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Quotes by Writer

"On the same line of reasoning, if Australians were to be Australians, or rather if Australians were as separate from any other nation as Australia from any other land, there would be no jealousy between them on England's account."


"Leadership has become a heavy industry. Concern and interest about leadership development is no longer an American phenomenon. It is truly global. Though I will probably be in less demand, I wanted to move on."

"Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God. But democracy is a forgiving God and America's heresies-torture, theft, enslavement-are so common among individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune."

"Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist."

"The wisest were just the poor and simple people. They knew the war to be a misfortune, whereas those who were better off, and should have been able to see more clearly what the consequences would be, were beside themselves with joy."

"There were times he thought it would have been far better to never have known. Yet he continued to return to his core principle: that, in every situation, knowledge was better than ignorance. However agonizing, it was necessary to confront the facts. Only through knowing could a person become strong."


"A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. . . . Loneliness fosters that which is original, daringly and bewilderingly beautiful, poetic. But loneliness also fosters that which is perverse, incongruous, absurd, forbidden."

"Perhaps it should only be added that the Gorean master, though often strict, is seldom cruel. The girl knows, if she pleases him, her lot will be an easy one."
Will,

"As for sticking strictly to presently known science, I will simply point out that we have already experienced at least two major revolutions in science in this century alone."

"I outline fairly extensively because I'm usually dealing with real events. I don't need to give myself as much information as I used to, but I still like to have two pages of outline for every projected 100 pages of manuscript."

"When a writer knows home in his heart, his heart must remain subtly apart from it."

"Poetry transforms and redeems the common, the hurtful, the humiliating."

"But hey, what's life without a little adversity?'That had to have been the fakest attempt at optimism since my fourth grade teacher tried reasoning that we were better off without the dead kids in our class because it'd mean more turns on the playground swings for the rest of us."

"Compassion can be learned through example."

"For the first few years we lived in a tiny rented cottage at the bottom of a friend's garden. We often joked that there was plenty of film in the fridge, but not too much food!"


"In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality."

"She sat listening to the music. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance."

"Life produces a different taste each time you take it."

"What the ten commandments set forth is a strategy. This strategy is a strategy for dominion."

"Maybe it's easier to conform, to stay in a job I hate to pay bills of the things I don't even enjoy and marry a man I'm not passionately in love with, whilst surrounded by those who have absolutely no life to their smile but I don't want easy. I never have. I want a life so fucking grande' I reach every little milestone in sweats or tears knowing I Followed what was true to my heart. I don't care if I walk alone for the rest of my days, if it means I get to stay true to myself."


"Shevek saw that he had touched in these men an impersonal animosity that went very deep. Apparently they, like the tables on the ship, contained a woman, a suppressed, silenced, bestialized woman, a fury in a cage. He had no right to tease them. They knew no relation but possession. They were possessed."


"Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change you believe in."

"An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination."

"The problem with human race is not that it errs, but that it does so repetitively."


"They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas."
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