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Quotes by Novelist
"The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies."
59
"Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen."
59
"In this course I have tried to reveal the mechanism of those wonderful toys - literary masterpieces. I have tried to make of you good readers who read books not for the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters, and not for the adolescent purpose of learning to live, and not for the academic purpose of indulging in generalizations. I have tried to teach you to read books for the sake of their form, their visions, their art. I have tried to teach you to feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction, to share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author - the joys and difficulties of creation. We did not talk around books, about books; we went to the center of this or that masterpiece, to the live heart of the matter."
59
"She, with her affection and her gaiety, had been largely responsible for him having rediscovered the meaning of life, her love had driven him to the far corners of the Earth, because he needed to be rich enough to buy some land and live in peace with her for the rest of their days. It was his utter confidence in this fragile creature, that had made him fight with honor, because he knew that after a battle he could forget all the horrors of war in her arms, and that, despite all the women he had known, only there in her arms could he close his eyes and sleep like a child."
59
"Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth."
59
"In our struggle to restrain the violence and contain the damage, we tend to forget that the human capacity for aggression is more than a monstrous defect, that it is also a crucial survival tool."
59
"Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members."
58
"The human crisis is always a crisis of understanding: what we genuinely understand we can do."
58
"It is to the middle-class we must look for the safety of England."
58
"Keyholes are the occasions of more sin and wickedness, than all other holes in this world put together."
58
"Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man."
58
"I was an English major in college with minors in Fine Arts and Humanities."
58
"Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it."
58
"Sometimes love is stronger than a man's convictions."
58
"Yes, and imagine a world where there were no hypothetical situations."
58
"The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend."
58
"She thought of Aziza's stutter, and of what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor."
58
"The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing."
58
"There is a touch of divinity even in brutes, and a special halo about a horse, that should forever exempt him from indignities."
58
"Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what."
58
"Are not half our lives spent in reproaches for foregone actions, of the true nature and consequences of which we were wholly ignorant at the time?"
58
"Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait."
58
"All TV can do is capture the spirit of a book because the medium is so utterly different. But I'm very grateful for the readers that Masterpiece Theatre has undoubtedly brought me."
58
"Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining."
58
"You will generally observe that, of all Americans, your foreign-born citizens are the most patriotic - especially toward the Fourth of July."
58
"I'm not sure Kinsey has changed in these first twelve books. I think the reader learns more about her, but from Kinsey's perspective, only three years have passed while the rest of us have been getting older at a much faster clip."
58
"Elsewhere the paper notes that vegetarians and vegans (including athletes) 'meet and exceed requirements' for protein. And, to render the whole we-should-worry-about-getting-enough-protein-and-therefore-eat-meat idea even more useless, other data suggests that excess animal protein intake is linked with osteoporosis, kidney disease, calcium stones in the urinary tract, and some cancers. Despite some persistent confusion, it is clear that vegetarians and vegans tend to have more optimal protein consumption than omnivores."
58
"The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary... She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind-or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units."
58
"I'm inclined to think that a military background wouldn't hurt anyone."
58
"But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?"
58
"They can fatten me up. They can give me a full body polish, dress me up, and make me beautiful again. They can design dream weapons that come to life in my hands, but they will never again brainwash me into the necessity of using them. I no longer feel allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despite being one myself."
58
"I couldn't help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever."
58
"The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one."
58
"Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story; rumors don't care what's true."
58
"Man will not merely endure; he will prevail."
58
"Remember!--It is Christianity to do good always--even to those who do evil to us. It is Christianity to love our neighbours as ourself, and to do to all men as we would have them do to us. It is Christianity to be gentle, merciful and forgiving, and to keep those qualities quiet in our own hearts, and never make a boast of them or of our prayers or of our love of God, but always to show that we love Him by humbly trying to do right in everything. If we do this, and remember the life and lessons of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and try to act up to them, we may confidently hope that God will forgive us our sins and mistakes, and enable us to live and die in peace."
58
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