Author Quotes

Don't think too small about what God could do in your life-be prepared for God to do a big thing.

Although intelligence tests are usually speed tests for the sake of convenience, it is debatable whether speed has any rightful place in the basic concept of intelligence.

Sweet Genevieve,
The days may come, the days may go,
But still the hands of memory weave The blissful dreams of long ago.

It was popularly supposed that figures couldn't lie, but they did; they lied like the dickens.

Summertime
And the livin' is easy,
Fish are jumpin',
And the cotton is high.
Oh, your daddy's rich,
And your ma is good lookin';
So hush, little baby,
Don' yo' cry.

My idea of marriage, as of every other partnership,... is that each member shall contribute to it his or her personality, unrepressed and uncoerced. Thus, and only thus, we obtain the most complex synthesis possible, which may well surpass in beauty, as it surely does in interest and human value, the separate elements of such an association.

In the mind all things are written in pictures - there is no alphabetical combination of letters and words; all things are pictures and symbols.

Richard Jefferies
Richard Jefferies
Kindly recall that variation is not the same as deformity.

He called for his urinal and having made water in it, he cast it, & viewed it (as Physicians do) a prettie while; at last he swore soberly, he saw nothing in that man's water, but that he might live.

John Harington (writer)
John Harington (writer)
Life's too short to waste it on someone you can't trust. You should be able to depend on the man you love not to lie to you or cheat on you. If you have that as a base, you can work on the other stuff.

In Europe, a product must be good, or it will not sell in competition with other products; with you, it is enough to say that it is good, often enough and sufficiently loudly. The keenest competition is not in the making of things but in the advertising of them!

We only have one life to live, and must go on with it to the end, that if we feel it is meaningless, then we ourselves must give it meaning.

What linked them was not only the closeness they'd felt as children, but also the fear of losing that closeness.

I have so fiercely dreamed of you And walked so far and spoken of you so, Loved a shade of you so hard That now I've no more left of you.

My grandfather was the great solace. He didn't have a lot of formal education, but he had a feeling for words and a sense of the past, a sense of being involved in something larger than his own immediate concerns.

Let not my death be long,
But light
As a bird's swinging;
Happy decision in the height
Of song —
Then flight
From off the ultimate bough!
And let my wing be strong,
And my last note the first
Of another's singing.
See to it, Thou!

Leonora Speyer
Leonora Speyer
Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars.

Eve Ensler
Eve Ensler
This piercing cold I feel:
my dead wife's comb, in our bedroom
under my heel...

To callow wings no flight is too high to attempt. At sixteen all things are possible.

There is no medicine to be found for a life which has fled.

A poem needs disguises. It needs secrets. It thrives on the tension between what is said and not said; it prefers the oblique, the implied, the ironic, the suggestive; when it speaks, it wants you to lean forward a little to overhear; it wants you to understand things only years later.

There are deep lines on each side of his mouth and I know they are the scars from the thin blade of life.

the Revolution aint dead
its tired,
and jest resting.

I am not a member of a community or a synagogue. Really, my devotion to writing is my religion. There are other aspects of my religion, but mainly it is to be with myself, for many hours.

Aharon Appelfeld
Aharon Appelfeld
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.