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Quotes by Novelist
"Big doesn't necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren't better than violets."
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"It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the natural grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. "That was all I wanted," he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. "That was all, for thirty years. That didn't seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years."
35
"An illness is like a journey into a far country; it sifts all one's experience and removes it to a point so remote that it appears like a vision."
35
"Temptations come, as a general rule, when they are sought."
35
"After years of working with missionaries, I am tempted to conclude that their endeavors merely prolong a dying race's agonies for ten or twenty years. The merciful plowman shoots a trusty horse grown too old for service. As philanthropists, might it not be our duty to likewise ameliorate the savages' sufferings by hastening their extinction? Think of your Red Indians, Adam, think on the treaties you Americans abrogate & renege on, time & time & time again. More humane, surely & more honest, just to knock the savages on the head & get it over with?"
35
"Kennedy was a man who liked writers and even I got invited to the White House."
35
"That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think it up. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own."
35
"What is love? It is the morning and the evening star."
35
"The young all have the same dream: to save the world. Some quickly forget this dream, convinced that there are more important things to do, like having a family, earning money, traveling, and learning a foreign language. Others, though, decide that it really is possible to make a difference in society and to shape the world we will hand on to future generations."
35
"Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing."
35
"One word more. You look as if you thought it tainted you to beloved by me. You cannot avoid it. Nay, I, if I would, cannotcleanse you from it. But I would not, if I could. I have neverloved any woman before: my life has been too busy, my thoughtstoo much absorbed with other things. Now I love, and will love.But do not be afraid of too much expression on my part."
35
"You're a marshmallow. Soft and sweet and when you get heated up you go all gooey and delicious."
35
"When I see him, his frame filling the doorway, I do not feel passion, excitement. I can't remember if I ever have. He makes me feel comfortable, like a favorite pair of shoes."
35
"The affairs of life embrace a multitude of interests, and he who reasons in any one of them, without consulting the rest, is a visionary unsuited to control the business of the world."
35
"You don't talk much, do you?" she blurted out."I didn't think there was a need. You seem to be holding up both our ends of the conversation admirably."
35
"It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day, but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail."
35
"Magic swirls about us like an invisible fog of energy that can be tapped by those gifted enough, using a variety of techniques that center on layered spelling, mumbled incantations, and a burst of concentrated thought channeled through the index fingers. The technical name for this energy is "variable electro-gravitational mutable subatomic force," which doesn't mean anything at all--confused scientists just gave it an important-sounding name so as not to lose face. The usual term is "wizidrical energy," or simply "the crackle."
35
"I cannot express it: but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you."
35
"I like to work for four or five hours a day. I aim for seven days a week."
35
"He squinted at me. 'What are you wearing? Is that some new form of birth control?"
35
"A mathematical formula for happiness:Reality divided by Expectations.There were two ways to be happy:improve your reality or lower your expectations."
35
"I'll take the cemetery," Kane said. He didn't sound excited. Rather, he sounded resigned. "The club might collapse if I go."
35
"Responsibility walks hand in hand with capacity and power."
35
"If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing."
35
"I can't write if someone else is in the house, not even the cleaning woman."
35
"Caroline stamped her foot in frustration, but when it landed, it landed on something considerablyless flat than the floor."Owww!" he yelled.Oh! His foot!Sorrysorrysorrysorrysorrysorry , she mouthed.I didn't mean it."If you think I can understand that," he growled, "you're crazier than I'd originally thought."
35
"If you are never alone, you cannot know yourself."
35
"Well-timed silence is the most commanding expression."
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"Art begins with resistance - at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor."
35
"When I was a junior camp counselor and it was my job to tell the campers a bedtime story or devotional, I would tell them a rapture story."
Job,
35
"Where ambition can cover its enterprises, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of passions."
35
"I don't hate you.. I just don't like that you exist."
35
"No one wants to know how clever you are. They don't want an insight into your mind, thrilling as it might be. They want an insight into their own."
35
"If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression."
35
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