Ifs And Quotes (page 582)
Don't you see? We've become smart enough to justify stupid behavior. Like, 'I'm angry at him and I didn't express it, so I turned my anger inward and now it's depression, so in order to feel good again, what I should do is call him and express my anger.' It's like, if we can make it sound smart enough, we're allowed to do stupid things.
Carrie Fisher
I was waiting for my body receipt when Morelli walked in. He nodded to Ranger and grinned at me in my whiteness.
“I was at my desk, and Mickey told me I had to come out to take a look,” Morelli said.
“It’s floor,” I told him.
“I can see that. If we add some milk and eggs, we can turn you into a cake.
Janet Evanovich
There's nothing to stop a man from writing unless that manstops himself. If a man truly desires to write, then he will. Rejection and ridicule will only strengthen him. And the longerhe is held back the stronger he will become, like a mass of risingwater against a dam. There is no losing in writing, it will make your toes laughas you sleep, it will make you stride like a tiger, it will firethe eye and put you face to face with death. You will die a fighter, you will be honored in hell. The...
Charles Bukowski
Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.
C. S. Lewis
It's a lovely day today. So whatever you've got to do. You've got a lovely day to do it in, that's true. And I hope whatever you've got to do. Is something that can be done by two. For I'd really like to stay. It's a lovely day today. And whatever you've got to do. I'd be so happy to be doing it with you. But if you've got something that must be done. And it can only be done by one. There is nothing more to say. Except it's a lovely day for saying. It's a lovely day!
Irving Berlin
When I opened my eyes I saw nothing but the pool of nocturnal sky, for I was lying on my back with out-stretched arms, face to face with that hatchery of stars. Only half awake, still unaware that those depths were sky, having no roof between those depths and me, no branches to screen them, no root to cling to, I was seized with vertigo and felt myself as if flung forth and plunging downward like a diver.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
To knot a sentence up properly, it has to be thought out carefully, and revised. New phrases have to be put in; sudden changes of subject must be introducted; verbs must be shifted to unsuspected localities; short words must be excised with ruthless hand; archaisms must be sprinkled like sugar-plums upon the concoction; the fatal human tendency to say things straightforwardly must be detected and defeated by adroit reversals; and, if a glimmer of meaning yet remain under close scrutiny, it...
Aleister Crowley
Times of terror and the deepest misery may arrive, but if there is to be any happiness in this misery it can only be a spiritual happiness, related to the past in the rescue of the culture of early ages and to the future in a serene and indefatigable championship of the spirit in a time which would otherwise completely swallow up the material.
Herman Hesse
The only deep emotion I occasionally felt in these affairs was gratitude, when all was going well and I was left, not only peace, but freedom to come and go--never kinder and gayer with one woman than when I had just left another's bed, as if I extended to all others the debt I had just contracted toward one of them.
Albert Camus
Don Pedro - (...)'In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke.'Benedick - The savage bull may, but if ever the sensible Benedick bear it, pluck off the bull's horns and set them in my forehead, and let me be vildly painted; and in such great letters as they writes, 'Here is good horse for hire', let them signify under my sign, 'Here you may see Benedick the married man.
William Shakespeare
My HeartI'm not going to cry all the timenor shall I laugh all the time, I don't prefer one "strain" to another. I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie, not just a sleeper, but also the big, overproduced first-run kind. I want to be at least as alive as the vulgar. And if some aficionado of my mess says "That's not like Frank!," all to the good! I don't wear brown and grey suits all the time, do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera, often. I want my feet to be bare, I want my face to be...
Frank O'Hara
She is a woman of honour and smartness whose wild leaves out luck, always taking risks, and there is something in her brow now, that only she can recognize in a mirror. Ideal and idealistic in that shiny dark hair! People fall in love with her. She is a woman I don’t know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life.
Michael Ondaatje
Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud--that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and...
Ayn Rand