"A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading."
William Styron
Saturday, June 27, 2009
James Baldwin
"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."
James Baldwin
James Baldwin
Anna Quindlen
"Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home."
Anna Quindlen
Anna Quindlen
Friday, June 26, 2009
Walt Whitman
"I depart as air—I shake my white locks at the runaway sun;
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you …"
Walt Whitman
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you …"
Walt Whitman
Reginald Hill
"When we dead awake it will be to each of us as if but a second ago we had felt the pangs of dying, the explosion in the head, the drowning of the lungs, the fingers tightening around the throat. What a noise of screaming and wailing there will be at that moment! … Silence and amazement as we realise pain is no more … and then the onset of such a fear at the strangeness and uncertainty of this awakening that as we remember forever that unattainable past - sunlight… sea … the pleasures of mind and appetite, even the pains of dying - will seem more desirable to us than all the fabled joys of immortality. Even your lonely, frightened and unhappy existence will beckon you backward with siren song Dalziel. Even that Dalziel. Even that ..."
Reginald Hill
Reginald Hill
Wilfred Owen
Move him into the sun -
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds, -
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved -still warm -too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds, -
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved -still warm -too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Charles Frazier
"She fit her head under his chin, and he could feel her weight settle into him. He held her tight and words spilled out of him without prior composition. And this time he made no effort to clamp them off. He told her about the first time he had looked on the back of her neck as she sat in the church pew. Of the feeling that had never let go of him since. He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, Inman said, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you are. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you. Nevertheless, over all those wasted years, he had held in his mind the wish to kiss her on the back of her neck, and now he had done it. There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred."
Charles Frazier
Charles Frazier
W.S. Merwin
"Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color."
W.S. Merwin
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color."
W.S. Merwin
Alice Munro
Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you."
Alice Munro
Alice Munro
Pam Houston
"I wanted her to see that the only life worth living is a life full of love; that loss is always part of the equation; that love and loss conjoined are the best opportunity we get to live fully, to be our strongest, our most compassionate, our most graceful selves. "
Pam Houston
Pam Houston
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
On writing
"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."
- Ernest Hemingway
"Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."
- Mark Twain
"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."
— Maya Angelou
"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
— Toni Morrison
"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."
— Stephen King
"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
— Mark Twain
"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."
— J.D. Salinger
"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
— Oscar Wilde
"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."
— Winston S. Churchill
"Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a blank piece of paper until your forehead bleeds."
— Douglas Adams
"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
— Sylvia Plath
"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
— Anaïs Nin
"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."
— Robert Frost
"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
— Ray Bradbury
"If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."
— Isaac Asimov
"We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."
— Kurt Vonnegut
"Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."
— Virginia Woolf
"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
— Flannery O'Connor
"There are books by which the backs and covers are by far the best parts."
— Charles Dickens
"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
— Kurt Vonnegut
"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."
— Stephen King
"If you love to write, then write. Don't let your goal be having a novel published, let your goal be enjoying your stories. However, if you finish your story and you want to share it, be brave about it. Don't doubt your story's appeal. If you are a good reader, and you know what is interesting, and your story is interesting to you, then trust in that. If I would have realized that the stories in my head would be as intriguing to others as they were to me, I would probably have started writing sooner. Believe in your own taste."
— Stephenie Meyer
"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."
— Virginia Woolf
"Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters."
— Neil Gaiman
"You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write."
— Saul Bellow
"I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone."
— Mark Twain
"People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy."
— Joss Whedon
"So what? All writers are lunatics!"
— Cornelia Funke
"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."
— Jack Kerouac
"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."
— John Steinbeck
"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
— Thomas Mann
"Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted."
— Jules Renard
"One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper."
— Michael Cunningham
"The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself."
"You are what you write."
— Helvy Tiana Rosa
"Write what should not be forgotten."
— Isabel Allende
"Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either."
— Meg Cabot
"The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do."
— Thomas Jefferson
"Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins."
— Neil Gaiman
"Easy reading is damn hard writing."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
"I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?"
— J.R.R. Tolkien
"A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger. "
— Stephen King
"I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions."
— James A. Michener
"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself."
— Albert Camus
"If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it."
— Anaïs Nin
"Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write."
— Rainer Maria Rilke
- Ernest Hemingway
"Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."
- Mark Twain
"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."
— Maya Angelou
"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
— Toni Morrison
"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."
— Stephen King
"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
— Mark Twain
"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."
— J.D. Salinger
"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
— Oscar Wilde
"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."
— Winston S. Churchill
"Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a blank piece of paper until your forehead bleeds."
— Douglas Adams
"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
— Sylvia Plath
"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
— Anaïs Nin
"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."
— Robert Frost
"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
— Ray Bradbury
"If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."
— Isaac Asimov
"We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."
— Kurt Vonnegut
"Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."
— Virginia Woolf
"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
— Flannery O'Connor
"There are books by which the backs and covers are by far the best parts."
— Charles Dickens
"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
— Kurt Vonnegut
"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."
— Stephen King
"If you love to write, then write. Don't let your goal be having a novel published, let your goal be enjoying your stories. However, if you finish your story and you want to share it, be brave about it. Don't doubt your story's appeal. If you are a good reader, and you know what is interesting, and your story is interesting to you, then trust in that. If I would have realized that the stories in my head would be as intriguing to others as they were to me, I would probably have started writing sooner. Believe in your own taste."
— Stephenie Meyer
"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."
— Virginia Woolf
"Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters."
— Neil Gaiman
"You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write."
— Saul Bellow
"I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone."
— Mark Twain
"People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy."
— Joss Whedon
"So what? All writers are lunatics!"
— Cornelia Funke
"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."
— Jack Kerouac
"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."
— John Steinbeck
"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
— Thomas Mann
"Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted."
— Jules Renard
"One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper."
— Michael Cunningham
"The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself."
"You are what you write."
— Helvy Tiana Rosa
"Write what should not be forgotten."
— Isabel Allende
"Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either."
— Meg Cabot
"The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do."
— Thomas Jefferson
"Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins."
— Neil Gaiman
"Easy reading is damn hard writing."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
"I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?"
— J.R.R. Tolkien
"A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger. "
— Stephen King
"I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions."
— James A. Michener
"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself."
— Albert Camus
"If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it."
— Anaïs Nin
"Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write."
— Rainer Maria Rilke
David Bullard
"I went onto Twitter at the suggestion of a colleague who is slightly younger than I am and has become a social media evangelist. This apparently is the way to go and before long the whole world will communicate in short sound bites (or maybe bytes) with one another. "Nation shall speak crap unto nation" to bastardise the motto of the British Broadcasting Authority. This would all be terribly exciting if a) I could work out how to make money from it and b) people said anything of consequence.
I haven't bothered to set my cell phone up for Twitter so I only check in when I am online but that is bad enough. I'm following a couple of geeks who went to a "geekretreat" last weekend. Where's the Enola Gay when you need her? They get terribly excited about new gadgets and obviously they burble on about them to each on Twitter which is all a bit sad. Then there's the person I am following who has written books and is known to be witty. So why is she writing that she has just eaten a custard cream biscuit or telling us about her washing machine? Most of the other entries are just as banal. Someone Twittered the other day that he had just found his seat at what used to be called Ellis Park and was looking forward to the game. Now, who goes to Ellis Park and bothers to get a cellphone out to tell people he doesn't even know that he is about to watch a soccer match? This is seriously boring.
The great virtue of Twitter is that all these banalities are restricted to 140 characters so at least the messages are short and boring rather than long and boring. However, they add no value to my life which is why I think I might have to de-Twitter myself. Although nobody is saying anything of much interest we still think this is cool because its, like, technology innit? Thanks to things like Facebook and Twitter we are becoming absorbed in trivial minutiae and losing our ability to think and converse. Personally I'd rather have a good face to face argument and I can't do that if I'm restricted to 140 characters on a website. I'd much prefer to have a conversation with a real person over a convivial lunch than blast off short messages to people I hardly know. The problem is that as more people accept Facebook and Twitter as the normal way to communicate with their fellow human beings the stock of conversationalists is going to dry up. I might be forced to read Ulysses after all."
I haven't bothered to set my cell phone up for Twitter so I only check in when I am online but that is bad enough. I'm following a couple of geeks who went to a "geekretreat" last weekend. Where's the Enola Gay when you need her? They get terribly excited about new gadgets and obviously they burble on about them to each on Twitter which is all a bit sad. Then there's the person I am following who has written books and is known to be witty. So why is she writing that she has just eaten a custard cream biscuit or telling us about her washing machine? Most of the other entries are just as banal. Someone Twittered the other day that he had just found his seat at what used to be called Ellis Park and was looking forward to the game. Now, who goes to Ellis Park and bothers to get a cellphone out to tell people he doesn't even know that he is about to watch a soccer match? This is seriously boring.
The great virtue of Twitter is that all these banalities are restricted to 140 characters so at least the messages are short and boring rather than long and boring. However, they add no value to my life which is why I think I might have to de-Twitter myself. Although nobody is saying anything of much interest we still think this is cool because its, like, technology innit? Thanks to things like Facebook and Twitter we are becoming absorbed in trivial minutiae and losing our ability to think and converse. Personally I'd rather have a good face to face argument and I can't do that if I'm restricted to 140 characters on a website. I'd much prefer to have a conversation with a real person over a convivial lunch than blast off short messages to people I hardly know. The problem is that as more people accept Facebook and Twitter as the normal way to communicate with their fellow human beings the stock of conversationalists is going to dry up. I might be forced to read Ulysses after all."
Jolene Mottern
"Time does not heal all wounds, parts of us remain broken, and it's loving the broken pieces for what they are that allows us to feel whole."
AA Milne
"You can't stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes."
AA Milne
AA Milne
AA Milne
"If the person you are talking to doesn't appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear."
AA Milne
AA Milne
C.S. Lewis
"I am a product [...of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass."
C.S. Lewis
C.S. Lewis
Helen Fielding
"I will not fall for any of the following: alcoholics, workaholics, commitment phobics, people with girlfriends or wives, misogynists, megalomanics, chauvists, emotional fuckwits or freeloaders, perverts."
Helen Fielding
Helen Fielding
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
George Eliot
"A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one's heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away."
George Eliot
George Eliot
Stephenie Meyer
"He is like a drug to you, Bella." His voice was still gentle, not at all critical. "I see that you can't live without him now. It's too late. But I would have been healthier for you. Not a drug; I would have been the air, the sun."
The corner of my mouth turned up in a wistful half smile. "I used to think of you that way, you know. Like the sun. My personal sun. You balanced out the clouds nicely for me."
He Sighed. "The clouds I can handle. But I can't fight with an eclipse."
Stephenie Meyer
The corner of my mouth turned up in a wistful half smile. "I used to think of you that way, you know. Like the sun. My personal sun. You balanced out the clouds nicely for me."
He Sighed. "The clouds I can handle. But I can't fight with an eclipse."
Stephenie Meyer
Tana French
"The girls I dream of are the gentle ones, wistful by high windows or singing sweet old songs at a piano, long hair drifting, tender as apple blossom. But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver. Think of the first time you slept with someone, or the first time you fell in love: that blinding explosion that left you cracking to the fingertips with electricity, initiated and transformed. I tell you that was nothing, nothing at all, beside the power of putting your lives, simply and daily, into each other's hands."
Tana French
Tana French
Anita Diamant
"If you want to understand any woman you must first ask about her mother and then listen carefully. Stories about food show a strong connection. Wistful silences demonstrate unfinished business. The more a daughter knows about the details of her mother's life - without flinching or whining - the stronger the daughter."
Anita Diamant
Anita Diamant
John Dufresne
"You can't possibly conduct a proper affair without a lot of deliberating, scheming, speculating, and conniving. It's a delicate balance where the excitement must equal the guilt and sex must be as bright as the future you gamble."
John Dufresne
John Dufresne
Monday, June 22, 2009
Jim Harrison
"Birthdays are ghost bounty hunters that track you down to ask, "Que pasa, baby?"
Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison
Robert Frost
"A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age."
Robert Frost
Robert Frost
Janet Evanovich
"Romance novels are birthday cake and life is often peanut butter and jelly. I think everyone should have lots of delicious romance novels lying around for those times when the peanut butter of life gets stuck to the roof of your mouth."
Janet Evanovich
Janet Evanovich
Publius Ovidius Naso
"I grabbed a pile of dust, and holding it up, foolishly asked for as many birthdays as the grains of dust, I forgot to ask that they be years of youth. "
Publius Ovidius Naso (Metamorphoses)
Publius Ovidius Naso (Metamorphoses)
Zelda Fitzgerald
"The night you gave me my birthday party... you were a young Lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom, wasn't I? And it was a radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed that it was all going to be for the best."
Zelda Fitzgerald
Zelda Fitzgerald
Henry Miller
"You must be life for me to the very end," so he writes. "That is the only way in which to sustain my idea of you. Because you have gotten, as you see, tied up with something so vital to me, I do not think I shall ever shake you off. Nor do I wish to. I want you to live more vitally every day, as I am dead. That is why, when I speak of you to others, I am just a bit ashamed. It's hard to talk of one's self so intimately"
Henry Miller
Henry Miller
Abraham Lincoln
"And in the end it is not the years in your life that count,
It's the life in your years."
Abraham Lincoln
It's the life in your years."
Abraham Lincoln
Gilda Radner
"I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity."
Gilda Radner
Gilda Radner
Naphtali Lewis
"In the end, it is impossible not to become what others believe you are."
Naphtali Lewis
Naphtali Lewis
Stephen Colbert
"A father has to be a provider, a teacher, a role model, but most importantly, a distant authority figure who can never be pleased. Otherwise, how will children ever understand the concept of God?"
Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert
John Wilmot
"Before I got married I had six theories about raising children; now, I have six children and no theories."
- John Wilmot
- John Wilmot
Scott Dunlop
"Somewhere in the rough and tumbles, the Lego dinosaurs, the funny-voiced bedtime stories, the kidding and joking and dancing and hugs and tickling, fatherhood takes place."
Scott Dunlop
Scott Dunlop
Sunday, June 21, 2009
George Eliot
"It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves."
George Eliot
George Eliot
Anaïs Nin
"The leaf fall of his words, the stained glass hues of his moods, the rust in his voice, the smoke in his mouth, his breath on my vision like human breath blinding a mirror."
"There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don't work."
Anaïs Nin
"There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don't work."
Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin
"The leaf fall of his words, the stained glass hues of his moods, the rust in his voice, the smoke in his mouth, his breath on my vision like human breath blinding a mirror."
"There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don't work."
"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive."
"I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing."
"Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, & stumble from defeat to defeat."
"Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live."
"I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women, to enter ordinary relationships, I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic- in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself."
"There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don't work."
"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive."
"I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing."
"Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, & stumble from defeat to defeat."
"Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live."
"I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women, to enter ordinary relationships, I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic- in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself."
Anaïs Nin
"Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions."
Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin
Mary Stewart
"It is not true that women cannot keep secrets. Where they love, they can be trusted to death and beyond, against all sense and reason. It is their weakness, and their great strength. "
- Mary Stewart
- Mary Stewart
Anaïs Nin
"I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman."
Albert Einstein
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
- Albert Einstein
- Albert Einstein
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)