Quotes by Writers - Page 57

On my strand, lovely flowers their blossoms unfold,My mother shall grace thee with garments of gold.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I can't tell whether a revived man would appreciate his second chance or yearn for the stolen serenity.
Ahmed Mostafa
We are so afraid of the idea of having to die… that we always try to find excuses for the dead, as if we were asking beforehand to be excused when it is our turn…
José Saramago
Nothing quite brings out the zest for life in a person like the thought of their impending death
Jhonen Vásquez
Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I wish people used wishes to modify themselves instead of others. Wish to be low maintenance. Wish to be autonomous, even.
Dan Harmon
I expect the audience to assume TV is stupid. I accept that it's my job to overcome it.
Dan Harmon
You can't tell the audience — well, you can, but I don't like to tell the audience — that anything they're watching doesn't matter.
Dan Harmon
Garry Shandling has always been a pioneer of… meta entertainment. He's always been a defender of the creative right to use the frame as part of the painting.
Dan Harmon
Don't be so hard on yourself, don't put pressure on yourself, life is just a chain of experiments and results, and you'll be perfect when you're dead.
Dan Harmon
My cat brought me a toy. I thanked her and threw it. She sat there gave me a look that made me realize people and dogs are the crazy ones.
Dan Harmon
All [tv] shows are like cigarettes. You watch two, you have a higher chance of watching three. They're all addictive.
Dan Harmon
Is it not true that in ancient times the worst punishment of all was not death, but banishment?
Jean Said Makdisi
The reality is, it takes daily cultivation of a spiritual path, preferably with spiritual kin in proximity, to sustain not the feeling of elation, but the focused, mindful path of steady growth.
S. Kelley Harrell
The emotional element which gives an obsessive value to communal existence is death.
Georges Bataille
In our modern religion there is a reticence in speaking of our personal relationship to Jesus which often causes great loss. We forget that the majority of men are guided more by emotions than by intellect: the heart is the great power by which they are meant to be influenced and molded.
Andrew Murray
The function of the well-intentioned individual, acting in isolation, is to formulate or disseminate theoretical truths. The function of the well-intentioned individuals in association is to live in accordance with those truths, to demonstrate what happens when theory is translated into practice, to create small-scale working models of the better form of society to which the speculative idealist looks forward.
Aldous Huxley
In peace-armies discipline meant the hunt, not of an average but of an absolute; the hundred per cent standard in which the ninety-nine were played down to the level of the weakest man on parade…. The deeper the discipline, the lower was the individual excellence; also the more sure the performance. – T. E. Lawrence Seven Pillars of Wisdom
T.E. Lawrence
When you didn't force yourself to think in formal reconstructions, when you didn't catch these moments of ravishments under the lens of premises and conclusions, when you didn't impale them and label them, like so many splayed butterflies, bleeding the transcendental glow right out of them, then... what?
Rebecca Goldstein
I am constantly searching for places that rekindle my sense of wonder.
Gillian Anderson & Jeff Rovin
I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then.
H.G.Wells
...the great floodgates of the wonder-world swung open...
Herman Melville
The Dark Angel had seen much over the course of the past millennia, the passing of hundreds of thousands of mortal lives. He felt neither remorse nor mercy for the enemies he had felled in the course of wars and battles. He did what he had to do and believed that the people of Earth did not deserve all the good things they had received. For him, most people were harmful parasites who, in the process of their brief mortal lives, tried to get ahead by climbing over each other and destroying their own homes. He looked down on them and their love of material things. He believed that the star of humankind was waning, and that its brief stay on Earth would serve, at most, to swell the ranks of slaves in the underworld, where eventually darkness would eat them away.
A.O. Esther
Human beings, when confronted with the strange and inexplicable, have an immediate instinct to get back to the accustomed and the normal. We do not hug our miracles close; we put them hastily away, preferring the commonplace to live with it. It is as if some compulsive hand wipes clean the wall on which the handwriting appeared.
Fulton Oursler
I'm beginning to believe that there are angels disguised as men who pass themselves off as such and who inhabit the earth for a while to console and lift up with them toward heaven the poor, exhausted and saddened souls who were ready to perish here below.
George Sand
My mother always tells me that anyone who gets enjoyment from other people's misery will eventually get the greatest discomfort from his or her own miseries.
Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
Here we are, you and I, and I hope that Christ makes a third with us. No one can interrupt us now... So come now, dearest friend, reveal your heart and speak your mind." (p. 29)
Aelred of Rievaulx
This is the most enormous extension of vision of which life is capable: the projection of itself into other lives. This is the lonely, magnificent power of humanity. It is . . . the supreme epitome of the reaching out.
Loren Eiseley
Maybe this is kind of cliche, but animals, well, dogs, are what I do for a living. One reason I like spending time with them so much is they seem to think people are really good. They live with us, and obey our rules, most of which make no sense to them. And the main reason they do it is because they like us. When I watch them, sometimes I'm so blow away by how enthusiastic they are about everything we do that I have to go out and buy them something squeaky or chewy. Just because I love proving to them that it's not a mistake to see the world as a great benevolent place. I hope one day to react to something with as much pure ecstasy as I see in Chuck's face every time I throw the ball. Sometimes he looks so happy, it reminds me of the way blind people smile way too big because they can't see themselves. And if none of this links to anything in you, well... I think you don't know who I am.
Merrill Markoe
I know its totally senseless to attempt to write something 'great' in a time where people seem mostly concerned with bashing each other heads in, there's only 1 bestseller a year that a 12 year old would find tedious, and the entire Human Race will probably be nonexistant a 100 years later, but - you know - i have no idea what else to do. I like creating. What else can i do?
Martijn Benders
I miss the days when I was alone with my characters and no one else knew them except me.
Lian Hearn
I'm writing a book. I'm almost finished. I numbered the pages. Now all I have to do is fill them in.
Steven Wright
The writer,' said Donald Barthelme, 'is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.' In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut mind is moved to the sidelines in favor of the swinging, perceptive, light-footed, tutu-wearing subconscious.
George Saunders
So I suppose one danger is that we might get the idea that, you know, “to blurt, is to be.” The idea that whatever comes out is good and is us. Whereas someone who has really worked with text realizes – well, that neither one is “really” you, but that the considered version might represent a “higher” you – brighter, less willing to coast or condescend, funnier, and (mysteriously) also, I think, kinder.
George Saunders
There are three difficulties in authorship: – to write anything worth publishing - to find honest men to publish it - and to get sensible men to read it. — Caleb C. Colton [1780-1832]
Caleb C. Colton
I make up as little as possible. I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of the people involved there, and I try to run up all the accounts side by side to see where the contradictions are and to look where things have gone missing. And it's really in the gap - it's in the erasures - that I think the novelist can best go to work because inevitably in history in any period, we know a lot about what happened, but we may be far hazier on why it happened. And there's always the question, why did it happen the way it did? Where was the turning point?
Hilary Mantel
My dear Keats go on, don't despair, collect incidents, study characters, read Shakespeare and trust in Providence.
Benjamin Haydon
It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires a great deal of strength to decide what to do.
Elbert Hubbard
That Crawford Tilinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair, if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed.
H.P. Lovecraft
Climate change. Urbanization. Biotechnology. Those three narratives, still taking shape, are developing a long arc likely to dominate this century.
Stewart Brand
leave me. And it was a great sense of relief. The
Rebecca Goldstein
how irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience—so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of the impact lost—and when he had also, almost as an afterthought, included as an appendix thirty-six arguments for the existence of God, with rebuttals, his claim being that the most thorough demolition of these arguments would make little difference to the felt qualities of religious experience,
Rebecca Goldstein
It’s a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it’s happened on your watch.
Rebecca Goldstein
He hadn’t altogether gotten it himself until this moment of seeing straight through to the soul of her.
Rebecca Goldstein
They really cut to the chase in the urologist’s examination room, and I tried to laugh. If this office were a movie, it would have been rated R.
Mike Birbiglia
I thought, Hey, maybe these people shouldn’t be making up holidays to drink more. Maybe if they drank less they might be able to title their newspaper articles more specifically. For example, I would title this last article “Drunk Driver Hits Drunk Walker Drunkety-Drunk I’m So Drunk.
Mike Birbiglia
I try to think up material that might apply to the subjects they are studying. How many mitochondria does it take to power a cell? One. Because mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. Not ready for prime time, that one.
Mike Birbiglia
at Florence which included diplomatic missions to various European courts. Imprisoned
Niccolò Machiavelli
Florence which included diplomatic missions to various European courts.
Niccolò Machiavelli
one evangelical scientist who had felt his doubts falling away from him when he was hiking in the mountains and came upon a frozen waterfall—in fact a trinity of a frozen waterfall, with three parts to it. “At that moment, I felt my resistance leave me. And it was a great sense of relief.
Rebecca Goldstein
Picard only saw the movie, which had the entire Tales of the Black Starship subplot removed for time.
Wil Wheaton
Lore: Making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS!
Wil Wheaton
Come with me, ladies and gentlemen who are in any wise weary of London: come with me: and those that tire at all of the world we know: for we have new worlds here.
Lord Dunsany
Bears are simultaneously so graceful and so strong. Bears know who they are, but they often don’t know who you are, which is why they kill you.
Mike Birbiglia
I guess after a certain age, things change and those things or people or friendships that happen in movies, just don't happen in real life.
Alberto Fuguet
Late-Flowering LustMy head is bald, my breath is bad,Unshaven is my chin,I have not now the joys I hadWhen I was young in sin.I run my fingers down your dressWith brandy-certain aimAnd you respond to my caressAnd maybe feel the same.But I've a picture of my ownOn this reunion night,Wherein two skeletons are shewnTo hold each other tight;Dark sockets look on emptinessWhich once was loving-eyed,The mouth that opens for a kissHas got no tongue inside.I cling to you inflamed with fearAs now you cling to me,I feel how frail you are my dearAnd wonder what will be--A week? or twenty years remain?And then--what kind of death?A losing fight with frightful painOr a gasping fight for breath?Too long we let our bodies cling,We cannot hide disgustAt all the thoughts that in us springFrom this late-flowering lust.
John Betjeman
I could see it all. The hand on the shoulder, then the hug. The mouths that find each other through the tears, the moment when guilt and the certainty that things must go no further gives way to lust and the certainty that they cannot stop.
S.J. Watson
Kartik feels like a country I want to travel—vast, dangerous, and unknown.
Libba Bray
Tis better to have love and lustThan to let our apparatus rust.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust.
Marquis de Sade