Figuring It Quotes (page 20)
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Grady knew no one she thought less attractive than Mink, or more preposterous than Winifred: yet together and around them they made a clear, lovely, light: it was as if, out of their ordinary stone, their massive unshaped selves, something precious had been set free, a figure musical and pure: she could not but pay it homage.
Truman Capote
Years ago, when I was about to go on a book tour for Someplace to Be Flying, my editor at the time Terri Windling and I sat down to figure out what to call what I was writing for the interviews that were to come. Terri came up with the term mythic fiction and I think that sums it up perfectly. There are almost invariably mythic elements in my fiction (as well as bits of folk and faerie lore) and the term doesn’t lock me into writing only in an urban setting since many of my stories take place...
Charles de Lint
When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.
Flannery O'Connor
When I was young - really young - I used to think that the kids who had money, who were popular at school and who did well at things must have had horrible home lives - abusive parents or nasty siblings or lived in cupboard under stairs.
It’s kind of sick when you think about it, but what I figured was that life should be fair - everyone had to have good and bad things in their lives, and no one could have a wholly good life or a wholly bad life because that would upset the balance of...
Skylar Laine
All teenagers knew this was true. The process of growing up was nothing more than figuring out what doors hadn't yet been slammed in your face. For years, parents tell you that you can be anything, have anything, do anything. That was why she'd been so eager to grow up-until she got to adolescence and hit a big fat wall ofreality. As it turned out, she couldn't have anything she wanted. You didn't get to be pretty or smart or popular just because you wanted it. You didn't control your own...
Jodi Picoult
I half closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy, and he'd wave, and maybe even call.
Kazuo Ishiguro
There’s a whole psychological reason for those cartoons about good against evil. We have "Superman" and all those other hero people, so that we can go out into life and try to be something. I’ve got most of Disney’s animated movies on video-tapes, and when we watch them. Oh, I could just eat it, eat it. […] Jimmy Cricket, Pinocchio, Mickey Mouse – these are world-known characters. Some of the greatest political figures have come to the United States to meet them.
Michael Jackson
With Jason I thought I'd finally played my cards right, and now I'm just one more of thosebroken, sad people out there, figuring out a year in advance where they can have Easter and. Christmas dinner without feeling like a burden or duty to others, cursing the quality of modernmovies because it's so hard to fill weeknights with movies when they're all crap, and waiting, justwaiting, for those three drinks a night to turn into four - and then, well, then I'll be applying mymakeup in the...
Doug Coupland
that manic depression, far from being a liability was an advantage. It was a selected trait. If it wasn't selected for, then the "disorder" would have disappeared long ago, bred out of the population like anything else that didn't increase the odds of survival. The advantage was obvious. The advantage was the energy, the creativity, the feeling of genius, almost, that Leonard felt right now. There was no telling how many great historical figures had been manic-depressives, how many...
Jeffrey Eugenides
Without love, loyalty, desires, passion, courage, dignities, faith, beliefs and all the other ingredients that go into making the human soul something so elevated that only God knows its limits, we are only shells bobbing aimlessly in a calm sea of mediocrity. ...And if you can figure that out, please write and explain it to me because you're a better man than I am.
Sylvester Stallone