Author Quotes

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

Patrick O'Brian

Before you, mother Idoto,
naked I stand;
before your watery presence,
a prodigal.

Christopher Okigbo

Songs, stories are beyond value; they are the memory and wisdom of a people, the particular individual rivers of the sea of life which constitutes us all.

The list of cities lost was long and disheartening, even granting exaggeration by the reporters. Soldiers defeated always overestimate the strength of their foe. That soothes egos suspecting their own inferiority.

The flowers are ravined
by bees, the fruit blossoms

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

We are as we are. How can you claim to know what life I was meant to lead, let alone threaten to force me into it? All your quibbling is nonsense. As well forbid your nose to snuff, or your ears to hear. We are as we do.

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

Leaving traces of ourselves, as in creative productivity, could then be seen as part of the definition of consciousness for us as well. We know that in order to progress we must stretch for something just out of reach—if only for a life that will be more compassionate and decent than the cruelty, paranoia, greed, narrow corporatism, or narcissism we mostly indulge in and find such ample justification for. And so we dream.

Breyten Breytenbach

She could not trust herself to hope—but without hope, she realized, she had no reason to go on.

Melissa de la Cruz

There are things I miss," you said. "But if I didn't have you, I'd miss more.

Worry is the most popular form of suicide. Worry impairs appetite, disturbs sleep, makes respiration irregular, spoils digestion, irritates disposition, warps character, weakens mind, stimulates disease, and saps bodily health. It is the real cause of death in thousands of instances where some other disease is named on the death certificate.

William George Jordan

I am God, says Love, for Love is God and God is Love, and this Soul is God by the condition of Love. I am God by divine nature and this Soul is God by the condition of Love. Thus this precious beloved of mine is taught and guided by me, without herself, for she is transformed into me, and such a perfect one, says Love, takes my nourishment.

Marguerite Porete

Life is like a huge lottery in which only the winning tickets are visible.

Jostein Gaarder

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

Revival, as contrasted with a Holy Ghost atmosphere is a clean- cut breakthrough of the Spirit, a sweep of Holy Ghost power, bending the hearts of hardened sinners as the wheat before the wind, breaking up the fountains of the great deep, sweeping the whole range of the emotions, as the master hand moves across the harp strings, from the tears and cries of the penitent to the holy laughter and triumphant joy of the cleansed.

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

You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you.

Chérie Carter-Scott

You should see my baby pictures. My cheeks hung off my face like water balloons. You can imagine how often I was teased.

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

Perhaps lovers aren't supposed to look down at the ground. That kind of story is told in symbols-and earth represents reality, and reality represents frustrations, chance illnesses, death, murder, and all kinds of other tragedies. Lovers are meant to look up at the sky, for up there no beautiful illusions can be trampled upon.

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

The challenge is always to find the ultimate in the ordinary horseshit.

James Tate (writer)

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

It is not simply what one remembers, but why. There are sites of amputation where the past is severed from the body of the present. Remembering only encourages the growth of phantom limbs. And it is not simply what one remembers, or why, but what to do with what one remembers, which of the scattered pieces to carry forward, what to protect and preserve, what to leave behind.