfect human being.
Olga Núñez Miret
) “Do you hear his voice as you hear me? Is it a voice outside your head?”“It’s difficult to explain. It isn’t a voice like anything I’ve ever heard before. It isn’t a man or a woman, it’s God.”“How do you know?”“Because the voice says so. And I believe it.”“Does it talk to you or does it talk about you or others?”“It talks to me.”“Does it call your name?”“Yes…It says something like: “Cain, listen. There’s something I want you to tell the others. Tell them they must love themselves. Tell them they are beautiful.””“Who are the others?”“Black people.”“You mean God is talking to the black people through you.”“I mean God is black.
Olga Núñez Miret
I advise you to be suspicious of any black American whose family does not claim a blood connection to Native Americans. That’s a clear sign of a racial infiltrator who has not done enough research.
Baratunde R. Thurston
This kid was writing saying that they were breaking down some of the racial lines in their towns and communities, because their break dance crews were mixed race, and they didn’t give a fuck. They didn’t care what the Klu Klux Klan said.”- Michael Holman (screenwriter, Basquiat)from nthWORD Issue #8, coming soon...
Michael Holman
Trying to be white? What the hell does that mean? I've never understood that. How could anyone be white when they aren't white? Seems like a simple enough thing to prove, right? Hold out your arm next to someone else's arm and do a simple swatch test. Of course, what people mean when they say that is that there's some kind of authentic black experience that the accused isn't properly expressing. But what is the authentic experience? Clothes that wannabe gangbangers wear on the street? Hood style? What's authentic about that? For that matter, is fashion even a good marker of authenticity or race, anyway? Aren't clothes a second skin you wear over your real skin to obscure who you really are? Can they also express who you really are?
Ahmir Questlove Thompson
If you chose Option 2 [confrontation], you did well. People will be less likely to engage you in office small talk of any kind, but that's likely a benefit when you consider the fact that every ten minutes of office small talk takes one year off of your life.
Baratunde R. Thurston
It’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones who win in the lifelong race.
Robert W. Service
Never to have to think of yourself as white is a luxory that makes you deeply stupid.
Leonard Michaels
I’m not that kind of Indian,” Shanti said, her practiced smile never leaving her face, though it faltered just a bit, and in that slight wobble was something hard and angry, something that looked like centuries of colonial oppression boiling up into an I’m-going-to-kick-your-ass-in-this-pageant-and-then-take-over-all-your-beauty-out-sourcing-needs hatred.
Libba Bray
I think you should know that real-life white people are not all as funny as the ones on 'Seinfeld'.
Aaron McGruder
He is not a man wedded to action, Boleyn, but rather a man who stands by, smirking and stroking his beard; he thinks he looks enigmatic, but instead he looks as if he's pleasuring himself.
Hilary Mantel
... every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.
Hilary Mantel
You know what it's like when a cart overturns in the street? Everybody you meet has witnessed it. They saw a man's leg sliced clean off. They saw a woman gasp her last. They saw the goods looted, thieves stealing from the back-end while the carter was crushed at the front. They heard a man roar out his last confession, while another whispered his last will and testament. And if all the people who say they were there had really been there, then the dregs of London would have drained to the one spot, the gaols emptied of thieves, the beds empty of whores, and all the lawyers standing on the shoulders of the butchers to get a better look.
Hilary Mantel
No man as godly as George, the only fault he finds with God is that he made folk with too few orifices. If George could meet a woman with a quinny under her armpit, he would call out 'Glory be' and set her up in a house and visit her every day, until the novelty wore off. Nothing is forbidden to George, you see. He'd go to it with a terrier bitch if she wagged her tail at him and said bow-wow.'For once he is struck silent. He knows he will never get it out of his mind, the picture of George in a hairy grapple with a little ratting dog.
Hilary Mantel
Every time you go to see Hamlet you don't expect it to have a happy ending...you're still enthralled.(Interview BBC Radio 4 Today 17 October 2012.)
Hilary Mantel
... those sectaries in Europe who are always expecting the end of the world, but who hope that, after the earth has been consumed by fire, they will be seated in glory: grilled a little, crisp at the edges and blackened in parts, but still, thanks be to God, alive for eternity, and seated at his right hand.
Hilary Mantel
If Mary's blood is Spanish, at least it is royal. And at least she can walk straight and has control of her bowels.
Hilary Mantel
He draws a line under his conclusions. Says, 'Gregory, what should I do about the great worm?' 'Send a commission against it, sir,' the boy says. 'It must be put down.' He gives his son a long look. 'You do know it's Arthur Cobbler's tales?' Gregory gives him a long look back. 'Yes, I do know.' He sounds regretful. 'But it makes people so happy when I believe them.
Hilary Mantel
But you see, Crumb, it is hard to give up what you have worked at since you were a boy. There were some Italian visitors once, they were cheering us on, Brandon and myself, and they thought that Achilles and Hector had come back to life. So they said.'But which is which? One dragged through the dust by the other ...The king says, 'You turn your boy out beautifully. No nobleman could do more.''I don't want him to be Achilles,' he says, 'I only want him not to be flattened.
Hilary Mantel
You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.
Hilary Mantel
Your love of glory must conquer your will to survive; or why fight at all? Why not be a smith, a brewer, a wool merchant? Why are you in the contest, if not to win, and if not to win, then to die?
Hilary Mantel