Author Quotes

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

Max Schneckenburger

Sometimes very strong feelings don't get written up because the interesting metaphor or dramatic situation doesn't suggest itself. So much of one's life goes unused.

Because systems of mass communication can communicate only officially acceptable levels of reality, no one can know the extent of the secret unconscious life. No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control.

We reveal more of ourselves in the lies we tell than we do when we try to tell the truth.

Dorothy Salisbury Davis

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

Men simply copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons. They simply extended into objective reality what was already a subjective reality. Only jailors really believe in jails.

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.

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

Thus, while I quaff the genial wine, I live mid transports quite divine.

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

The happiest people I have known in this world have been the Saints-and, after these, the men and women who get immediate and conscious enjoyment from little things.

Mirror, mirror, here I stand. Who is the fairest in the land?

In times of uncertainty, wait. Always, if you have any doubt, wait. Do not force yourself to any action. If you have a restraint in your spirit, wait until all is clear, and do not go against it.

Nature admits of no permanence in the relation between man and woman. It is only man's egoism that wants to keep woman like some buried treasure. All endeavors to introduce permanence in love, the most changeable thing in this changeable human existence, have gone shipwreck in spite of religious ceremonies, vows, and legalities.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

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

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.

How many fears came between us? Earthquakes, diseases, wars where hell rained smoldering pus from skies made of winged death. Horror tore this world asunder. While inside the bleeding smoke and beyond the shredded weeping flesh we memorized tales of infinite good. -from The History Lesson

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

Anzia Yezierska

An age being mathematical, these flowers Of linear stalks and spheroid blooms were prized.

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

So much to live for.
Each rope rings
a different bell.

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.

Innocence involves an unseeing acceptance of things at face value, an ignorance of the area below the surface.... one cannot have both compassion and innocence.

Eugenia Collier

Speaks well of a man to need a little something in this world. I wouldn't trust a man who could git through it cold sober.