First Quotes (page 228)
Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism! You must achieve mastery over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice, aesthetic mastery over everything that drives you to write in the first place - your outrage, your politics, your grief, your love!
Philip Roth
Before we can successfully undertake a personal search for Jesus, we must first prepare time for him in our lives and room for him in our hearts. In these buys days there are many who have time for golf, time for shopping, time for work, time for play--but no time for Christ. Lovely homes dot the land and provide rooms for eating, rooms for sleeping, playrooms, sewing rooms, television rooms--but no room for Christ.
Thomas S. Monson
Who did you pass on the road?" the King went on, holding out his hand to the Messenger for some more hay."Nobody," said the Messenger."Quite right," said the King; "this young lady saw him too. So of course Nobody walks slower than you."I do my best," the Messenger said in a sullen tone. "I'm sure nobody walks much faster than I do!"He can't do that," said the King, "or else he'd have been here first.
Lewis Carroll
It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there had never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.
Joseph Conrad
The tent in which she first met him had smelled of blood, of the death she did not understand, and still she had thought of it all as a game. She had promised him the world. His flesh in the flesh of his enemies. And much too late had she realized what he had sown in her. Love. Worst of all poisons.
Cornelia Funke
Dantes passed through all the stages of torture natural to prisoners in suspense. He was sustained at first by that pride of conscious innocence which is the sequence to hope; then he began to doubt his own innocence, which justified in some measure the governor's belief in his mental alienation; and then, relaxing his sentiment of pride, he addressed his supplications, not to God, but to man. God is always the last resource. Unfortunates, who ought to begin with God, do not have any hope in...
Alexander Dumas
I wish we were dead together to-day, Lost sight of, hidden away out of sight, Clasped and clothed in the cloven clay, Out of the world's way, out of the light, Out of the ages of worldly weather, Forgotten of all men altogether, As the world's first dead, taken wholly away, Made one with death, filled full of the night.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
The sky was no longer blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars. Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless, and south-eastward it grew brighter to a glowing scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the huge hull of the sun, red and motionless. The rocks about me were of a harsh reddish colour, and all the trace of life that I could see at first was the intensely green vegetation that covered every projecting point on...
H. G. Wells
I didn't get fired."
"You didn't punch your boss and get fired from the Tribune? That's what I heard."
"I punched what could loosely be called a colleague for cribbing my notes on a story and since the editor–who happened to be the asshole's uncle–took his word over mine, I quit."
"To write books. Is it fun?"
"I guess it is."
"I bet you killed the asshole in the first one you wrote."
"You'd be right. Beat him to death with a shovel. Very satisfying.
Nora Roberts