Author Quotes

Nobody gets everything in this life. You decide your priorities and you make your choices. I'd decided long ago that any cake I had would be eaten.

Donald E. Westlake

Speaks well of a man to need a little something in this world. I wouldn't trust a man who could git through it cold sober.

We mothers rock into the heart of the world the melody of peace.

I can hear the sizzle of newborn stars, and know anything of meaning, of the fierce magic emerging here. I am witness to flexible eternity, the evolving past, and I know we will live forever, as dust or breath in the face of stars, in the shifting pattern of winds.

Most men, if you just tell them what to do in a businesslike fashion, will follow directions without thinking about it. One proceeds on the assumption that they'll do as they're told, and they do.

Lynne Reid Banks

When thought and action are combined, the results are powerful-among the most powerful forces on earth. The combination of successful communication-the sharing of thoughts-and physical action can, literally, move mountains.

Peter McWilliams

London is a city of clubs and private houses. You have to be a member.

Things happen, and you can't make them unhappen. You don't get do-overs, you can't roll back the clock, and the only thing you can change, and the only thing it does any good to worry about, is how you let them affect you.

Jennifer Weiner

Because he had nothing to hide, he did perhaps appear to have forfeited a little of his strength. But that is the irony of honesty.

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

The tenure of a literary reputation is the most uncertain and fluctuating of all.

Charles Dudley Warner

So much to live for.
Each rope rings
a different bell.

A loyal-hearted man rejoices at a friend's advancement; a disloyal man cries out in sorrow when something pleasant befalls his friend and he is there to see it.

Wolfram von Eschenbach

Like all wage slaves, he had two crosses to bear: the people he worked for and the people he worked with

Stephen Vizinczey

The happiest people I have known in this world have been the Saints-and, after these, the men and women who get immediate and conscious enjoyment from little things.

Few women are so beautiful and charming that they can afford to divest themselves of any portion of their charm; so they are very foolish to do so by smoking. It doesn't matter about men. Men look ugly and silly, too, when smoking. But it isn't beauty that matters with them-only strength

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Sometimes very strong feelings don't get written up because the interesting metaphor or dramatic situation doesn't suggest itself. So much of one's life goes unused.

I saw how fascinating her mystery was to you. For my part, I think that the mystery is always greatest where there is the most emptiness. A person full of live is never mysterious. On the contrary.

The sweet reward for preparation often does not come in the youthful twenties or staid thirties. It arrives — with accrued interest — in the mature years.

Mary Ellen Snodgrass

A beautiful envelope for mortality, presenting a glittering and polished exterior, the appearance of which gives no certain indication of the real value of what is contained therein.

Clara Lucas Balfour

We must not be timid from a fear of committing faults: the greatest fault of all is to deprive oneself of experience.

Luc de Clapiers

Wires instead of veins. that's what writers are made of. We get these electric demands & if we don't co-operate, we don't get to go to sleep. wired. Coffee nerves without the coffee.

The lesson is that dying men must groan;
And poets groan in rhymes that please the ear.

Much of the time, the things we feel guilty about are not our issues. Another person behaves inappropriately or in some way violates our boundaries. We challenge the behavior, and the person gets angry and defensive. Then we feel guilty.

Unless there is a new mind there cannot be a new line, the old will go on repeating itself with recurring deadliness

William Carlos Williams