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Quotes by Writer
"Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them. From an anthropologist's view, 'justice' is a search for workable customs."
37
"Grief reunites you with what you've lost. It's a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that's going away. You follow it a far as you can go.But finally,the grief goes away and you phase back into the world. Without him.And you can accept that. What the hell choice is there? You cry, you continue to cry, because you don't ever completely come back from where you went with him -- a fragment broken off your pulsing, pumping heart is there still. A cut that never heals.And if, when it happens to you over and over again in life, too much of your heart does finally go away, then you can't feel grief any more. And then you yourself are ready to die. You'll walk up the inclined ladder and someone else will remain behind grieving for you."
37
"The confrontation lasted about five minutes; then the display died out as quickly as it had begun, and everyone drank his fill of the muddy water. Honor had been satisfied; each group had staked its claim to its own territory."
37
"When She Needs a Reminder of Your Birthdate, Make Sure Not to Remind Her That She was Once a part Of Your Life."
37
"Lift your spirits by practicing random acts of kindness."
37
"He was holding his breath so as not to inhale the odor of democracy."
37
"Though the man-apes often fought and wrestled one another, their disputes very seldom resulted in serious injuries. Having no claws or fighting canine teeth, and being well protected by hair, they could not inflict much harm on one another. In any event, they had little surplus energy for such unproductive behavior; snarling and threatening was a much more efficient way of asserting their points of view."
37
"As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved - it's the citizen who changes things."
37
"It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with a conceit of our own importance, which would render us insupportable through life."
37
"That's the method: restructure the world we live in in some way, then see what happens."
37
"When is the impulse to help an adult child a wise intervention and when is it self-serving and prying? I have an uneasy feeling I will have to carry the question around for a while like some grating pebble in my shoe."
37
"Mausoleum air and anguished pauses: If this production were a poem, it would be mostly white space."
37
"It is Pointless Trying to Impress Someone Who Doesn't Care about You."
37
"When Roseanne read the first script of mine that got into her hands without being edited by someone else she said, 'How can you write a middle-aged woman this well?' I said, 'If you met my mom you wouldn't ask'."
37
"The chief prerequisite for a escort is to have a flexible conscience and an inflexible politeness."
37
"Were you watching me sleep? Because I thought we agreed that's creepy."
37
"There are in most states one or two ministers of war, one of whom is the minister of naval affairs."
37
"In the kingdom of glass everything is transparent, and there is no place to hide a dark heart."
37
"I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment."
37
"There is nothing worse than having an enemy who is a total loser. It's incredibly frustrating when seeking revenge against one, because you come to the realization that there is really nothing you can do to make the person's life worse than it already is. They have nothing to take, there is no way to screw them over if you have been their victim. It's maddening."
37
"I grew up with an artist father, and my parents' friends were also mainly artists or writers, so he connects what I do with his example."
37
"A moral lesson is better expressed in short sayings than in long discourse."
37
"Require... electoral votes to be allocated in proportion to the popular votes."
37
"Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference, we should each be treated with appropriate respect."
37
"i was delighted I had offended her upholstered sensibilities."
37
"He was home on his own and listening to the sort of music he needed to listen to when he felt like this, music that seemed to find the sore spot in him and press up hard against it..."
37
"The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men."
37
"Fantasies can be great, but we shouldn't make the wedding a fantasy, because the wedding is the gateway to married life. It shouldn't be a moment of illusion; it should be a moment of preparation."
37
"You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live."
37
"Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints."
37
"The only joy I had was writing what was. That book was. It no longer amuses me to be all the things I was when I wrote that. But it is my story as I was then."
37
"I don't know about you, but I can tell when someone's lying. They can't look you in the eye - they look you in the bridge of your nose."
37
"Life - how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere."
37
"I didn't want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that's a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I'm proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it."
37
"Some dangers are so spectacular and so much beyond normal experience that the mind refuses to accept them as real, and watches the approach of doom without any sense of apprehension. The man who looks at the onrushing tidal wave, the descending avalanche, or the spinning funnel of the tornado, yet makes no attempt to flee, is not necessarily paralyzed with fright or resigned to an unavoidable fate. He may simply be unable to believe that the message of his eyes concerns him personally. It is all happening to somebody else."
37
"The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host."
37
"One sin seldom mentioned is that of killing time."
37
"The virtue of paganism was strength; the virtue of Christianity is obedience."
37
"Proverbs may not improperly be called the philosophy of the common people."
37
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