20th-century Author Quotes

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

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

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

Adrian Mitchell

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

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

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

If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.

Mickey Spillane

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

We can't continue to be like this. Who am I? Your fiancée or your concubine?

When we strike a balance between the challenge of an activity and our skill at performing it, when the rhythm of the work itself feels in sync with our pulse, when we know that what we're doing matters, we can get totally absorbed in our task. That is happiness.

Happiness is a hard thing because it is achieved only by making others happy.

We are all of us invented. We are all of us cobbled together from cartilage and dust. Few of us know with certainty the name of our maker. But I do... Bram Stoker.

It's stupid. There are maps to show you how to get to the place where you want to be but no maps that show you how to get to the time when you want to be.

How do you show up for your relationships? Are you healthy or crippled? Are you prepared or needy? Are you ready to give or too tired to talk?

The war came to me in my dreams and showed me its sole purpose: to go on, only to go on.

If, as you teach, the universe has no beginning and no end, why should we?

The brain is the man; its health is essential for normal living; its disorders are surely the most profound of human miseries; and its destruction annihilates a person humanly, however intact his body.

H. Chandler Elliott

Perpetrators who receive the gift of forgiveness are given a chance to change

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

Fear - jealousy - money - revenge - and protecting someone you love.

Frederick Knott

One of the most important results you can bring into the world is the you that you really want to be.

I was already at an age when putting off anything was a bad idea.

Shatter the icons of slavery and fear.
Replace
the leer
of the minstrel's burnt-cork face
with a proud, serene
and classic bronze of Benin.

Enlightenment is any experience of expanding our consciousness beyond its present limits.

Marriages are more likely to fail when one partner not only does not mirror the other's expressions of happiness, but instead shows expressions of contempt.

There's no app for a bourbon buzz on a warm day in a cool, dark bar. The world will always want a drink.