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Quotes by Novelist
"When the heart flies out before the understanding, it saves the judgment a world of pains."
45
"The whole summer lay ahead of us-time to rest, time to wait. And when the future comes-no matter what comes with it-I'll be smarter. I'll be stronger. I'll be ready."
45
"You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do."
45
"When I write something, every word of it is meant. I can't say it enough."
45
"A woman's heart and a woman's dreams are malleable and can change at any moment. It is the essence of being a woman."
45
"Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions."
45
"Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character."
45
"Adversity is the trial of principle. Without it a man hardly knows whether he is honest or not."
45
"It isn't about love,' Vee said. 'It's about fun."
45
"Anything devised by man has bureaucracy, corrpution and error hardwired at inception."
45
"Sweet pea, you are my favorite hello and my hardest goodbye, and I don't want to go a day without you. Consider that your official invitation."
45
"Friendship is a pretty full-time occupation if you really are friendly with somebody. You can't have too many friends because then you're just not really friends."
45
"Why are poets so apt to choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsman as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit? Because, probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger."
45
"I looked westward and marveled that, somewhere over those mountains, Kabul still existed. It really existed, not just as an old memory, or as the heading of an AP story on page 15 of the San Francisco Chronicle."
45
"The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you were told that the king died and then the queen died of grief, that is a story that he was interested."
45
"A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that which is provided for them."
45
"It is well for the heart to be naive and the mind not to be."
45
"Letty's first false step was here: she said to herself _I can not_, and did not. She lacked courage--a want in her case not much to be wondered at, but much to be deplored, for courage of the true sort is just as needful to the character of a woman as of a man."
45
"People who do not know how to laugh are always pompous and self-conceited."
45
"The greatest fight is when you are fighting in the smoke and cannot see with your eyes."
45
"Hosni Mubarak... his constitution is not democratic, but he is democratic. We can voice our opinions now. The press is free."
45
"Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance."
45
"The best place for discovering what a man is is the heart of the desert. Your plane has broken down, and you walk for hours, heading for the little fort at Nutchott. You wait for the mirages of thirst to gape before you. But you arrive and you find an old sergeant who has been isolated for months among the dunes, and he is so happy to be found that he weeps. And you weep, too. In the arching immensity of the night, each tells the story of his life, each offers the other the burden of memories in which the human bond is discovered. Here two men can meet, and they bestow gifts upon each other with the dignity of ambassadors."
45
"For the human mind is seldom at stay: If you do not grow better, you will most undoubtedly grow worse."
45
"It was shepherds who were the first to recognize a king that the rest of the world refused to acknowledge. So it's not surprising that kings would talk to shepherds."
45
"His words - the gift of expression, the bewildering, the iluminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness."
45
"There is no growth except in the fulfillment of obligations."
45
"I wonder how Merripen is faring, Win said, her blue eyes soft with concern. Merripen, the cook-maid, and the footman had gone to the house two days earlier to prepare for the Hathaways' arrival. "No doubt he's been working ceaselessly day and night, Amelia replied, "taking inventory, rearranging everything in sight, and issuing commands to people who don't dare disobey him. I'm sure he's quite happy."
45
"The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time."
45
"I remember staying to look at it for a long time, as one would linger within reach of a consoling whisper. The sky was pearly grey. It was one of those overcast days so rare in the tropics, in which memories crowd upon one, memories of other shores, of other faces."
45
"There are worse prisons than words."
45
"Every self-respecting act of persuasion must find appeal to curiosity, then to vanity, and lastly to kindness or remorse. Isabella looked down and slowly nodded."
45
"The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time."
45
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