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Quotes by Writer
"They spoke less and less between them until at last they were silent altogether as is often the way with travelers approaching the end of a journey."
7
"The best things are nearest: breath in your nostrils light in your eyes flowers at your feet duties at your hand the path of God just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars but do life's plain common work as it comes certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things of life."
7
"Moderation is the feebleness and sloth of the soul, whereas ambition is the warmth and activity of it."
7
"Learn to ask for what you want. The worst people can do is not give you what you ask for which is precisely where you were before you asked."
7
"Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction."
7
"Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is."(Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)"
7
"Preserving tradition has become a nice hobby, like stamp collecting."
7
"Eco sees the intellectual as an organizer of culture, someone who can run a magazine or a museum. An administrator, in fact. I think this is a melancholy situation for an intellectual."
7
"Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken."
7
"I've always had a love affair with the ocean. It's my one and only true love."
7
"Every civilization depends on the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness-- they cannot work and their civilization collapses."
7
"I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time."
7
"People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. They did not give or ask for reasons. 'Reason,' Dr. Pritchett had told them, 'is the most naive of all superstitions.' 'The source of public opinion?' said Claude Slagenhop in a public radio speech. 'There is no source of public opinion. It is spontaneously general. It is a reflex of the collective instinct of the collective mind."
7
"When a baby comes into the world, its hands are clenched, right? Like this?" He made a fist. "Why? Because a baby, not knowing any better, wants to grab everything, to say, 'The whole world is mine.' "But when an old person dies, how does he do so? With his hands open. Why? Because he has learned his lesson." What lesson? I asked. He stretched open his empty fingers. "We can take nothing with us."
7
"Standing before costly objects of technological beauty, we may be tempted to reject the possibility of awe, for fear that we could grow stupid through admiration. We may feel at risk of becoming overimpressed by architecture and engineering, of being dumbstruck by the Bombardier trains that progress driverlessly between satellites or by the General Electric GE90 engines that hang lightly off the composite wings of a Boeing 777 bound for Seoul. And yet to refuse to be awed at all might in the end be merely another kind of foolishness."
7
"God would never make man in his image,because that would then make him as vain as what man is."
7
"Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way."
7
"No one cares about the artist Kafka, who troubles us with his puzzling aesthetic, because we'd rather have Kafka as the fusion of experience and work, the Kafka who had a difficult relationship with his father and didn't know how to deal with women."
7
"The BBC has the obligation to think big. And at the moment, that clarion call sounds an uncertain note to me."
7
"Admittedly great though these reasons be, they are not the principal grounds, that is, those which may rightfully claim for themselves the privilege of the highest admiration."
7
"What joy can the years bring half so sweet as the unhappiness they've taken away?"
7
"If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility."
7
"Constitutions become the ultimate tyranny," Paul said. "They're organized power on such a scale as to be overwhelming. The constitution is social power mobilized and it has no conscience. It can crush the highest and the lowest, removing all dignity and individuality. It has an unstable balance point and no limitations."
7
"It is not death that allows us to understand each other, but poetry."
7
"If we fear failure, how then will we handle success?"
7
"And even if you cared what they had to say, would you act upon their opinions and create your life from it? No. Than stop replaying their toxic words in your head, it's no good for your being and start doing the things that once made you, you."
7
"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."
7
"The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it."
7
"Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves."
7
"I was a tomboy and most of my close friends were male."
7
"When the owner of the pig arrived he found a scrawny and bloodcovered white boychild standing on what was left of his property sawing at it with a knife and hauling on the skin and cursing. The dirty half flayed pig looked like something recovered from a shallow grave."
7
"The tree of possibilities: life as it reveals itself to a man arriving, astonished, at the threshold of his adult life: an abundant treetop canopy filled with bees singing. And he thinks he understands why she never showed him the letters: she wanted to hear the murmur of the tree by herself, without him, because he, Jean-Marc, represented the abolition of all possibilities, he was the reduction, (even though it was a happy reduction) of her life to a single possibility."
7
"There is no God and we are his prophets."
7
"An old villa surrounded by a garden looked to them like the image of a comforting home, the dream of an idyll long past."
7
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