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Quotes by Novelist
"The purely agitation attitude is not good enough for a detailed consideration of a subject."
38
"If the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?"
38
"You get so used to being hit you find you're always waiting for it. (...) How can I say what it feels like? I don't know. I know everybody's in trouble and nothing is easy, but how can I explain to you what it feels like to be black when I don't understand it and don't want to and spend all my time trying to forget it? I don't want to hate anybody - but now maybe, I can't love anybody either - are we friends? Can we really be friends?"
38
"If my mom told one more story about how cute I looked in the bathtub when I was three years old I was going to burrow into the snow and freeze myself to death."
38
"Looking back, I understand that I was teaching myself to write."
38
"I was trying to do you a favor, you silly woman. A few more hours in the fire, and your baby boy would have been immortal! He would've grown into a fine young god and brought you eternal honor. Now you've ruined the magic. He will simply be human-a great hero, yes, strong and tall, but doomed to a mortal life. He will only be Demophoon, when he could have been Fully Phoon! Phoon the Great!"
38
"Can miles truly separate you from friends... If you want to be with someone you love, aren't you already there?"
38
"For millions of years, man spoke only to what he could see. Suddenly, in just one decade, 'seeing' and 'speaking' have been separated. We think we're used to it, yet we don't realize the immense impact it's had on our reflexes. Our bodies are simply not used to it. Frankly, the result is that, when we talk on the telephone, we enter a state that is similar to certain magical trances; we can discover other things about ourselves."
38
"To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe."
38
"At the time it seemed like a natural development of my interest in what was going on around me in society."
38
"Only fools imply compliments. The wise man comes right out with it, point-blank. Imply criticism--unless the criticized isn't within earshot."
38
"Always happens with men. They promise friendship. They promise to treat you as an equal. In the end, all they want is to possess you."
38
"I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates."
38
"I envision someday a great, peaceful South Africa in which the world will take pride, a nation in which each of many different groups will be making its own creative contribution."
38
"I'm going to keep on dealing with the supernatural in a lot of ways."
38
"What we now call "finance" is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love."
38
"There is a vulgar incredulity, which in historical matters, as well as in those of religion, finds it easier to doubt than to examine."
38
"Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable."
38
"Nothing and no one had ever belonged to him and only him-except Legion. Not that she would do anything necessary to save him, nor would he do anything necessary to save her. But. Yeah, there was always a but with him. He had been her first lover-and he wanted to be her last."
38
"Feminism is sort of like God. Many people profess to believe in it, but no one seems to be able to define it to everyone's satisfaction."
38
"If you'd rather not go with me, I will completely understand and won't hate you for more than a day. Maybe two."
38
"The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man."
38
"You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it."
38
"Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart twice, along the very same fault lines."
38
"All I could think of was that the teachers must've found the illegal stash of candy I'd been selling out of my dorms room. Or maybe they'd realized I got my Essay on Tom Sawyer from the Internet without ever reading the book and now they were going to take away my grade. Or worse, they were going to make me read the book."
38
"Men would rather be starving and free than fed in bonds."
38
"It is impossible to repent of love. The sin of love does not exist."
38
"Looking back, of course, it was irresponsible, mad, forlorn, idiotic, but if you don't take chances then you'll never have a winning hand, and I've no regrets."
38
"You can't be too old to be a writer, but you can definitely be too young!"
38
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