Author Quotes

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.

We have, each of us, nothing.
We will give it to each other.

Carolyn Forché

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

They fear others—that is why they sought positions of power. Their greatest dream is to have a King who dances when they move the threads: and for Massenet, to marry his child to the heir of Entonne, and sit his grandson upon the throne. The ordinary desires of those who rise to such positions. In their appetites, they are not men of great originality. Though they will do enormous harm in spite of that.

I nearly went fucking crazy crazy. Notes [from a Coma] marked a sort of natural breakdown with Jonathan Cape. The book got a good critical response but it didn't too well. So publishers look at you then and think, okay, he writes good books but... If you have that experimental twist, you make things hard for yourself. So for those five years, I couldn't give my work away. It was tough on me and for people around me. But as my wife Maeve said to me, it isn't my job to get published... it is my job to write.

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.

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.

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

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

Lies are easy to believe in but the truth sounds false.

Dear Fatherland, no danger thine:
Firm stands thy watch along the Rhine.

Max Schneckenburger

In loss itself I find assuagement: having lost the treasure, I've nothing to fear.

Juana Inés de la Cruz

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

Those who were high go down low, and those who've been low go up higher.

Anzia Yezierska

I support all people on earth who have bodies like and unlike my body...

Naomi Shihab Nye

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

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.

I have long been active in and supportive of conservation and historical preservation causes.

Jack L. Chalker

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

We were also misled by M. Michelin's use of the word "impracticable". "Impracticable," we argued with a careful exercise in semantics, leaves just a chance. More than that. As we thought about it, it seemed to give a broad hint that the road was passable to the young and the determined in sturdy motor cars. "Impracticable" - scratched paintwork, discomfort, difficult finding petrol stations, shortage of good restaurants - these it seemed were the sort of hazards the urbane Michelin was trying to convey to us. Alas, he was not.

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

I have always noticed that people only think you are stupid if you do things differently from them.

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

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

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