Author Quotes

We are always the most violent against those whom we have injured.

Patrick O'Brian

How simple life becomes when things like mirrors are forgotten.

Daphne du Maurier

Human nature is a mystic duality, half animal, half angel; a worm, a God; and the contrast and strife between the two natures is never so marked as in the gifted.

What's lost upon the roundabouts we pulls up on the swings!

Patrick R. Chalmers

Count Erskyll said nothing for a moment. He was opposed to the use of force. Force, he believed, was the last resort of incompetence; he had said so frequently enough since this operation had begun. Of course, he was absolutely right, though not in the way he meant. Only the incompetent wait until the last extremity to use force, and by then, it is usually too late to use anything, even prayer.

The flowers are ravined
by bees, the fruit blossoms

are thrown to the ground, the wind
the rain forces everything.

There are fools who seek to understand the secrets of nature.

The best may slip, and the most cautious fall; He's more than mortal that ne'er err'd at all.

You cannot sit at home as a twenty-year-old poet. You don't know anything about life.

What to know about pain is how little we do to deserve it, how simple it is to give, how hard to lose.

Frederick Busch

Extreme vanity sometimes hides under the garb of ultra modesty.

Anna Brownell Jameson

Sweet appletree, with delicate blossom,
Growing concealed in the wood.

A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.

Over the mountains,
And over the waves,
Over the fountains,
And under the graves;
Over the floods that are deepest,
Which do Neptune obey;
Over the rocks that are steepest,
Love will find out the way.

A true warrior does not fight because he wishes to but because he has to. A man who yearns for war, a man who enjoys his killing, he is a brute and a monster. No matter how much glory he wins on the battlefield, that cannot erase the fact that he is no better than a rabid wolf who will turn on his friends and family as soon as his foes.

Christopher Paolini

Love is this thing that we pursue today, tonight, for ever,
We care not whither, know not who shall be at length the giver:
For Love, — our life and all our years are cast upon the waves;
Our heart is as the hand that steers; — but who is He that saves?

Arthur O'Shaughnessy

This is the real tragedy of mankind, that until now the spirit of man has not been able to free itself, even along the path of its own development, from the tentacles of self-deception.

Phyllis Bottome

Look at any city through the right memories and it could become a graveyard as haunted as a former battlefield.

Christopher Rice

There is a great gulf between the really creative person and normal people. The totally creative person does not have the rest of his life in proper proportion.

There were times when I thought I got a bit more punishment than was coming to me, but I don't regret a minute of it now. Each of us must be tempered in some fire. Nobody had more to do with choosing the fire that tempered me than myself, and instead of finding fault with the fire I give thanks that I had the metal to take the temper and hold it.

Jack Black (author)

I have never cared much for people. Most of them are cowards, conformists, muddleheads, moneygrubbers, and they infect each other.

But see, in our open clearings, how golden the melons lie; Enrich them with sweets and spices, and give us the pumpkin-pie!

Margaret Junkin Preston

The world is comparable to ice, and the Truth to water, the origin of this ice. The name 'ice' is only lent to this coagulation; it is the name of water which is restored to it, according to its essential reality.

Abd al-Karīm al-Jīlī

Using someone's name during a conversation was like a casual caress, like stroking their hair.

Reverend Lawson: You men are homosexual!
Bob (correcting The Reverend): Homosexuals.