Quotes by Writers - Page 74

Though American scenery is destitute of many of those circumstances that give value to the European, still it has features, and glorious ones, unknown to Europe...the most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wildness
Thomas Cole
You hate America, don't you?' 'That would be as silly as loving it,' I said. 'It's impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn't interest me. It's no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can't think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can't believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
A lot of bands make two different music videos for their latest songs. A censored version for American TV, and an uncensored version that includes nudity for European music stations. The so-called Land of The Free doesn't seem so free anymore, when you realize that other countries have a lot more freedom.
Oliver Markus Malloy
Yesterday the greatest question was decided which ever was debated in America; and a greater perhaps never was, nor will be, decided among men. A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony, 'that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.
John Adams
America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamourous reasonable voice.
George Saunders
Don't worry, I can hander it!
Hidekaz Himaruya
In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky — her grand old woods — her fertile fields — her beautiful rivers — her mighty lakes, and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked, my joy is soon turned to mourning. When I remember that all is cursed with the infernal actions of slaveholding, robbery and wrong, — when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, and that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing.
Frederick Douglass
After 50 years together as a couple:"Look how fast the leaves are falling now," Alan says. "The trees will be bare in a couple of days. Do you realize that we have watched the leaves fall together for more than fifty autumns?"I stand quietly, looking at Alan, letting his words sink in. I am suddenly so moved.
Norman Sunshine
About their wedding on a beach of Nantucket, after nearly 50 years together as a couple: "After years of being who we truly were only in the privacy of our homes or with a few friends, we were out in the world, under the sky, no longer pretending.” - Norman Sunshine, co-author, Double Life
Norman Sunshine
As an artist in the 1960s, Norman Sunshine was able to maintain a moderately out lifestyle. But when the first exhibition of his paintings in New York brought on a profile in The New York Times in 1968, he was photographed in the apartment that he admitted sharing with Shayne. At both his advertising agency and Shayne’s television production company, the article was met with absolute silence.
Norman Sunshine
The growth of my love story had been gradual but my success had always existed and both coupled together formed a deadly combination that was detrimental to our love. I wanted people to love me. She wanted them to leave her alone.
Faraaz Kazi
We both grew up at a time when homosexuality was not even spoken about. There were certainly no books that could help a young person understand that two people of the same sex could build a happy, productive and loving life together. When we entered our 50th year, another same sex couple told us we were ‘an inspiration’, so we began to feel we had the responsibility to make what we’ve experienced available to others. We also wanted to show people who were not gay that our life was not unlike theirs. We are all pretty much the same, so we deserve equal protection under the Constitution.
Norman Sunshine
But liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.
Aldous Huxley
Everybody has asked the question. . ."What shall we do with the Negro?" I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature's plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!
Frederick Douglass
Liberty is like those solid and tasty foods or those full-bodied wines which are appropriate for nourishing and strengthening robust constitutions that are used to them, but which overpower, ruin and intoxicate the weak and delicate who are not suited for them.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Political writers argue in regard to the love of liberty with the same philosophy that philosophers do in regard to the state of nature; by the things they see they judge of things very different which they have never seen, and they attribute to men a natural inclination to slavery, on account of the patience with which the slaves within their notice carry the yoke; not reflecting that it is with liberty as with innocence and virtue, the value of which is not known but by those who possess them, though the relish for them is lost with the things themselves. I know the charms of your country, said Brasidas to a satrap who was comparing the life of the Spartans with that of the Persepolites; but you can not know the pleasures of mine.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Even the soberest judged it requisite to sacrifice one part of their liberty to ensure the other, as a man, dangerously wounded in any of his limbs, readily parts with it to save the rest of his body.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Liberty is not an end, but a means. Whoever mistakes it for an end does not know what to do once he attains it.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Time means a lot to me, paperwork wastes it, and I have always been a firm believer in my right to do anything I cannot be stopped from doing. Which sometimes entails not getting caught at it. This is not quite so bad as it sounds, as I am a decent, civilized, likable guy. So, shading my eyes against the blue and fiery afternoon, I began searching for ways to convince the authorities of this. Lying, I decided, was probably best.
Roger Zelazny
The political superstition is still holding sway over the hearts and minds of the masses, but the true lovers of liberty will have no more to do with it. Instead, they believe with Stirner that man has as much liberty as he is willing to take. Anarchism therefore stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral. But defiance and resistance are illegal. Therein lies the salvation of man. Everything illegal necessitates integrity, self-reliance, and courage. In short, it calls for free, independent spirits, for "men who are men, and who have a bone in their backs which you cannot pass your hand through.
Emma Goldman
Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time, are either psychopaths or mountebanks.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There is no liberty, save wisdom and self-control. Liberty is within--not without. It is each man's own affair.
H.G.Wells
Be it remembered, that liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we have not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.
John Adams
Immediately after his re-election [Cameron] announced: “For too long we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens so long as you obey the law we will leave you alone.” A statement so far to the right that it conceded the political centre ground to Judge Dredd.
Frankie Boyle
[M]an has as much liberty as he is willing to take.
Emma Goldman
Freedom or prison--what's the difference? A man must develop unwavering will power subject only to his reason.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Liberty is like rich food and strong wine: the strong natures accustomed to them thrive and grow even stronger on them; but they deplete, inebriate and destroy the weak.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
There were those few, and there will be more, who really liked people, loved people—all people. They were the human torches setting aflame the hearts of men so that they passionately fought for the rights of their fellow men, all men. They were hated, feared, and branded as radicals . They wore the epithet of radical as a badge of honor. They fought for the right of men to govern themselves, for the right of men to walk erect as free men and not grovel before kings, for the Bill of Rights, for the abolition of slavery, for public education, and for everything decent and worth while. They loved men and fought for them. Their neighbor’s misery was their misery. They acted as they believed.
Saul Alinsky
Liberty will not descend to a people. A people must raisethemselves to liberty. It is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed.
Charles Caleb Colton
To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
To renounce freedom is to renounce one's humanity, one's rights as a man and equally one's duties.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Countrymen: I have given proofs, as well as the best of you, of desiring liberty for our country, and I continue to desire it. But I place as a premise the education of the people, so that by means of instruction and work they may have a personality of their own and that they may make themselves worthy of that same liberty. In my writings I have recommended the study of the civic virtues, without which there can be no redemption. I have also written (and my words have been repeated) that reforms, to be fruitful, must come from above, that those which spring from below are uncertain and insecure movements. Imbued with these ideas, I cannot do less than condemn, and I do condemn, this absurd, savage rebellion, planned behind my back, which dishonors the Filipinos and discredits those who can speak for us. I abominate all criminal actions and refuse any kind of participation in them, pitying with all my heart the dupes who have allowed themselves to be deceived. Go back, then, to your homes, and may God forgive those who have acted in bad faith.
José Rizal
I have observed that the prosperity or misery of each people is in direct proportion to its liberties or its prejudices and, accordingly, to the sacrifices or the selfishness of its forefathers. -Juan Crisostomo Ibarra
José Rizal
The stove, she knew, wished it were a volcano, the humble teaspoons wished they were steamshovels, and the sink wished it were a well so all the others could have their wishes. Yet they all stayed exactly the same no matter what they wished, no matter what they saw and heard.
Georgess McHargue
Lola writes in her notebook: Leaf-fleas are even worse. Someone said, They don't bite people, because people don't have leaves. Lola writes, When the sun is beating down, they bite everything, even the wind. And we all have leaves. Leaves fall off when you stop growing, because childhood is all gone. And they grow back when you shrivel up, because love is all gone. Leaves spring up at will, writes Lola, just like tall grass. Two or three children in the village don't have any leaves, and those have a big childhood. A child like that is an only child, because it has a father and a mother who have been to school. The leaf-fleas turn older children into younger ones - a four-year-old into a three-year-old, a three-year-old into a one-year-old. Even a six-months-old, writes Lola, and even a newborn. And the more little brothers and sisters the leaf-fleas make, the smaller the childhood becomes.
Herta Müller
Polly had arrived in the world outraged to discover that her sisters had gotten there before her.
Liane Moriarty
We think the purpose of a child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of life is death
Alexander Herzen
I would often sit in the corner of the room wearing Dad's massive headphones, carefully replaying the records time after time. It was something I did frequently throughout my childhood with music, comedy and film, inspiring my own creative imagination, the headphones rendering the experience intensely personal, as though it were all happening inside my own head.
Simon Pegg
He was thirteen that year, the age when children splinter off and abandon the old loves.
Mark Costello
Nobody truly becomes an adult. The child we have been is always there, deep inside of us. As time passes, we think we're growing, but maturity is only an illusion; a hindrance to our free child soul.
Jirō Taniguchi
The hardest part of being a Canadian kid is having to color in Nunavut with a crayon in school, hell on earth.
Rebecca McNutt
Envy is a much natural byproduct when your childhood isn’t the way it is supposed to be
Faraaz Kazi
Life do your worst; we are plump of knee and mild of eye, we are douce, glib and blithe; we inherit the semi, while others inherit the wind.
Hilary Mantel
Why is it that places thousands of miles from my childhood village home send me back, opening the sluice-gates of the past? Well, we are all emigrants from the homeland of our childhoods. It may be, then, that the natural place to meet ourselves as children is 'abroad', and that includes the foreign country of our growing up and aging. So it is that the personal, physical feeling of departure from the time of childhood may merge in a special symbiosis with geographical departure, biography and geography resonating now on a single wavelength.
Georgi Gospodinov
I think life is a lot different for alternative kids nowadays. Texting and the internet mean that being a Goth or something means you're part of a big social scene, it's an inclusive thing. Back then, we all just went our different ways in the afterglow,wishing each other all the best with the next ten years of bullying.
Frankie Boyle
I drop to the curb like childhood leaving a body.
Lidia Yuknavitch
I should acquaint the reader with the basic principles of the mythology I adhered to then. I believed . . . that inanimate objects were no less fallible than people. They, too, could be forgetful. And, if you had enough patience, you could catch them by surprise.
Stanisław Lem
Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind.
Joseph Campbell
To create, I destroyed myself; I made myself external to such a degree within myself that within myself I do not exist except in an external fashion. I am the living setting in which several actors make entrances, putting on several different plays.
Fernando Pessoa
The first sentiment of man was that of his existence, his first care that of preserving it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Hiding my half existence behind the opaque walls of my skull, concealing it like a shameful disease, I did not consider the simple fact that the same thing could be occurring under other skullcaps, in other locked rooms.
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
People are ignorant of what any street clock knows. Why? Because the crack that cleaves existence also swallows their existence-reflecting consciousnesses. Thrown back into existence, the poor souls don't suspect that a moment ago they didn't exist - and only isolated things and persons, swallowed by the crack never to return to this world, arouse a certain fear and foreboding.
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Everyone knows that dragons don’t exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each non-existed in an entirely different way.
Stanisław Lem
He himself, Anthony went on to think, he himself had chosen to regard the whole process as either pointless or a practical joke. Yes, chosen. For it had been an act of the will. If it were all nonsense or a joke, then he was at liberty to read his books and exercise his talents for sarcastic comment; there was no reason why he shouldn't sleep with any presentable woman who was ready to sleep with him. If it weren't nonsense, if there was some significance, then he could no longer live irresponsibly. There were duties towards himself and others and the nature of things. Duties with whose fulfilment the sleeping and the indiscriminate reading and the habit of detached irony would interfere. He had chosen to think it nonsense, and nonsense for more than twenty years the thing had seemed to be – nonsense, in spite of occasional uncomfortable intimations that there might be a point, and that the point was precisely in what he had chosen to regard as the pointlessness, the practical joke.
Aldous Huxley
I took my pill at eleven. An hour and half later I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers -- a full-blown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-coloured carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colours. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation -- the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
Aldous Huxley
I will say nothing against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I will say nothing... against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Still, it was fair to say that the minimum requirement for a truly enjoyable existence would be unbridled promiscuity.
Aleksandar Hemon
You're born thinking you're the centre of things, and they chip away at that until you expire muttering If I knew then, or some nonsense in an empty rooming house.
Mark Anthony Jarman
It's way too easy to get used to losing, it does something small to you.
Mark Anthony Jarman