Author Quotes

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

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

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

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

José Bergamín

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

I am naturally taciturn, and became a silent and attentive listener.

William Hamilton Maxwell

I sing of arms and of a man: his fate
had made him fugitive; he was the first
to journey from the coasts of Troy as far
as Italy and the Lavinian shores
Across the lands and waters he was battered
beneath the violence of the high ones for
the savage Juno's unforgetting anger.

Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible, then one must try to wriggle through by subtle manoeuvres.

Man is only miserable so far as he thinks himself so.

Jacopo Sannazaro

When all is said and done, monotony may after all be the best condition for creation.

Lady Margaret Sackville

She moves the way clocks move. And on her face, as on a clock dial which someone shines a light onto at night, a strange, briefly shown hour stands: a terrifying hour, in which someone dies.

Rainer Maria Rilke

A persuadable temper might sometimes be as much in favour of happiness as a very resolute character.

Thou art the cause, and most accursed effect.

William Shakespeare

He plants trees to benefit another generation.

Caecilius Statius

I do not like to sleep when your body lies against mine at night, for I think of death which comes so quickly to put us thoroughly to sleep.

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

Adrian Mitchell

For we must consider that we shall be a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.

Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow.

One can hardly think too little of one's self. One can hardly think too much of one's soul.

G. K. Chesterton

Negligence is the rust of the soul that corrodes through all her best resolves.

We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.

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

Let people catch something from your heart that will cause no discomfort, but help them to sing.

There are times when Science does not satisfy.

Rudyard Kipling