top of page
.png){kind=small}
"What do Americans know about morality? They don't want their presidents to have penises but they don't mind if their presidents covertly arrange to support the Nicaraguan rebel forces after Congress has restricted such aid, they don't want their presidents to deceive their wives but they don't mind if their presidents deceive Congress-lie to the people and violate the people's constitution!"
Standard
Customized
More
"Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging."
Author Name
Personal Development
"We enjoy observing kindness and compassion in others, while we act as evils."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It is neither just the religious, the spiritual, the power-hungry, the evil, the ignorant, the corrupt, the Christian, the Muslim, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Jew, nor the atheist that makes a hypocrite, but being a human being. Any man who thinks himself to be free of hypocrisy while committed to cherry-picking others for such, I am confident, the Almighty can prove to him a great deal of his own hypocrisy even beyond his earthly comprehension."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Let them show me a cottage where there are not the same vices of which they accuse the courts."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Those who preach bookish religion are the greatest atheists of all, because they don't have the slightest idea of neither God nor religion. Their beloved religion is their book. And their God is in the doctrines."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I might be tempted to make to Christendom a proposal different from that of the Bible society. Let us collect all the New Testaments we have, let us bring them out to an open square or up to the summit of a mountain, and while we all kneel let one man speak to God thus: 'Take this book back again; we men, such as we now are, are not fit to go in for this sort of thing, it only makes us unhappy,' This is my proposal, that like those inhabitants in Gerasa we beseech Christ to depart from our borders. This would be an honest and human way of talking -- rather different from the disgusting hypocritical priestly fudge..."
Author Name
Personal Development
"[Or perhaps my friends should have realized that they shouldn't have left behind the FRICKING REASON FOR THEIR PROTEST!And that thought just cracked me up.]It was like my friends had walked over the backs of baby seals in order to get to the beach where they could protest against the slaughter of baby seals."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Some people's blameless lives are to blame for a good deal."
Author Name
Personal Development
"This mannerism of what he'd seen of society struck Homer Wells quite forcefully; people, even nice people-because, surely, Wally was nice-would say a host of critical things about someone to whom they would then be perfectly pleasant. At. St. Cloud's, criticism was plainer-and harder, if not impossible, to conceal."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Neither man nor angel can discern hypocrisy, the only evil that walks invisible except to God alone."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is."
Writing
"You don't want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven't done what I do. Most book reviewers haven't written 11 novels. Many of them haven't written one."
Enemy
"A person's faith goes at its own pace. The trouble with church is the service. A service is conducted for a mass audience. Just when I start to like the hymn, everyone plops down to pray. Just when I start to hear the prayer, everyone pops up to sing. And what does the stupid sermon have to do with God? Who knows what God thinks of current events? Who cares?"
Worship
"Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us."
Gender
"Keep passing the open windows."
Mindfulness
"(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it, it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action."
Sports
"People are like that .... They need to make their own worst experiences universal. It gives them a kind of support.' And who can blame them? It is just infuriating to argue with someone like that; because of an experience that has denied them their humanity, they go around denying another kind of humanity in others, which is the truth of human variety -- it stands alongside our sameness."
Humanity
"And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you."
Writing
"That's okay," I said. "We're writers. We make things up."
Writing
"And what were the rules at St. Cloud's? What were Larch's rules? Which rules did Dr. Larch observe, which ones did he break, or replace--and with what confidence?"
Ethics
bottom of page