No Work Quotes (page 36)
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I don't know how much you understand about what is happening outside your locked room, but strangely enough (despite your personality), you have a number of loyal idiots working on your behalf. I have already established an elite body called The Knights of the Idiotic Table. We will be holding an annual dinner at which we'll have fun talking crap about you. (No, you're not invited).
Steig Larsson
Everything was red, the air, the sun, whatever I looked at. Except for him. I fell in love with someone who was human. I watched him walk through the hills and come back in the evening when his work was through. I saw things no woman would see: that he knew how to cry, that he was alone. I cast myself at him, like a fool, but he didn't see me. And then one day he noticed I was beautiful and he wanted me. He broke me off and took me with him, in his hands, and I didn't care that I was dying...
Alice Hoffman
REST IN PEACE, MR. PARKER.
'You want us to be surreptitious?' Hawk said.
'Surreptitious?' Sapp said.
'I educated in Head Start,' Hawk said.
'Really worked,' Sapp said.
'No reason to be covert,' I said.
'You too?' Sapp said.
'Nope,' I said. 'I'm a straight Anglo white guy of European ancestry. We're naturally smart.'
'You missed Bernard,' Sapp said.
'Tall straight Anglo white guy,' I said.
'Hey,' Bernard said.
Robert B. Parker
As I understand it, I am being paid only for my work in arranging the words; my property is that arrangement. The thoughts in this book, on the contrary, are not mine. They came freely to me, and I give them freely away. I have no "intellectual property," and I think that all claimants to such property are theives.
Wendell Berry
I do think free will is sewn into everything we do; you can't cross a street, light a cigarette, drop saccharine in your coffee without really doing it. Yet the possible alternatives that life allows us are very few, often there must be none. I've never thought there was any choice for me about writing poetry. No doubt if I used my head better, ordered my life better, worked harder etc., the poetry would be improved, and there must be many lost poems, innumerable accidents and ill-done...
Robert Lowell
Carrying his books from one life into the next was nothing new to Zuckerman. He had left his family for Chicago in 1949 carrying in his suitcase the annotated works of Thomas Wolfe and Roget's Thesaurus. Four years later, age twenty, he left Chicago with five cartons of classics, bought secondhand out of his spending money, to be stored in his parents' attic while he served two years in the Army. In 1960, when he was divorced from Betsy, there were thirty cartons to be packed from the shelves...
Philip Roth
Someone has to do it. It's all very well calling for eye of newt, but do you mean Common, Spotted or Great Crested? Which eye, anyway? Will tapioca do just as well? If we substitute egg white will the spell a) work b) fail or c) melt the bottom out of the cauldron? Goodie Whemper's curiosity about such things was huge and insatiable*.* Nearly insatiable. It was probably satiated in her last flight to test whether a broomstick could survive having its bristles pulled out one by one in mid-air....
Terry Prachett
Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer's habit to remember nothing good of himself. I have usually forgotten those who have admired my work, and seldom anyone who disliked it. Obviously, this is because praise is never enough and censure always too much.
Ben Hecht
I mostly want to remind her of the recipes of healing, and give her my own made-on-the spot remedy for the easing of her pain. I tell her, “Get a pen. Stop crying so you can write this down and start working on it tonight.” My remedy is long. But the last item on the list says: “When you wake up and find yourself living someplace where there is nobody you love and trust, no community, it is time to leave town – to pack up and go (you can even go tonight). And where you need to go is any place...
Bell Hooks
Just because things happen slow doesn't mean you'll be ready for them. If they happened fast, you'd be alert for all kinds of suddenness, aware that speed was trump. "Slow" works in an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there's plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you'll always be slower.
Richard Russo
All right, then, I'll go to hell' -and tore it up. It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head; and I said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn't. And for a starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in,...
Mark Twain
Ride with an outlaw, die with him," he added. "I admit it's a harsh code. But you rode on the other side long enough to know how it works. I'm sorry you crossed the line, though." Jake's momentary optimism had passed, and he felt tired and despairing. He would have liked a good bed in a whorehouse and a nice night's sleep. "I never seen no line, Gus," he said. "I was just trying to get to Kansas without getting scalped.
Larry McMurtry