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Quotes by Writer
"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
"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
"We lived longer but at a price. We had to be our own children, having none."
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
"What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?"
7
"I wonder what it is that the people who criticize me for telling this story truly object to: is it that I have dared to tell the story? Or that the story turns out not to be the one they wanted to hear?"
7
"We cannot attribute to fortune or virtue that which is achieved without either."
7
"The people who influence you are the people who believe in you."
7
"People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it's only the outward form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich."
7
"I tried to use the questions and answers as an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversation."
7
"Pink colors my world red!"
7
"Politeness is the art of choosing among your thoughts."
7
"Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all."
7
"It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor."
7
"Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide."
7
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