Author Quotes

If you tell someone a secret, and ask them to keep it secret, you are asking them to display a discretion you are unable to display yourself.

Jill Paton Walsh

Madame Schmid belonged to that large class of persons who believe that a man who engages in any form of art is necessarily a loafer.

Molly Elliot Seawell

I was compiling a list in my head titled 'Reasons to Get Up: You Don't Have to Leave, but You Can't Pee Here.

We are not here in this world to drift like seaweed. Whatever intelligence we have, it is our duty to drive to the utmost.

Blanche Willis Howard

When one went fishing in information networks, one also became fish food.

Carol O'Connell

Is it for miracles
We live? I like it when the morning sun lights up my room Like a yellow jelly bean, an inner glow. May mutters: "Why ask questions?" or, "What are the questions you wish to ask?"

You are not broken. You break again
and again because

that's what breaking means.
To be whole.

Brenda Shaughnessy

Is it for you to forgive me? Is it for me to forgive you? Is it for God to forgive us all, and for what? Where there's no judging on one side or the other, there's no forgiveness wanted.

E. Arnot Robertson

All it takes for America to become a theocracy is for nonbelievers to do nothing.

Germany, Germany above everything,
Above everything in the world,
When, for protection and defense, it always
takes a brotherly stand together.
From the Meuse to the Neman,
From the Adige to the Belt,

August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben

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

Democracy is not tolerance. Democracy is a prescribed way of life erected on the premise that all men are created equal.

Convalescence is a sort of grown-up rebirth, enabling us to see life with a fresh eye.

Margaret Prescott Montague

Rain knows the earth and loves it well, for rain is the passion of the earth.

Estela Portillo-Trambley

It is always so, every pleasure comes exactly half an hour too late - Life! Life!

I have looked for the center of the art scene. I went to Paris as a student. I lived in Venice, California.

Eleanor Coppola

We get mad, sure! Like ice an' snow an' thunder an' lightning storm, but they don't hurt the wheat down in the ground any.' Mom picked up her whitewash brush and slapped it against the rough boards. 'Yolochka, you don't know how love is yet.'

You must learn to be three people at once: writer, character, and reader.

The essence of kitsch is the confusion of ethical and esthetic categories; kitsch wants to produce not the "good" but the "beautiful."

Pacifists lead a lonely life. Not even gathering together can take the place of that vast, warm sun of approval that is shed on motherhood, on law-abiding, on killing, and on making money. Someday will we come into our own? Well, motherhood may move into the shade. Law-abiding is going through a trauma. But killing and making money are good for a long, long time.

Josephine Johnson

To the political elite, statecraft is predicated on the notion that society is theirs to put into some type of hegemonic order. It is immaterial whether this institutionalized order actually helps society or instead puts it into a chokehold that slowly squeezes the air out of life. To the authorities, supremacy is always the primary objective.

Sometimes journeys begin long before their first step is taken

Every death diminishes us, but those that leave differences unresolved and things unsaid are the most painful of all.

Only when we have a respect for time will we have learned something of the art of living.

Jacqueline Winspear

The Hudson River loomed cold and gray before me. There was a biting chill in the air that seemed to sharpen my perception of everything—from the trees that displayed their few, last, withering leaves to the hulking black barge that roiled the water downstream. Odd how cold temperatures can generate an effect that is uniquely visual.

Stefanie Pintoff