Author Quotes

I love Germany so dearly that I hope there will always be two of them.

François Mauriac

"A child!" said Edith, looking at her. "When was I a child? What childhood did you ever leave to me? I was a woman - artful, designing, mercenary, laying snares for men - before I knew myself, or you, or even understood the base and wretched aim of every new display I learnt. You gave birth to a woman. Look upon her. She is in her pride tonight."

Charles Dickens

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

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

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.

A great enormous thing, like — like nothing. A huge big — well, like a — I don't know — like an enormous big nothing.

It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.

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

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

In November, 1964 when I was a patient at the Mayo Clinic I though seriously about killing myself.

To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm's way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin.

Nothing is hidden from the eyes of the observing world.

Alexander Pushkin

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Beautiful... as the fortuitous encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.

Comte de Lautréamont

There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.

Summary riposte
To the dreary wail
There's no knowing what
Love is all about.
Poets know a lot.

To feel admiration for a man all through one's married life would, I think, be excessively tedious.

Agatha Christie

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

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

We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.

It is better to waste one's youth than to do nothing with it at all.

Georges Courteline

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.

I am human: nothing human is alien to me.

In Latin: Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto.

That's really the best ambition, to be hungry for sensual experience in your life. Ravenous. Artists are not intellectuals. We are sensualists.

Robert Olen Butler

Art is a misleading, deceptive superstition; in it we think that we have before us the last, innermost essence of humanity itself; and yet, it merely foists upon us a beautiful product of man, in which are set down all of the egotistical, self-satisfying thoughts and emotions which remain sterile and ineffective in the world of action. And I, imbecile, esteem this product more highly than the human being himself, whom God has created.

Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder