Author Quotes

I never get used to it, the unknowable mystery of a person so suddenly, totally closed, snapped shut like a half-read novel.

Linda Barnes (writer)

The heart holds, like remembered music,
a landscape grown too dark to see.

Where would anyone in publicity be if they allowed sensitivity, restraint, breeding or good taste to stand in their way?

Isabelle Holland

The Christian Scientists held that it was not God Who wanted sickness, but man who [put] himself in the way of suffering. If this were the case, though, wouldn't we all die in perfect health?

Disrespectful words cannot entirely be eaten, ever. Respect is a kind of Humpty Dumpty. All the king's horses can't put it all the way up again.

Charlotte Armstrong

The only natural human beings seem to be those who are making trouble.

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 love of those among whom one has been reared is usually not love at all. One can die inwardly without any of them being aware of it.

Evelyn Scott (writer)

It was the hour when gauze-winged insects are born that only live for a day.

Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany

There's a kind of virgin one only becomes with difficulty.

My plan is to ignore this ageing business and hope it goes away. But if these bags under my eyes get any bigger, Ryanair will make me pay extra for them.

John O'Farrell (author)

The past is not only that which happened but also that which could have happened but did not.

Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.

There was a thoughtful frown on the face of the man who was the possessor of twenty million dollars.

Eleanor H. Porter

Husbands and wives quarrel a lot more than anyone thinks, and it's oftener about little things than big ones.

Patricia Wentworth

Perhaps, on the whole, embarrassment and perplexity are a kind of natural accompaniment to life and movement; and it is better to be driven out of your senses with thinking which of two things you ought to do than to do nothing whatever, and be utterly uninteresting to all the world.

Margaret Oliphant

I need to feel that the language in my poems is alive, in the sense of talking on the phone to a friend sharing gossip.

Deborah Garrison

I kinda like it when you forget to give me presents. It makes me feel like we're married.

People can say what they like about the eternal verities, love and truth and so on, but nothing's as eternal as the dishes.

And all about him was the wind now, a pervasive sighing trough great emptiness, as though the prairie itself was breathing in long gusting breaths, unhampered by the buildings of town, warm and living against his face and in his hair.

We are pretty sure that we and our pets share the same reality, until one day we come home to find that our wistful, intelligent friend who reminds us of our better self has decided a good way to spend the day is to open a box of Brillo pads, unravel a few, distribute some throughout the house, and eat or wear all the rest. And we shake our heads in an inability to comprehend what went wrong here.

That's really the best ambition, to be hungry for sensual experience in your life. Ravenous. Artists are not intellectuals. We are sensualists.

Robert Olen Butler

No one who cooks cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.

Nothing can stop the questing of men, not even Man. If we will it, not only the wonders of space, but the very stars are ours.

I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me, I did not leave him, he did not leave me, I freed him, he freed me.