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Quotes by Writer
"I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect."
23
"For anyone to open their heart, they need the right atmosphere, and something to prompt them. For my mother it was her trip abroad: she was in a very relaxed, understanding environment. I was very sympathetic towards her."
23
"But it had been widely argued that advanced intelligence could never arise in the sea, there were not enough challenges in so benign and unvarying an environment."
23
"I have the advantage of knowing your habits, my dear Watson," said he. "When your round is a short one you walk, and when it is a long one you use a hansom. As I perceive that your boots, although used, are by no means dirty, I cannot doubt that you are at present busy enough to justify the hansom." "Excellent!" I cried. "Elementary," said he. "It is one of those instances where the reasoner can produce an effect which seems remarkable to his neighbour, because the latter has missed the one little point which is the basis of the deduction. The same may be said, my dear fellow, for the effect of some of these little sketches of yours, which is entirely meretricious, depending as it does upon your retaining in your own hands some factors in the problem which are never imparted to the reader."
23
"Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That's part of what it means to be alive."
23
"I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed I suppose."
23
"The proximity of a desirable thing tempts one to overindulgence. On that path lies danger."
23
"Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears."
23
"Insane people give me hope.""What!!!!" I almost dropped my beer."The insane have decided to stay on," Crumley said. "They love life so much that, rather than destroy it, they go behind a self-made wall to hide. Pretend not to hear, but the do hear. Pretend not to see, but see. Insanity says: I hate living but love life. Hate the rules but do like me. So, rather than drop in graves, I hide out. Not in liquor, nor in bed under sheets, nor in a needle's prick or snuffs of white powder, but in madness. On my own shelf, in my own rafters, under my own silent roof. So, yeah, insane people give me hope. Courage to go on being sand and alive, always with the cure at hand, should I ever tire and need it: madness."
23
"It's not like the original movie where you thought it was the mother committing the murders, but it was actually the son. I don't think it's possible to create the kind of shock today that we created in 1959. And I don't even want to try."
23
"Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion."
23
"The walls around the hood keep the people on the inside from the changes on the outside."
23
"I'll never love you anymore than I do, right this second. And I'll never love you any less than Ido, right this second."
23
"Nothing makes you feel that you've overstayed your welcome like a flower arrangement that has withered and died."
23
"Truth is what reconciles thought and experience."
23
"Youth is a terrible thing: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and fancy costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand."
23
"People don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue - a highly intellectual virtue - out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt... They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear."
23
"The surveillance, he thought, essentially should be maintained. And, if possible, by me. I should always be watching, watching and figuring out, even if I never do anything about what I see; even if I just sit there and observe silently, not seen: that is important, that I as a watcher of all that happens should be at my place."
23
"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man."
23
"I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend's voice arises: and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?"
23
"I wasn't even that lovable to begin with. I was a selfish ass, but somehow something I did made this man love me, deeply and without reservations. He knew things about me that I would die to keep secret. I trusted him more than I trusted anyone in my life. I mattered to him. He was suffering and I wanted it to stop. I wanted to see him happy. I loved him so much."
23
"Time is the worst place, so to speak, to get lost in, as Arthur Dent could testify, having been lost in both time and space a good deal. At least being lost in space kept you busy."
23
"We all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it."
23
"It's time to fly.Care to join me?"
23
"The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see."
23
"It was growing dark on this long southern evening, and suddenly, at the exact point her finger had indicated, the moon lifted a forehead of stunning gold above the horizon, lifted straight out of filigreed, light-intoxicated clouds that lay on the skyline in attendant veils. Behind us, the sun was setting in a simultaneous congruent withdrawal and the river turned to flame in a quiet duel of gold....The new gold of moon astonishing and ascendant, he depleted gold of sunset extinguishing itself in the long westward slide, it was the old dance of days in the Carolina marshes, the breathtaking death of days before the eyes of children, until the sun vanished, its final signature a ribbon of bullion strung across the tops of water oaks."
23
"From the day we touched these stolen shores, he'd explain to anyone who'd listen, they infected our minds. They deployed their phrenologists, their backward Darwinists, and forged a false Knowledge to keep us down. But against this demonology, there were those who battled back. Universities scorned them. Compromised professors scoffed at their names. So they published themselves and hawked their Knowledge at street fairs, churches, and bazaars.For their efforts, they were forgotten. Their great works languished out of print, while those they sought to save grew fat on integration and amnesia."
23
"Learn, or you'll be made to learn."
23
"We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves."
23
"On paper, being good sounds great but a lot depends on the atmosphere of the workplace or community we live in. We tend to become good or bad depending on the cues sent out within a particular space."
23
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