Author Quotes

How could an argument soothe or settle a controversy when every word is a nest for a bird of doubt? (meaning of words as inferences)

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.

W. O. Mitchell
W. O. Mitchell
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.

The healthy, the strong individual, is the one who asks for help when he needs it. Whether he has an abscess on his knee or in his soul.

Rona Barrett
Rona Barrett
Love is like fire.
Wounds of fire are hard to bear; harder still are those of love.

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)
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.

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.

Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother?

What a recovery of the wisdom of the Mother brings to all of us is the knowledge of inseparable connection with the entire creation and the wise, active love that is born from that knowledge.

Life is full of opportunities to feel exactly the way
you want to feel.

Sometimes she goes out to work as a practical nurse, and comes home and sits by the kitchen table soaking her feet in a pan of hot water and Epsom salts. When she gets into bed and the springs creak under her weight, she groans with the pleasure of lying stretched out on an object that understands her so well.

William Keepers Maxwell Jr.
William Keepers Maxwell Jr.
Repentance clothes in grass and flowers the grave in which the past is laid.

When you get down to the bottom of it, only about half of what we remember really happened. We tend to modify things to make ourselves look better in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. Then, if what we did wasn't really very admirable, we tend to forget that it ever happened. A normal human being's grasp on reality is very tenuous at best. Our imaginary lives are usually much nicer.

David Eddings
David Eddings
The little dissatisfaction which every artist feels at the completion of a work forms the germ of a new work.

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?

Gabrielle Roy
Gabrielle Roy
The border between music and noise is always culturally defined—which implies that, even within a single society, this border does not always pass through the same place; in short, there is rarely a consensus.... By all accounts there is no single and intercultural universal concept defining what music might be

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
To live by a large river is to be kept in the heart of things.

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

Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany
Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany
Self-important western journalists who'd given up their sacred trust to become cheerleaders for trendy causes, the way communist journalists had once been cheerleaders for the government...They were depriving the free world of its most valuable weapon in condemning and exposing the worst human scourge since Nazism: the targeting and murder of civilians to achieve political and religious ends.

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

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.

Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America; or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb.

My boyhood saw
Greek islands floating over Harvard Square.