#fiction
392 quotes
“After a while she got up from where she was and went over the little garden field entire. She was seeking confirmation of the voice and vision, and everywhere she found and acknowledged answers. A personal answer for all other creations except herself. She felt an answer seeking her, but where? When? How? Ch. 2”
“Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches. Ch. 2, p. 8”
“Well, Ah see Mouth”
“Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. Ch. 1, p. 9”
“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry . It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It is beyond me. But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first”
“I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul , nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal. Even in the helter”
“I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.”
“Crazy for This Democracy”
“Gods always behave like the people who make them. Tell My Horse (1938), Ch. 15, p. 219”
“Ah done been in sorrow 's kitchen and Ah done licked out all de pots. Ah done died in grief and been buried in de bitter waters, and Ah done rose agin from de dead lak Lazarus. Lucy in Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Ch. 6, p. 13”
“started with distillation.”
“Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find. As quoted in the National Observer”
“Faulkner Without Fanfare”
“Why that's a hundred miles away. That's a long way to go just to eat. On declining invitation to White House dinner honoring Nobel laureates, as quoted in Life magazine”
“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this ... as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth; in one generation all the Napoleons and Hitlers and Caesars and Mussolinis and Stalins and all the other tyrants who want power and aggrandizement, and the simple politicians and time”
“It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books; I wish I had enough sense to see ahead thirty years ago, and like some of the Elizabethans, not signed them. It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died. Letter to Malcolm Cowley (February 11, 1949), quoted in William Faulkner: A Critical Essay (1970) by Martin Jarrett”
“Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid. Ain't nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be. "The Bear" in The Saturday Evening Post”
“For the holy are susceptible too to evil, even as you and I, signori; they too are helpless before sin without God's aid... and the holy can be fooled by sin as quickly as you or I, signori. Quicker, because they are holy. "Mistral"”
“Setting: Chickasaw land; fictional Yoknapatawpha County , based on Lafayette County, Mississippi . Author nationality: American. First published: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ( Curtis Publishing Company ).”
“Man was not made to sweat.”
“Il y a maintenant en France dans chaque village un flambeau allumé, le maître d'école, et une bouche qui souffle dessus, le curé. Histoire d'un crime. Déposition d'un témoin (1877), Deuxième Journée. La lutte, ch. III: La barricade Saint”
“To love or to have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life. To love is a consummation. Les Misérables (1862), page 1190, as translated by Charles Wilbour and provided by A.L. Bert Publishers. Source: Shawn Thomas (June 24, 2013): Quotes & Illustrations From Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables . Archived from the original on March 11, 2023.”
“The best way to worship God is to love your wife. Les Misérables (1862), page 1190, as translated by Charles Wilbour and provided by A.L. Bert Publishers. Source: Shawn Thomas (June 24, 2013): Quotes & Illustrations From Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables . Archived from the original on March 11, 2023.”
“Happy, even in anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and of grief! Les Misérables (1862), page 746, as translated by Charles Wilbour and provided by A.L. Bert Publishers. Source: Shawn Thomas (June 24, 2013): Quotes & Illustrations From Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables . Archived from the original on March 11, 2023.”
“One can no more pray too much than love too much. Les Misérables (1862), page 55, as translated by Charles Wilbour and provided by A.L. Bert Publishers. Source: Shawn Thomas (June 24, 2013): Quotes & Illustrations From Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables . Archived from the original on March 11, 2023.”
“Plaidoyer contre la peine de mort”
“La raison, c'est l'intelligence en exercice; l'imagination c'est l'intelligence en érection Reason is intelligence taking exercise; imagination is intelligence with an erection. Unpublished notebook from 1845”
“Dieu s'est fait homme; soit. Le diable s'est fait femme! God became a man, granted. The devil became a woman. Ruy Blas (1838), Act II, Scene V”
“Ces deux moitiés de Dieu, le pape et l'empereur! These two halves of God , the Pope and the emperor. Hernani (1830), Act IV, Scene II”
“I will be Chateaubriand or nothing. Written at the age of 15 in one of his notebooks ( c . 1817), as quoted in The Literary Movement in France During the Nineteenth Century (1897) by Georges Pellissier”
“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. As quoted in Grace Notes (1989) by Rita Dove”
“The fully realized presence of the haunting is both a major incumbent of the narrative and sleight of hand. One of its purposes is to keep the reader preoccupied with the nature of the incredible spirit world while being supplied a controlled diet of the incredible political world. … Here I wanted the compelling confusion of being there as they (the characters) are; suddenly, without comfort or succor from the”
“Black women write differently from white women. This is the most marked difference of all those combinations of black and white, male and female. It's not so much that women write differently from men, but that black women write differently from white women. Black men don't write very differently from white men. Black Women Writers at Work (1983) by Claudia Tate”
“If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it.”
“Writing to me is an advanced and slow form of reading. If you find a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. Morrison said this in her talk at the annual meeting of the Ohio Arts Council in Cincinnati in September 1981. Variants, unsourced: If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
“Was there anything so loathsome as a wilfully innocent man? Hardly. An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines. Tar Baby”
“At some point in life the world 's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens”
“Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about "us"; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us. Commencement address at Barnard College (May 1979) as quoted in Ms. magazine”
“There is really nothing more to say”
“Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. The Bluest Eye (1969) First lines”
“You think 'Okay, I get it, I'm prepared for the worst', but you hold out that small hope, see, and that's what fucks you up. That's what kills you. Joyland”
“YouTube is very addictive. I refused to put it on my favorite places because it's too easy to go there. Stephen King Visits YouTube”
“My Book About A Really Mean Car That Kills People Was Pretty Scary. But Not As Scary As Those Scary Republicans”
“Stephen King's God trip”
“President Clinton has made a few feeble swipes at addressing this issue [school violence], but one can only gape at the unintentionally comic spectacle of this man chastising the gun”
“I think the author who influenced me the most as a writer was Richard Matheson . Books like I Am Legend were an inspiration to me. As quoted in an edition of I Am Legend”
“I have grown into a Bestsellasaurus Rex”
“French is the language that turns dirt into romance. Time”
“I work until beer o'clock. On his 9 to 5 writing day, as quoted in Time”
“Interview: Stephen King”
“In the heart of the wilderness, a man finds his true self.”
“The river is like life: it flows endlessly toward the sea.”
“Power corrupts even the noblest of intentions.”
“The earth knows no masters, only those who work it.”
“Civilization and barbarism are two faces of the same coin.”
“The jungle demands everything from those who enter it.”
“The llanero is free because he lives under the open sky.”
“Nature in the tropics is both generous and cruel.”
“In the immensity of the landscape, man discovers his own smallness.”
“The plains teach man to be patient.”
“Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by. Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), Introduction, p. xix; in The Collected Essays , ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 56.”
“What These Children Are Like”
“The Golden Age, Time Past”
“Some Questions and Some Answers”
“The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing. "Remembering Jimmy " (1958), in The Collected Essays , ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 277.”
“Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke”
“Society, Morality and the Novel”
“The Art of Fiction: An Interview”
“Brave Words for a Startling Occasion”
“Richard Wright 's Blues”
“I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.”
“Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα, δε φοβούμαι τίποτα, είμαι λεύτερος.”
“This is what I want!”
“You gave me your curse, holy Fathers. I give you a blessing: May you be as moral and religious as I am. In response to attempts by leaders of the Greek Orthodox church to anathematize him, as quoted in God's Struggler: Religion in the Writings of Nikos Kazantzakis (1996) by Darren J. N. Middleton and Peter Bien, p. 12”
“I said to the almond tree: "Speak to me of God." And the almond tree blossomed. The Fratricides (1961), epigraph”
“All my life I struggled to stretch my mind to the breaking point, until it began to creak, in order to create a great thought which might be able to give a new meaning to life, a new meaning to death, and to console mankind. "Odyssey of Faith" in TIME magazine”
“We, who are dying, are doing better, than they, who will live. For Crete doesn't need householders, she needs madmen like us. These madmen make Crete immortal. Freedom and Death (1956), ch. 13”
“God, what is all this talk put out by the popes? Paradise is here, my good man. God, give me no other paradise! Freedom and Death (1956), ch. 3”
“We are not simple people who believe in happiness; nor weaklings who crumple to the ground in distress at the first reverse; nor skeptics observing the bloody effort of marching humanity from the lofty heights of a mocking, sterile wit. Believing in the fight, though we entertain no illusions about it, we are armed against every disappointment. Toda Raba (1934), ch. 10”
“I am a mariner of Odysseus with heart of fire but with mind ruthless and clear. Toda Raba (1934), quoted in Kimon Friar's introduction to The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (1958), p. xxvi”
“The young have less charity for aged follies than the old for those of youth. "The Wedding Knell" (1837) from Twice”
“The Maypole of Merry Mount”
“Lo, there ye stand, my children,”
“By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places”
“Long, long may it be, ere he comes again! His hour is one of darkness, and adversity, and peril. But should domestic tyranny oppress us, or the invader's step pollute our soil, still may the Gray Champion come, for he is the type of New England's hereditary spirit; and his shadowy march, on the eve of danger, must ever be the pledge, that New England's sons will vindicate their ancestry. "The Gray Champion" (1835) from Twice Told Tales”
“Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system , and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. "Wakefield" (1835) from Twice Told Tales”
“Would Time but await the close of our favorite follies, we should all be young men, all of us, and until Doom's Day. "Wakefield" (1835) from Twice Told Tales”
“It is perilous to make a chasm in human affections ; not that they gape so long and wide”
“Sketches from Memory”
“If his inmost heart could have been laid open, there would have been discovered that dream of undying fame, which, dream as it is, is more powerful than a thousand realities. "Fanshawe"”
“You can't make facts fit the rules, it is the other way round. The rules have to be adopted to fit the facts.”
“We all believe in the regulations, but you have to know how to interpret them.”
“When you start having bad luck, there isn't an end to it.”
“Every thing is done halfway in Peru, and that is why everything goes wrong.”
“He is always furious, on account of what he finds out or what he doesn't find out.”
“Lima frightened him, it was too big, you could lose yourself in it and never find your way home; the people on the street were total strangers.”
“It is easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it.”
“Political correctness is the enemy of freedom because it rejects honesty and authenticity. We have to tackle it as the distortion of the truth. Interview , El País , 27/02/2018”
“Mario Vargas Llosa compara al peronismo con los nazis y lo culpa de destruir Argentina”
“Ahora tenemos un peronismo que es todo: es la extrema derecha, es el centro, es el centro izquierda, es la extrema izquierda, es la democracia y es el terrorismo, es la demagogia y es la insensatez... Todo es el peronismo... Now we have Peronism that is everything: it's the far right and its the center, it's left centrist and is also extreme leftist, it is democracy and is also terrorism, its demagogy is also insanity...Peronism is everything.”
“Fashions, being themselves begotten of the desire for change, are quick to change also.”
“Our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; they come to be so closely linked in our minds with the actions in conjunction with which we make it our duty to practice them, that, if we are suddenly called upon to perform some action of a different order, it takes us by surprise, and without our supposing for a moment that it might involve the bringing of those very same virtues into play.”
“Autrefois on rêvait de posséder le cœur de la femme dont on était amoureux; plus tard sentir qu’on possède le cœur d’une femme peut suffire à vous en rendre amoureux. In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.”
“They would have preferred for me, instead of Bloch, companions who would have given me no more than it is proper to give according to the laws of middle”
“Ce n’est pas le mal qui lui donnait l’idée du plaisir, qui lui semblait agréable ; c’est le plaisir qui lui semblait malin. It was not evil that gave her the idea of pleasure, that seemed to her attractive; it was pleasure, rather, that seemed evil.”
“Même au point de vue des plus insignifiantes choses de la vie, nous ne sommes pas un tout matériellement constitué, identique pour tout le monde et dont chacun n'a qu'à aller prendre connaissance comme d'un cahier des charges ou d'un testament; notre personnalité sociale est une création de la pensée des autres. Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account”
“[Music] a pederast might hum when raping a choirboy. Of Fauré 's Romances sans paroles Op. 17, as quoted in Orledge Gabriel Fauré (1979), p. 48”
“received in good society,”
“I shall not find a painting more beautiful because the artist has painted a hawthorn in the foreground, though I know of nothing more beautiful than the hawthorn, for I wish to remain sincere and because I know that the beauty of a painting does not depend on the things represented in it. I shall not collect images of hawthorn. I do not venerate hawthorn, I go to see and smell it. Preface (1910) to The Bible of Amiens by John Ruskin , translated by Proust (1904); from Marcel Proust: On Reading Ruskin, trans. Jean Autret and Philip J. Wolfe (Yale University Press, 1987, ISBN 0”
“A sort of egotistical self”
“As you have invited me, I cannot come, for I have made a rule to decline all invitations ; but I will come the next day. Quoted in Beatrice Hatch, "Lewis Carroll", Strand Magazine (April 1898), p. 422”
“Quoted in Beatrice Hatch, "Lewis Carroll", Strand Magazine (April 1898), p. 421”
“But surely you trust God! Do you think He would let you come to harm? To be afraid is to distrust. To a girl who was frightened of traveling by train”
“And at last we've got to the end of this ideal racecourse! Now that you accept A and B and C and D , of course you accept Z .”
“If you want to inspire confidence, give plenty of statistics”
“I charm in vain; for never again, All keenly as my glance I bend, Will Memory, goddess coy, Embody for my joy Departed days, nor let me gaze On thee, my fairy friend! "To my Child”
“To Her, whose children's smiles fed the narrator's fancy and were his rich reward: from the Author. Inscribed in Mrs. Lorina Liddell's copy of Alice's Adventures Under Ground ; quoted by Edward Wakeling”
“The `Why?' cannot, and need not, be put into words. Those for whom a child's mind is a sealed book, and who see no divinity in a child's smile, would read such words in vain: while for any one that has ever loved one true child, no words are needed. For he will have known the awe that falls on one in the presence of a spirit fresh from GOD's hands, on whom no shadow of sin, and but the outermost fringe of the shadow of sorrow, has yet fallen: he will have felt the bitter contrast between the haunting selfishness that spoils his best deeds and the life that is but an overflowing love”
“You have no mind to be unkind,”
“The White Knight must not have whiskers; he must not be made to look old. Instructions to Sir John Tenniel c.1864; quoted in Stuart Dodgson Collingwood , The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (1898) p. 130”
“The happiness of men consists in life. And life is in labor. What Is To Be Done? (1886) Chap. XXXVIII, as translated in The Novels and Other Works of Lyof N. Tolstoï (1902) edited by Nathan Haskell Dole, p. 259”
“Six feet of land was all that he needed. How Much Land Does a Man Need?”
“I sit on a man's back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back. Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence”
“A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral. Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence”
“Where Love Is, God Is”
“I know that my unity with all people cannot be destroyed by national boundaries and government orders. My Religion (1884), as translated in The Human Experience : Contemporary American and Soviet Fiction and Poetry (1989) by the Quaker US/USSR Committee”
“Error is the force that welds men together; truth is communicated to men only by deeds of truth. Only deeds of truth, by introducing light into the conscience of each individual, can dissolve the cohesion of error, and detach men one by one from the mass united together by the cohesion of error. My Religion (1884), Ch. 12”
“My Religion (1884), Ch. 8 В чем моя вера?”
“...никогда Христос ... ни одним словом не утверждал личное воскресение и бессмертие личности за гробом... Never did Christ utter a single word attesting to a personal resurrection and a life beyond the grave.”
“The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth. Sevastopol in May (1855), Ch. 16”
“I belong to the first generation of Latin American writers brought up reading other Latin American writers. Before my time the work of Latin American writers was not well distributed, even on our continent. In Chile it was very hard to read other writers from Latin America. My greatest influences have been all the great writers of the Latin American Boom in literature: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Borges, Paz, Rulfo, Amado, etc. Isabel Allende Interview”
“Julio was never a regional writer. You could see he was Argentinian, but he was more like Borges , more universal from the very beginning. He didn’t jump from the regionalism, he wrote universally all the time...It’s not that Julio was not very Argentinian, he was very Argentinian but his works were never as local. Claribel Alegría Interview with Bomb Magazine”
“Reflections on the Fantastic”
“The only true exile is the writer who lives in his own country.”
“The snail lives the way I like to live; he carries his own home with him.”
“Translation: LOVE 77”
“Hair loss and retrieval”
“Nada está perdido si se tiene el valor de proclamar que todo está perdido y hay que empezar de nuevo. Translation: Nothing is lost if one has the courage to proclaim that all is lost and we must begin anew.”
“I touch your mouth, I touch the edge of your mouth with my finger, I am drawing it as if it were something my hand was sketching, as if for the first time your mouth opened a little, and all I have to do is close my eyes to erase it and start all over again, every time I can make the mouth I want appear, the mouth which my hand chooses and sketches on your face, and which by some chance that I do not seek to understand coincides exactly with your mouth which smiles beneath the one my hand is sketching on you.”
“' Andábamos sin buscarnos pero sabiendo que andábamos para encontrarnos.' Translation: We went around without looking for each other, but knowing we went around to find each other.”
“Interview with El País (2002); cited in Princípios (Editora Anita Garibaldi, 2002), p. 88; English translation taken from Phillips The World Turned Upside Down (2010), p. 207.”
“Sometimes I say that writing a novel is the same as constructing a chair: a person must be able to sit in it, to be balanced on it. If I can produce a great chair, even better. But above all I have to make sure that it has four stable feet. Interview with Katherine Vaz, José Saramago , BOMB Magazine , June 2001.”
“On the idea for his next novel ( Blindness ), which came to him while sitting in a restaurant; New York Times interview with Alan Riding (1998), as quoted in Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies , 6th Edition (Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, 2001), p. 131.”
“Um dia, sentado à mesa, pensei: E se fôssemos todos cegos? Imediatamente me veio a resposta: Nós somos todos cegos. The question suddenly came into my head, 'And if we were all blind?' And then immediately, as if answering myself, 'But we are all blind.'”
“Interview Programa Jô Soares , 1997.”
“Não é a pornografia que é obscena, é a fome que é obscena It is not pornography that is obscene, it is hunger that is obscene.”
“A writer is a man like any other: he dreams. And my dream was to be able to say of this book, when I finished: 'This is a book about Alentejo'. Quoted in José Saramago: il bagaglio dello scrittore , page 41, by Giulia Lanciani, published by Bulzoni, 1996 ISBN 8871199332 , 9788871199337 (256 pages).”
“Deus é o silêncio do universo, e o homem o grito que dá um sentido a esse silêncio. God is the silence of the universe, and man is the cry that gives meaning to that silence. Lanzarote Notebooks (1990), quoted in The Notebook , entry for 9 October 2008.”
“Interview in Idéias , no. 107 (15 October 1988), trans. Margaret Jull Costa .”
“The Universal Library”
“Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv”
“The masked dyer Hakim of Merv”
“The Approach to Al”
“The Improbable Impostor Tom Castro”
“Reading … is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual. Universal History of Infamy [Historia universal de la infamia] (1935) Preface”
“That one individual should awaken in another memories that belong to still a third is an obvious paradox. Evaristo Carriego (1930) Ch. 2”
“A Poem by Oscar Wilde”
“The Argentine Writer and Tradition”
“If the pages of this book contain some successful verse, the reader must excuse me the discourtesy of having usurped it first. Our nothingness differs little; it is a trivial and chance circumstance that you should be the reader of these exercises and I their author. "To the Reader" ["A quien leyere"], preface to Fervor of Buenos Aires [ Fervor de Buenos Aires ]”
“There is no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple.”
“Life is a continuous process of arriving.”
“A writer is not only a person who writes, but also someone who reads and lives.”
“The memory keeps what the heart wants to keep.”
“Every man must find his own path, no matter how difficult.”
“Writing is like making love: one must give oneself completely.”
“I know that love is the only thing that saves us from the abyss. Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1966)”
“Encyclopedic article on Jorge Amado on Wikipedia”
“song of the cacao region”
“O cheiro de cravo, a cor de canela, eu vim de longe vim ver Gabriela. Colour of cinnamon, Clove's sweet smell, I've come a long way To see Gabrielle.”
“Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul. Notes (1913) made by Joyce for his play Exiles”
“The Mirage of the Fisherman of Aran: England's Safety Valve in Case of War,”
“Realism and Idealism in English Literature (Daniel Defoe”
“Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages,”
“Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end. Notebook entry, Paris (28 March 1903), printed in James Joyce: Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (2002) edited by Kevin Barry [Oxford University Press, 2002, ISBN 0”
“Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence. "A Suave Philosophy," in Daily Express, Dublin (6 February 1903), printed in James Joyce: Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (2002) edited by Kevin Barry [Oxford University Press, ISBN 0”
“My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair? My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone? From the poem I Hear an Army”
“All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light. And though I seem to have been driven out of my country here as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine. Letter to Augusta Gregory (November 1902), from James Joyce by Richard Ellmann (1959) [Oxford University Press, 1983 edition, ISBN 0”
“I want to achieve myself”
“James Clarence Mangan”
“at Rotterdam Holland attended 28 March 1958, in response to Professor Lambers summarizing approximately”
“I should say that, in addition to my tree”
“is based on rural England and not any other country in the world... The toponymy of The Shire ...is a”
“That story was the only thing I have ever done which cost me absolutely no pains at all. Usually I compose only with great difficulty and endless rewriting. I woke up one day (more than 2 years ago) with that odd thing virtually complete in my head. It took only a few hours to get down, and then copy out. About " Leaf by Niggle ", in a letter to Stanley Unwin”
“There was a solemn article in the local paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don't know the difference between good and evil! (What of the writer?) The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done. Letter”
“Nearly all marriages , even happy ones, are mistakes : in the sense that almost certainly (in a more Perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might be found more suitable mates. But the real soul”
“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”
“dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends.”
“A Philologist on Esperanto”
“Wars are not favourable to delicate pleasures . "A Secret Vice" (lecture, 1931) published in The Monsters And The Critics And Other Essays (1983), edited by Christopher Tolkien”
“...We are all born happy. Life gets us dirty along the way, but we can clean it up. Happiness is not exuberant or noisy, like pleasure or joy; it’s silent, tranquil, and gentle; it’s a feeling of satisfaction inside that begins with self”
“...you shouldn't stay trapped in the past or be frightened of the future. You only have one life, but if you live it well, that’s enough. The only reality is now, today. What are you waiting for to be happy? Every day counts, I can tell you!”
“There are a lot of good people, Irina, but they keep quiet about it. It’s the bad ones who make a lot of noise, and that’s why they get noticed...”
“When Irina Bazili began working at Lark House in 2010, she was twenty”
“Photographs deceive time, freezing it on a piece of cardboard where the soul is silent. Of Love and Shadows”
“For women, the best aphrodisiacs are words. The G”
“Silence before being born, silence after death: life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences. Paula”
“Where does taste end and smell begin? "Language of Flowers" anthologized in The Sweet Breathing of Plants: Women Writing on the Green World edited by Linda Hogan and Brenda Peterson”
“He realized...that the loudest are the least sincere, that arrogance is a quality of the ignorant, and that flatterers tend to be vicious. Zorro”
“Fear is inevitable, I have to accept that, but I cannot allow it to paralyze me. The Sum of Our Days: A Memoir”
“Man is always a stranger in the wilderness.”
“The wild does not forgive mistakes.”
“In the jungle, the struggle for survival is the only law.”
“Nature is indifferent to human suffering.”
“The jungle is a world where death lurks at every step.”
“Young people have many pleasures and many sorrows, because they only have themselves to think of, so every wish and every notion assume importance; every pleasure is tasted to the full, but also every sorrow, and many who find that their wishes cannot be fulfilled, immediately put an end to their lives. p. 32”
“Was that really love? I saw all these passionate people reel about and drift haphazardly as if driven by a storm, the man filled with desire today, satiated on the morrow, loving fiercely and discarding brutally, sure of no affection and happy in no love... p. 88”
“That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged”
“I was given the freedom to discover my own inclination and talents, to fashion my inmost pleasures and sorrows myself and to regard the future not as an alien higher power but as the hope and product of my own strength. p. 4”
“Once my world was full of friends,”
“Sadness when there should be Joy , hatred when there should be love show compassion because we can be more because we both have scars and pain that no one will ever understand but us so be with me not against me and bring us where we were happy and free .”
“That's the way it is when you love. It makes you suffer , and I have suffered much in the years since. But it matters little that you suffer, so long as you feel alive with a sense of the close bond that connects all living things, so long as love does not die !”
“Oh, love isn't there to make us happy . I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.”
“In the beginning was the myth . God , in his search for self”
“The marvel of the Bhagavad”
“Truth is ever incoherent, and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stunning. Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 1851); published in Memories of Hawthorne (1897) by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, p. 158”
“The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch. (You perceive I employ a capital initial in the pronoun referring to the Deity; don't you think there is a slight dash of flunkeyism in that usage?) Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne (June 1, 1851).”
“Whence came you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips”
“In me divine magnanimities are spontaneous and instantaneous”
“Not one man in five cycles, who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows, or any one of them. Appreciation! Recognition! Is love appreciated? Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory”
“There is a certain tragic phase of humanity which, in our opinion, was never more powerfully embodied than by Hawthorne . We mean the tragedies of human thought in its own unbiassed, native, and profounder workings. We think that into no recorded mind has the intense feeling of the usable truth ever entered more deeply than into this man's. By usable truth, we mean the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things as they strike the eye of the man who fears them not, though they do their worst to him,”
“It will be a strange sort of book , tho', I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;”
“And do not think, my boy, that because I, impulsively broke forth in jubillations over Shakspeare , that, therefore, I am of the number of the snobs who burn their tuns of rancid fat at his shrine. No, I would stand afar off & alone, & burn some pure Palm oil, the product of some overtopping trunk.”
“I do not oscillate in Emerson 's rainbow , but prefer rather to hang myself in mine own halter than swing in any other man's swing. Yet I think Emerson is more than a brilliant fellow. Be his stuff begged, borrowed, or stolen, or of his own domestic manufacture he is an uncommon man. Swear he is a humbug”
“Dolt & ass that I am I have lived more than 29 years, & until a few days ago, never made close acquaintance with the divine William . Ah, he's full of sermons”
“My choice is the old world”
“The Atlantic Monthly, March 1873”
“Cats and monkeys”
“Deep experience is never peaceful. Madame de Mauves , Galaxy Magazine (February/March 1874), ch. V, reprinted in A Passionate Pilgrim (1875) and later in The Madonna of the Future and Other Tales (1879) and the New York Edition of James' works, vol. 13”
“It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe. Letter to Charles Eliot Norton”
“The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination... To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master. Letter to Charles Eliot Norton”
“Everything about Florence seems to be coloured with a mild violet, like diluted wine. Letter to Henry James Sr.”
“I haven't a creature to talk to...How in Boston, when the evening arrives, and I am tired of reading, and know it would be better to do something else, can I go to the theater? I have tried it, ad nauseam. Likewise calling. Upon whom?" Letter to William James”
“Essays in Criticism by Matthew Arnold ,”
“[of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones ] [it is] like a vast episode in a sermon preached by a grandly humorous divine; and however we may be entertained by the way, we must not forget that our ultimate duty is to be instructed. An early critical review, North American Review”
“And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing. Sputnik Sweetheart”
“Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness? Sputnik Sweetheart”
“You burn barns. I don't burn barns. There's this glaring difference, and to me, rather than say which of us is strange, first of all I'd like to clear up just what that difference is. "Barn Burning"(short story) in The Elephant Vanishes”
“Even castles in the sky can do with a fresh coat of paint. South of the Border, West of the Sun”
“But I didn't understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair. South of the Border, West of the Sun”
“likewesaid, we'lldowhatwecan. Trytoreconnectyou, towhatyouwant,”
“Mediocrity is like a spot on your shirt, it never comes off. Dance Dance Dance”
“The world would be a pretty dull place if it were made up only of the first”
“write about a particular subject in a particular way,”
“I said this one day to the doctor in charge of my case, and he told me that, in a sense, what I was feeling was right, that we are in here not to correct the deformation but to accustom ourselves to it: that one of our problems was our inability to recognize and accept our own deformities. Just as each person has certain idiosyncrasies in the way he or she walks, people have idiosyncrasies in the way they think and feel and see things, … " In a letter from Naoko, Norwegian Wood”
“Comments on The Lifted Veil with a motto for it used in the "Cabinet Edition" of her works (1878), in a letter to John Blackwood (28 February 1873), published in George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals (1885), Vol. 4”
“Apropos of the " The Lifted Veil ," I think it will not be judicious to reprint it at present. I care for the idea which it embodies, and which justifies its painfulness. A motto which I wrote on it yesterday perhaps is a sufficient indication of that idea:”
“'Tis God gives skill, But not without men's hands : He could not make Antonio Stradivari's violins Without Antonio. Stradivarius”
“An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry. Felix Holt, the Radical”
“I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best. Felix Holt, the Radical”
“ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit”
“If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally. Letter to Charles Bray”
“My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy . Letter to Charles Bray”
“Unsigned article reprinted in The Essays of “George Eliot.” Complete.”
“The real drama of Evangelicalism”
“In the end, people will judge you by your actions, not by your intentions.”
“Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.”
“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”
“The soul is healed by being with children.”
“Man is what he believes.”
“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”
“Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth. The Brothers Karamazov (1880)”
“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. Crime and Punishment (1866)”
“Fyodor Dostoyevsky”
“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. Letter to Max Brod (1922)”
“By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired”
“Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old”
“Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair. The Zürau Aphorisms (1918)”
“There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe, but not for man. The Zürau Aphorisms (1918)”
“In the fight between you and the world, back the world. The Zürau Aphorisms (1918)”
“Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable”
“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one's own self”
“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness”
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. Letter to Oskar Pollak (1904)”
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher”
“A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.”
“He doesn't believe that public swimming”
“I simply state that I'm a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation”
“The shadow of a dove Falls on the cote, the trees are filled with wings; And down the valley through the crying trees The body of the darker storm flies; brings With its new air the breath of sunken seas And slender tenuous thunder . . . But I wait . . . Wait for the mists and for the blacker rain”
“Faint winds, and far away a fading laughter... And the rain and over the fields a voice calling...”
“There are no second acts in American lives. The Last Tycoon , "Hollywood, ETC.," ed. Edmund Wilson”
“The rich are different.”
“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. "The Rich Boy" (1926), paragraph 3.”
“The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we've forgotten there’s any other way. "Amory Blaine" in This Side of Paradise (1920) Bk. 2, Ch. 5”
“So hopeless is the world without; The world within I doubly prize; Thy world, where guile, and hate, and doubt, And cold suspicion never rise; Where thou, and I, and Liberty, Have undisputed sovereignty. "To Imagination", st. 2”
“When weary with the long day's care, And earthly change from pain to pain, And lost and ready to despair, Thy kind voice calls me back again: Oh, my true friend! I am not lone, While thou canst speak with such a tone! "To Imagination", st. 1”
“A Little While, a Little While”
“But first a hush of peace, a soundless calm descends; The struggle of distress and fierce impatience ends Mute music sooths my breast”
“He comes with western winds, with evening's wandering airs, With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars; Winds take a pensive tone and stars a tender fire And visions rise and change which kills me with desire. The Prisoner , st. 10”
“Shall Earth no more inspire thee, Thou lonely dreamer now? Since passion may not fire thee Shall Nature cease to bow? Thy mind is ever moving In regions dark to thee; Recall its useless roving”
“The night is darkening round me, The wild winds coldly blow; But a tyrant spell has bound me And I cannot, cannot go. The giant trees are bending Their bare boughs weighed with snow, And the storm is fast descending, And yet I cannot go. Clouds beyond clouds above me, Wastes beyond wastes below; But nothing drear can move me”
“I Saw Thee, Child, One Summer Day”
“First melted off the hope of youth Then Fancy's rainbow fast withdrew And then experience told me truth In mortal bosoms never grew 'Twas grief enough to think mankind All hollow, servile, insincere; But worse to trust to my own mind And find the same corruption there. "I Am the Only Being", st. 5”
“I Am the Only Being”
“How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be "American" before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, & having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries? Letter to Barrett Wendell”
“Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone. "Xingu" (1911), from Xingu and Other Stories”
“I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, & consequently suggests more tugging, & pain, & diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie. Letter to John Hugh Smith (12 February 1909), published in The Letters of Edith Wharton”
“After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them & invent others that (one is fairly sure) don't exist”
“No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity. "The House of Mirth" (1905), ch. X, pg. 69”
“He had come on her that morning in a moment of disarray; her face had been pale and altered, and the diminution of her beauty had lent her a poignant charm. That is how she looks when she is alone! had been his first thought; and the second was to note in her the change which his coming produced. "The House of Mirth" (1905), bk. 1, ch. 6”
“The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it. The House of Mirth (1905), bk.1, ch. 6”
“A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue. "The Other Two," ch. 1, from The Descent of Man and Other Stories”
“It was part of her discernment to be aware that life is the only real counselor, that wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissues. Sanctuary , (1903) part II, ch. IV”
“Vesalius in Zante”
“I have twice seen Macready act; once in Macbeth and once in Othello . I astounded a dinner”
“Yesterday I went for the second time to the Crystal Palace. We remained in it about three hours, and I must say I was more struck with it on this occasion than at my first visit. It is a wonderful place”
“I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward. 15 January, 1849. As quoted in Elizabeth Gaskell The life of Charlotte Brontë (1870), p. 285”
“real experience is perennially interesting, and to all men.”
“The letters of Charlotte Brontë (edited by Margaret Smith), Vol. I: 1829”
“If you like poetry let it be first”
“Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour ... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? Jane Eyre”
“If we would build on a sure foundation in friendship, we must love friends for their sake rather than for our own. Carolyn Warner (1992), page 135”
“I can only say with deeper sincerity and fuller significance”
“I can be on guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends! In response to George Henry Lewes (LL, II, v, 272); Miriam Farris Allott (1974), The Brontës, the critical heritage, page 160;”
“La difficulté d'écrire l'anglais m'est extrêmement ennuyeuse. Ah, mon Dieu! si l'on pouvait toujours écrire cette belle langue de France! The difficulty of writing English is most tiresome to me. My God! If only we could write this beautiful language of France at all times!”
“On the public execution on 6 July 1840 of the valet François Benjamin Courvoisier , who had murdered his employer Lord William Russell .”
“I was present, myself, at the execution of Courvoisier . I was, purposely, on the spot, from midnight of the night before; and was a near witness of the whole process of the building of the scaffold, the gathering of the crowd, the gradual swelling of the concourse with the coming”
“O let us love our occupations, Bless the squire and his relations, Live upon our daily rations, And always know our proper stations. The Chimes , Second Quarter”
“I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here. Comment while on an American tour (March 1842), as quoted in Dickens (1949) by Hesketh Pearson, Ch. 8”
“The bright old day now dawns again; the cry runs through the land, In England there shall be dear bread”
“To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart. Master Humphrey's Clock , (1840) Vol. 1”
“Love is not a feeling to pass away, Like the balmy breath of a summer day; It is not”
“If any one were to ask me what in my opinion was the dullest and most stupid spot on the face of the Earth, I should decidedly say Chelmsford . Letter to Thomas Beard (11 January 1835), in Madeline House, et al ., The Letters of Charles Dickens (1965), p. 53”
“A Dinner at Poplar Walk”
“I thought I introduced you!”
“Seven years ago we all went through the flames. And the happiness of some of us since then is, we think, well worth the pain we endured. Jonathan Harker”
“You think to baffle me, you”
“One and all we felt that the holy calm that lay like sunshine over the wasted face and form was only an earthly token and symbol of the calm that was to reign for ever. Dr. Seward of Lucy Westenra”
“Despair has its own calms. Jonathan Harker”
“No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be. Jonathan Harker”
“We are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things. Dracula to Jonathan Harker”
“Do not grieve for her! Who knows, but she may have found the joy she sought? Love and patience are all that make for happiness in this world; or in the world of the past or of the future; of the living or the dead. She dreamed her dream; and that is all that any of us can ask. The Jewel of Seven Stars , Chapter XIX: The Great Experiment”
“In my College days I had been Auditor of the Historical Society”
“I was naturally thoughtful, and the leisure of long illness gave opportunity for many thoughts which were fruitful according to their kind in later years.”
“At the moment our human world is based on the suffering and destruction of millions of non”
“What can we know? What are we all? Poor silly half”
“I should dearly love that the world should be ever so little better for my presence. Even on this small stage we have our two sides, and something might be done by throwing all one's weight on the scale of breadth, tolerance, charity, temperance, peace, and kindliness to man and beast. We can't all strike very big blows, and even the little ones count for something.”
“What I hope is that, when the whole district is full of these little rifle clubs, we may then get a central range to which they could all adjourn. Bisley is very useful to men of means, but to the ordinary civilian rifleman it might as well be in the moon. We must have local ranges if the men are really to get the good of them. "A British Commando", The Strand Magazine (June 1901), referencing the NRA Headquarters at Bisley, Surrey and Conan”
“You are my heart, my life, my one and only thought. The White Company”
“I can tell you that it is no game for children, and I will confess that, in spite of my nine campaigns, I felt myself turn pale when the first ball flashed past me. (Of cricket) Adventures of Gerard”
“The whole doctrine of original sin, the Fall, the vicarious atonement , the placation of the Almighty by blood”
“Testimony of an Enthusiast”
“These pictures are not occult, but they are psychic because everything that emanates from the human spirit or human brain is psychic. It is not supernatural; nothing is. It is preternatural in the sense that it is not known to our ordinary senses. It is the effect of the joining on the one hand of imagination, and on the other hand of some power of materialization. The imagination, I may say, comes from me”
“The highest morality may prove also to be the highest wisdom when the half”
“I don’t know nothing, I think. And glad of it.”
“They calls me yellow like yellow be my name. They calls me yellow like yellow be my name. But if yellow is a name Why aint black the same. Well, if I say Hey black girl Lord, she try to ruin my game.”
“Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to get attention we do, except walk?”
“The Cushion in the Road”
“, and this Obama has shown he can do.”
“Activism is the rent I pay for living on the planet. From the film poster for Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth .”
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any. As quoted in The Best Liberal Quotes Ever : Why the Left is Right (2004) by William P. Martin, p. 173.”
“A long walk to freedom”
“He has told me he likes men as well as he likes women, which seems only natural, he says, since he is the offspring of two sexes as well as two races. No one is surprised he is biracial; why should they be surprised he is bisexual? This is an explanation I have never heard and cannot entirely grasp; it seems too logical for my brain. Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992).”
“The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men. Foreword to The Dreaded Comparison: Animal Slavery and Human Slavery (1996) by Marjorie Spiegel, p. 14 .”
“Learn ever to separate the king and the principle of royalty. The king is but man ; royalty is the spirit of God . When you are in doubt as to which you should serve, forsake the material appearance for the invisible principle, for this is everything.”
“You are young, and your bitter recollections have time to change themselves into sweet remembrances." Ch. 67: Conclusion.”
“weep, heart full of love , youth, and life ! Alas, would I could weep like you!”
“Eh, gentlemen, let us reckon upon accidents ! Life is a chaplet of little miseries which the philosopher counts with a smile . Be philosophers, as I am, gentlemen; sit down at the table and let us drink. Nothing makes the future look so bright as surveying it through a glass of chambertin.”
“Ch. 9: D'Artagnan Shows Himself.”
“Tous pour un, un pour tous, c'est notre devise All for one, one for all , that is our motto.”
“* My father was a mulatto , my grandfather was a Negro, and my great”
“Sleeping on a plank has one advantage”
“Ange Pitou , Vol. 1 chapter 7 (1854).”
“Rien ne réussit comme le succès. Nothing succeeds like success .”
“History is never as we imagine it.”
“When the real becomes magical, we call it magical realism.”
“The magic of America lies in the fact that everything is extraordinary.”
“Latin America is the only continent where the real and the fantastic coexist naturally.”
“The baroque is a constant of the human spirit.”
“For many years I have said, following the tradition of Nicolás Guillén , Fernando Ortiz and Alejo Carpentier, that whoever wants to understand Cuba cannot ignore its mestizo condition in which the Hispanic and African components cannot be divided because they have created a cosmovisión that is authentically original. Nancy Morejón Interview (2002) translated from the Spanish by Jason Weiss.”
“Alejo Carpentier was absolutely wonderful. The Kingdom of the Earth is an exquisite little novel”
“Surtout point de zèle. ["Above all, no zeal"”
“Wordsworth in the Tropics”
“the Great Kings of Leinster,”
“Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them. Part IV: America , Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey ,”
“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong. Part II: Malaya ,”
“Where are the Movies Moving?”
“I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery. Those Barren Leaves”
“'There are quiet places also in the mind', he said meditatively. 'But we build bandstands and factories on them. Deliberately”
“Stupidity or reason? Oh, there was no choice now. It was imbecility every time. The Gioconda smile , in Mortal Coils”
“I suppose you imagined I was so insanely in love with you that I could commit any folly. When will you women understand that one isn't insanely in love? All one asks for is a quiet life, which you won't allow one to have. I don't know what the devil ever induced me to marry you. It was all a damned stupid, practical joke. And now you go about saying I'm a murderer. I won't stand it. The Gioconda smile , in Mortal Coils”
“cried Poirot irritably.”
“Everything must be taken into account. If the fact will not fit the theory”
“You give too much rein to your imagination. Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely.”
“Ah, my friend, one may live in a big house and yet have no comfort.”
“Poirot shook his forefinger so fiercely at me that I quailed before it.”
“The fellow is an absolute outsider, anyone can see that. He's got a great black beard, and wears patent leather boots in all weathers!”
“The intense interest aroused in the public by what was known at the time as “The Styles Case” has now somewhat subsided. Nevertheless, in view of the world”
“I specialize in murders of quiet, domestic interest. LIFE magazine”
“Oh dear, I never realized what a terrible lot of explaining one has to do in a murder! Spider's Web”
“I have given them life instead of death , freedom instead of the cords of superstition , beauty and truth instead of corruption and exploitation . The old bad days are over for them, the Light of the Aton has risen, and they can dwell in peace and harmony freed from the shadow of fear and oppression . Akhenaten , as portrayed in Akhnaton (1937); Christie later revised the play slightly in 1972, and it was published in 1973.”