Author Quotes

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

Jacopo Sannazaro

"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.

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

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

Those whom we called brutes had their revenge when Darwin showed us that they were our cousins.

George Bernard Shaw

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

There are times when Science does not satisfy.

Rudyard Kipling

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

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

José Bergamín

Faith is not trying to believe something regardless of the evidence; faith is daring to do something regardless of the consequences.

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

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

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

Comte de Lautréamont

Five minutes! Zounds! I have been five minutes too late all my life-time!

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

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.

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

What we pay for with our lives never costs too much.

Antonio Porchia

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

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

Therefore keep in the midst of life. Do not isolate yourself. Be among men and things, and among troubles, and difficulties, and obstacles.

Longing for something that you once had is a mistake because the pictures in your mind are never the same as whatever it is you are longing for.

Always plan for the fact that no plan ever goes according to plan.