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Quotes by Writer
"No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home."
59
"They are bright and exciting. Like America. Like its women."
59
"Having not said anything the first time, it was somehow even more difficult to broach the subject the second time around."
59
"Our virtues are often, in reality, no better than vices disguised."
59
"Solvency is entirely a matter of temperament and not of income."
59
"Anything that changes your values changes your behavior."
59
"You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you."
59
"Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast."
59
"The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone."
59
"It's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself."
59
"Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time."
59
"As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul."
59
"Easily the best thing in her life at the moment was her secret."
59
"If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility."
59
"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind."
59
"But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last."
59
"I have learned how I work best, and that is something that, if you're going to be a professional writer, you should be noticing: under what circumstances you work at your best, and to not get yourself cornered into writing in a way that doesn't let you do your best."
59
"Love what you do and do what you love. Don't listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it. You do what you want, what you love. Imagination should be the center of your life."
59
"We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts."
59
"Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness."
59
"The heart beneath the breastbone pumping. The blood on its appointed rounds. Life in small places, narrow crannies. In the leaves, the toad's pulse. The delicate cellular warfare in a waterdrop. A dextrocardiac, said the smiling doctor. Your heart's in the right place. Weathershrunk and loveless. The skin drawn and split like an overripe fruit."
59
"Originals cost more than imitations."
59
"The essence of life is finding something you really love and then making the daily experience worthwhile."
59
"Determination gives you the resolve to keep going in spite of the roadblocks that lay before you."
59
"Sophia shrieked and fainted on the ground - I screamed and instantly ran mad. We remained thus mutually deprived of our senses, some minutes, and on regaining them were deprived of them again. For an Hour and a Quarter did we continue in this unfortunate situation - Sophia fainting every moment and I running mad as often. At length a groan from the hapless Edward (who alone retained any share of life) restored us to ourselves."
59
"Few people know how to be old."
59
"You can accomplish by kindness what you cannot by force."
59
"By continually pushing the message that we have the right to gratification now, consumerism at its most expansive encouraged a demand for fulfillment that could not so easily be contained by products."
59
"Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude."
59
"They are of the dream time. I don't understand it, I can't say it in words. Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes. . . .But when the mind becomes conscious, when the rate of evolution speeds up, then you have to be careful. Careful of the world. You must learn the way. You must learn the skills, the art, the limits. A conscious mind must be part of the whole, intentionally and carefully--as the rock is part of the whole unconsciously. Do you see? Does it mean anything to you?"
59
"I've been a teacher at the college level, in composition mostly, and I've been an editor on magazines."
58
"There are no mistakes or failures, only lessons."
58
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