20th-century Author Quotes

J. K. Rowling

Bertolt Brecht

Pablo Neruda

Isaac Asimov

William Faulkner

Aldous Huxley

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sunsets and death; death and therefore kisses, kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset watchers.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

There's only us, there's only this. Forget regret, or life is yours to miss. No other road, no other way. No day but today!

Jonathan Larson

The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering-that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man's good.

L. Sprague de Camp

Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are.

Some tears have to be cried no matter what the hour- until they are, they simply rave and burn inside.

Try not to turn your life into a race, least of all an obstacle race.

José Bergamín

An administration, like a machine, does not create. It carries on.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

My desk, most loyal friend
thank you. You've been with me on
every road I've taken.
My scar and my protection.

Marina Tsvetaeva

When debts are not paid because they cannot be paid, the best thing to do is not talk about them, and shuffle the cards again.

Camilo José Cela

In the house, and on the street, how many, many feet you meet.

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.

Not to write, for many of us, is to die. We must take ares each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout. The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory.

Sometimes I think that Darwin made a mistake and that in fact man is descended from the pig, because eight out of every ten members of the human race are swine, and as crooked as a hog's tail.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.

It is amazing how nice people are to you when they know you are going away.

You take a number of small steps which you believe are right, thinking maybe tomorrow somebody will treat this as a dangerous provocation. And then you wait. If there is no reaction, you take another step: courage is only an accumulation of small steps.

György Konrád

I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp, gaunt names that never get fat,
The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

Stephen Vincent Benét

Nothing now remains for us seven but to go back to Stable Hill, proclaim the truth, and take the adventure that Aslan sends us.

Everyone chases after happiness, not noticing that happiness is at their heels.

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863.

William Faulkner

Misery's fine - as long as you know you can get out of it when you want to.

Expecting to be able to get rid of the competitive drive, first of all, flies in the face of human nature — and little girls certainly have this drive, as much as little boys do, or at least the little girls I have observed in my immediate family have it.

Brilliantly lit from stem to stern, she looked like a sagging birthday cake.

I feel that the longest and worst punishment should be reserved for those who slandered God by inventing Hell.