Quotes by Writers - Page 58

Editors are licensed to be curious.
William Zinsser
A taste for literature and a turn for business, united in the same person, never fails to make a great man.
John Adams
When you don't have a job (requiring reading) and you are doing your own reading you've got deep psychological questions. As deep as those of a little boy.
Joseph Campbell
Reading what you want, and having one book lead to the next, is the way I found my discipline.
Joseph Campbell
I’m curious about everyone, hungry for everything, greedy for all ideas. My awareness that not everything can be seen, not everything read and not everything thought torments me like the loss of ..... But I don’t see with fixed attention, I don’t read with great care, and I don’t think with continuity. I’m an ardent and inconsequential dilettante in everything. My soul is too weak to sustain the force of its own enthusiasm. Made out of ruins of the unfinished, I’m definable as a landscape of resignations.
Fernando Pessoa
There is nothing left of him but curiosity and a pair of eyes.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
People say: idle curiosity. The one thing that curiosity cannot be is idle.
Leo Rosten
Curiosity and irreverence go together. Curiosity cannot exist without the other. Curiosity asks, "Is this true?" "Just because this has always been the way, is the best or right way of life, the best or right religion, political or economic value, morality?" To the questioner, nothing is sacred. He detests dogma, defies any finite definition of morality, rebels against any repression of a free, open search of ideas no matter where they may lead. He is challenging, insulting, agitating, discrediting. He stirs unrest.
Saul D. Alinsky
Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.
Samuel Johnson
Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.
Samuel Johnson
To love in the sense of passion-love is the contrary of to live. It is an impoverishment of one's being, an askesis without sequel, an inability to enjoy the present without imagining it as absent, a never-ending flight from possession.
Denis de Rougemont
Being present is being connected to All Things.
S. Kelley Harrell
There you have it! - How they anticipate my wishes, how they grant friendship's little attentions, which are worth a thousand times more than breathtaking presents that merely prove the giver's vanity and humiliate us.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.
Alan W. Watts
She swore she'd never turn into her P.I. father...but that was before she ran over the body.
Lida Sideris
She never asked for too much. She just wanted to be ordinary.
Meryl Sawyer
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
I thought Beauty and the Beast were two people, not one.
Meryl Sawyer
Character determines fate.
Meryl Sawyer
The ocean was a molten gold. A drum roll sent the crowd into a frenzied cheering which reached a fevered pitch when the ocean swallowed the sun in a kinetic bolt of color representing the entire spectrum of light. Matt studied Shelly as she watched awed. The child-like delight on her face was captivating.
Meryl Sawyer
Hey Shelly, you’re looking at me like I’m from another planet. What’s wrong?”“Nothing’s wrong. Bubbles sold me alien abduction insurance. I haven’t got a care in the world.
Meryl Sawyer
He was almost at his door when Vik’s earsplitting shriek resounded down the corridor. Tom was glad for the excuse to sprint back toward him. “Vik?”He reached Vik’s doorway as Vik was backing out of it. “Tom,” he breathed, “it’s an abomination.”Confused, Tom stepped past him into the bunk. Then he gawked, too.Instead of a standard trainee bunk of two small beds with drawers underneath them and totally bare walls, Vik’s bunk was virtually covered with images of their friend Wyatt Enslow. There were posters all over the wall with Wyatt’s solemn, oval face on them. She wore her customary scowl, her dark eyes tracking their every move through the bunk. There was a giant marble statue of a sad-looking Vik with a boot on top of its head. The Vik statue clutched two very, very tiny hands together in a gesture of supplication, its eyes trained upward on the unseen stomper, an inscription at its base, WHY, OH WHY, DID I CROSS WYATT ENSLOW?Tom began to laugh.“She didn’t do it to the bunk,” Vik insisted. “She must’ve done something to our processors.”That much was obvious. If Wyatt was good at anything, it was pulling off tricks with the neural processors, which could pretty much be manipulated to show them anything. This was some sort of illusion she was making them see, and Tom heartily approved.He stepped closer to the walls to admire some of the photos pinned there, freeze-frames of some of Vik’s more embarrassing moments at the Spire: that time Vik got a computer virus that convinced him he was a sheep, and he’d crawled around on his hands and knees chewing on plants in the arboretum. Another was Vik gaping in dismay as Wyatt won the war games.“My hands do not look like that.” Vik jabbed a finger at the statue and its abnormally tiny hands. Wyatt had relentlessly mocked Vik for having small, delicate hands ever since Tom had informed her it was the proper way to counter one of Vik’s nicknames for her, “Man Hands.” Vik had mostly abandoned that nickname for “Evil Wench,” and Tom suspected it was due to the delicate-hands gibe.Just then, Vik’s new roommate bustled into the bunk.He was a tall, slim guy with curly black hair and a pointy look to his face. Tom had seen him around, and he called up his profile from memory:NAME: Giuseppe NicholsRANK: USIF, Grade IV Middle, Alexander DivisionORIGIN: New York, NYACHIEVEMENTS: Runner-up, Van Cliburn International Piano CompetitionIP: 2053:db7:lj71::291:ll3:6e8SECURITY STATUS: Top Secret LANDLOCK-4Giuseppe must’ve been able to see the bunk template, too, because he stuttered to a stop, staring up at the statue. “Did you really program a giant statue of yourself into your bunk template? That’s so narcissistic.”Tom smothered his laughter. “Wow. He already has your number, man.”Vik shot him a look of death as Tom backed out of the bunk.
S.J. Kincaid
The other good thing was that I had enough rank to strong-arm Marjit into confessing that she'd been the one who'd told everything to Pa about my first invisibility cap, which was how Pa knew to come steal it. Unfortunately, since my rank in the surface world hung off Pa's, I did NOT have enough rank to take him to task for stealing my cap. So I just put him to sleep during a fancy dinner, so that he went facedown into the sour soup. Just the once. It eased my ire terrifically.
Merrie Haskell
I’m dancing on land mines across your chest.Hoping high hopes I’ll trigger some
Renee Ruin
Never do an enemy a small injury.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Vae Victus -- suffering to the conquered. Ironic that now I was the one suffering. Not anything as pedestrian as physical pain. Rather the cruel jab of impotent anger -- the hunger for revenge. I didn't care if I was in Heaven or Hell -- all I wanted was to kill my assassins. Sometimes you get what you wish for. The Necromancer Mortanius offered me a chance for vengeance. And like a fool, I jumped at his offer without considering the cost. Nothing is free, not even revenge.
Denis Dyack
One thing at a time,' said the Boy. 'You must be patient. This is a day of hope and wild revenge. Do not interrupt me. I am a courier from another world. I bring you golden words.Listen!' said the Boy. 'Where I come from there is no more fear. But there is a roaring and a bellowing and a cracking of bones. And sometimes there is silence when, lolling on your thrones, your slaves adore you.
Mervyn Peake
Oh, I didn't think it wise to hide it. Might not be able to find it again," I say, cheerily. "It's sitting in plain view on your chair in the great hall. I do hope that was the best place for it.
Libba Bray
For the taking of revenge, a man locks himself up alone and thinks. His stomach must be empty for his head to be full. Vengeance comes a little from the heart and a lot from the mind; one must take oneself apart from the noise of men and of things, even from what resembles them; only the voices of bells and of thunder are allowed. Let the room in which you meditate be dark, narrow and warm.
Xavier Forneret
People should either be caressed or crushed. If you do them minor damage they will get their revenge; but if you cripple them there is nothing they can do. If you need to injure someone, do it in such a way that you do not have to fear their vengeance.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Feel it, deal with it, then throw it away
Reyna Hawk
I had to be the world's biggest loser, writing about hair, and stuff about my body. No wonder I stopped keeping a journal. It was like keeping a record of my own stupidity. Why would I want to do that?
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Michael Palin : "I am sorry to interrupt you there Dennis, but he's crossed it out. Thomas Hardy here on the first day of his new novel has crossed out the only word he has written so far and he is gazing off into space. Ohh! Oh dear he's signed his name again."Graham Chapman: "It looks like Tess of the D'Urbervilles all over again."- Matching Tie and Handkerchief, "Novel Writing
Graham Chapman
His overactive charm poured out like a lone drainage pipe after a flash flood.
Lida Sideris
I measure my days by the number of homicidal thoughts I have. I only had two today. So it must have been good.
Lida Sideris
He had a bushy unibrow that could house a family of quail.
Lida Sideris
We are all copy cats. The only original 'thing' is God, And "him", hell, most of us know as little as we know cats.
Fakeer Ishavardas
I shall tell you about God once you've reached your imaginary heaven. Then, give me a call.
Fakeer Ishavardas
I nurture very good intentions about you. May you die in peace.
Fakeer Ishavardas
When things are going really well, we should take time to notice it.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The next day was wonderful...and terrible. So, overall, I guess it was okay.
The Harvard Lampoon
despair all ye mortals,” he said in a voice of doom. “the mama approacheth
Lexi George
I imagine God creating humans was much like cavemen creating fire… First it sparkles brightly, full of life and beauty. But then it grows, stronger and fiercer until it becomes dangerous and uncontrollable… Then its creator can only stand on the hill and wait for his creation to die.
Ben Mitchell
But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific of all mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters; though but a moment’s consideration will teach that, however baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.
Herman Melville
No one has the right to demand that your body be something other than what it is.
Agnostic Zetetic
Sometimes I daydream about merging my body with my computer so that I can more fully enter the landscapes of Google Earth, lush surface world without pollution or traffic, planet seen from the vantage point of space and roving surveillance vehicles, a motionless field, magnifying the normal imperfections and irregularities of the earth so that the planet is rendered transparent, misshapen and yet intoxicating in its languishing distinction from the real.
Andrew Durbin
I looked over at him, running in the distance. Another faulty, fucked-up brain in a healthy body.
S.J. Watson
The body is more than the temple of the soul. It’s the grounded celebration of its rapture.
S. Kelley Harrell
I also don’t think there’s any shame in saying that when I was raped, I became a victim, and to this day, while I am also many other things, I am still a victim.
Roxanne Gay
The Church says: the body is a sin.Science says: the body is a machine.Advertising says: The body is a business.The Body says: I am a fiesta.
Eduardo Galeano
The whole world is not worth one soul.
Francis de Sales
People will kill you over time. And how they’ll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases like ‘be realistic’.
Dylan Moran
I wondered how that felt, to really like yourself. And I wondered why some people didn't like themselves and others did. Maybe that's just the way it was.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Yes, My Son, man is a piece of wood, that can be used for everything, from the moment he’s born until the moment he dies, he’s always ready to obey, send him there and he goes, tell him to halt and he stops, tell him to turn back and he retreats, whether in peace or in war, man, generally speaking, is the best thing that could have happened to the gods, And the wood from which I’m made, since I’m a man, what use will it be put to, since I’m Your son, You will be the spoon I shall dip into humanity and bring out laden with men who shall believe in the new god I intend to become, Laden with men You will devour, There’s no need for Me to devour those who devour themselves.
José Saramago
Of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are the most apt to get out of order.
Herman Melville
Everyone wants to save Man, but no one wants to know about men.
José Saramago
Yes, it's comforting to know, when you think about it, that only man can be a bastard
Stanisław Lem
There must be a bad chromosome somewhere in man that urges him to wound that which he can't conquer, deface that which is more beautiful, misunderstand and befoul the work of another.
Bill Murray
For this can be said of men in general: that they are ungrateful, fickle, hypocrites and dissemblers, avoiders of dangers, greedy for gain; and while you benefit them, they are entirely yours, offering you their blood, their goods, their life, their children,...when need is far away, but when you actually become needy, they turn away. (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)
Niccolò Machiavelli
He blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps he might snare it and spare it as it went down to its resting place amidst the distant hills.
H.G.Wells