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Quotes by Writer
"And you came to Finland to build a station?""No I came here on vacation to visit a friend.""That's good," the driver said. "Vacations and friends are the two best things in life."
29
"The thing is, at the end of the day you still have to face yourself."
29
"The death of Mrs. Lincoln was a serious loss to her husband and children. Abraham's sister Sarah was only eleven years old, and the tasks and cares of the little household were altogether too heavy for her years and experience."
29
"The children will come to no harm.''Except for the older ones. Like that poor kid down there.''Mr. Scoresby, that is the way this world works. And if you want to put an end to cruelty and injustice, you must take me farther on. I have a job to do.''Seems to me-' Lee said, feeling for the words, 'seems to me the place you fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed."
29
"Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next."
29
"If I play hard to get, soon the phone stops ringing altogether."
29
"Thinking is not enough. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience - any... thing."
29
"My fear for you outweighs my fear of him, he said simply. 'And I told you, didn't I? If you left, I'd follow you.But should you try to leave on your own, know that I will go to the ends of the earth to bring you back."
29
"War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to "a war against whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off."
29
"The best thing about my job, though, is stopping at the end of the day and rejoining the human universe."
29
"This was a great magic. Festin had no more performed it than has any man who in exile or danger longs for the earth and waters of his home, seeing and yearning over the doorsill of his house, the table where he has eaten, the branches outside the window of the room where he has slept. Only in dreams do any but the great Mages realize this magic of going home."
29
"In the sixties, for anybody to suggest that the government didn't have our best interests at heart and policemen sometimes killed people would have automatically made them a radical firebrand lefty. That's not the case anymore."
29
"There are African-American families around this country - a large, large number of African-American families - that operate out of complete fear that their kids are going to be taken from them and will do anything to prevent that."
29
"For grief has always been so dear to you that you would make me writhing in pain in the brothel of your imaginations than to be playing with a bunch of balloons in the yard where I should have been.'And may be that's why, you'd rather talk to me about this, than to write a story about me where I could live happily."
29
"Racism is a physical experience."
29
"We have been very conditioned by the cultures that we come from and are usually very identified with the particular gender that we happen to be a member of."
29
"A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you don't feel the pain. Your belly is whole and that's what counts. A half-yard away someone's world is snuffled out in roaring agony-and you feel nothing. That's the misery of the world."
29
"Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms."
29
"Her eyes were like the sea before a storm on the Carolina coast."
29
"I do believe that the genre reached its peak before the First World War."
29
"In a Universe with infinite possibilities we don't have to have our hearts set on just one."
29
"Don't you see? You and he might never cross paths again. Of course, a chance meeting could occur, and I hope it happens. I really do, for your sake. But realistically speaking, you have to see there's a huge possibility you'll never be able to meet him again. And even if you do meet, he might already be married to somebody else. He might have two kids. Isn't that so? And in that case, you may have to live the rest of your life alone, never being joined with the one person you love in all the world. Don't you find that scary?"
29
"I don't think anyone wants a reader to be completely lost - certainly not to the point of giving up - but there's something to be said for a book that isn't instantly disposable, that rewards a second reading."
29
"Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull."
29
"We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win."
29
"I didn't want readers to have to make allowances for what they couldn't see, but to be able to say to themselves that the fabric of the magic detailed was perfectly believable."
29
"Most of us readily take things for granted that at an earlier time remained to be discovered."
Time,
29
"I bet it gets pretty lonely with only your ego for company."
29
"When you please others in hopes of being accepted, you lose you self-worth in the process."
29
"Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your won presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement."
29
"You can't believe what a lovely planet we have until you see her from outside."
29
"Clinging to any form of conservatism can be dangerous. Become too conservative and you are unprepared for surprises. You cannot depend on luck. Logic is blind and often knows only its own past. Logic is good for playing chess but is often too slow for the needs of survival."
29
"We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone MADE equal. Each man man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against."
29
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