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Quotes by Writer
"Teenagers. Everything is so apocalyptic."
31
"The adoring crowds and overwhelming Democratic support in the 2008 election was based largely on joy at jettisoning Bush and the appeal of electing a superbly qualified charismatic African American leader."
31
"I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses."
31
"Anything you read can influence your work, so I try to read good stuff."
31
"When I was teaching at Harvard in the 1970s, I went to Project Incorporated in Cambridge and took photography classes. I didn't even know how to aim the camera in those days."
31
"When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before."
31
"All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is to - act as if it were impossible to fail."
31
"Here I am Rock You Like a Hurricane."
31
"So the mayor of New Orleans would have used his own buses had the people had been white?"
31
"It is a wise man that does know the contented man is never poor, whilst the discontented man is never rich."
31
"I day dream.Therefore, I am the queen, of my thoughts.Though thirteen, I drift, between, one conception, to another.I create opinions, liberate dilemmas, assert convictions, deal paroxysm, create perfections.I am neither, a thinker, nor a, perceiver, I am a Day Dreamer"
31
"The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else."
31
"Twenty years ago I wanted to move to a nice place so our Charley would grow up a nice boy and learn a profession. But instead we live in a jungle, so he can only be a wild animal. D'you think I picked the East Side like Columbus picked America?"
31
"Transformation isn't a butterfly. It's the thing before you get to be a pretty bug flying away. It's huddling in the dark cocoon and then pushing your way out. It's the messy work of making sense of your fortunes and misfortunes, desires and doubts, hang-ups and sorrows, actions and accidents, mistakes and successes, so you can go on and become the person you must next become."
31
"Marketers are out there trying to figure out how to get your money out of your child."
31
"The problem is the following, black music is increasing encumbered by white elements, often pleasant but always superfluous, easily and advantageously replaced with black elements."
31
"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much-the wheel, New York, wars and so on-whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man-for precisely the same reasons."
31
"The kindest and most meaningful thing anyone ever said to me is: Your mother would be proud of you. ... The strange and painful truth is that I'm a better person because I lost my mom young. When you say you excperienced my writing as sacred, what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I build in my obliterated place. I'd give it all back in a snap, but the fact is, my grief taught me things. ... It required me to suffer. It compelled me to reach."
31
"In every southerner, beneath the veneer of clichés lies a much deeper motherlode of cliché. But even cliché is overlaid with enormous power when a child is involved."
31
"I also felt that Ron and Hermione would have gotten divorced. I'm sorry, I just do. The end of Harry Potter did feel ultimately to me...just the fact everybody had married everybody. The books were so real and so grounded in what things are really like when you're that age, she nailed that so beautifully. And then there was this slightly fantastical ending. I know that was there for her to say, 'Really, I mean it, no more books,' but you do sort of go, people who were in a war are different from people who haven't been, and how does it affect them? But am I going to second-guess my favorite writer? I think not."
31
"But I was beginning to feel like it all fit together, the same way everything in the bowl ends up in the bisquits, as Amma would say."
31
"You. What is the moral difference, ifany, between the soldier and the civilian?""The difference," I answered carefully, "lies in the field of civicvirtue. A soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the bodypolitic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life.The civilian does not."
31
"Being a writer was never a choice, it was an irresistible compulsion."
31
"Whenever an occasion arose in which she needed an opinion on something in the wider world, she borrowed her husband's. If this had been all there was to her, she wouldn't have bothered anyone, but as is so often the case with such women, she suffered from an incurable case of of pretentiousness. Lacking any internalized values of her own, such people can arrive at a standpoint only by adopting other people's standards or views. The only principle that governs their minds is the question "How do I look?"
31
"Southerners had a long tradition of looking for religious significance in even the most humble forms of nature, and I always preferred the explanations of folklore to the icy interpretations of science."
31
"Growing up, I didn't have a lot of toys, and personal entertainment depended on individual ingenuity and imagination - think up a story and go live it for an afternoon."
31
"Not every man remembers the name of the cow which supplied him with each drop of milk he has drunk."
31
"He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he'd become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale."
31
"That Man indeed can never be good at heart, who is full of himself and his own Endowments."
31
"In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagines past."
31
"I submitted manuscripts to publishers. This was not so much a feeling that I should be published as a wish to escape the feared and hated drudgery of normal work."
31
"Thank you to all the people who have triggered my issues. You have helped me clarify what they are, start the healing process and ultimately become a better person."
31
"Gracefulness is to the body what understanding is to the mind."
31
"If its almost right its wrong. Pay attention to your hesitation."
31
"Because most writers have totally unrealistic concepts of how publishing works."
31
"Sometimes our walls exist just to see who has the strength to knockthem down."
31
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