Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Chaos was the natural law of the universe. Indifference was the engine of entropy. Man's apathy was the fertile ground in which the dark spirits tended their seeds.
What's the matter?'' She immediately started laughin. ''What's the mattter? Everything is the matter! Rocks! Trees! Atoms! Even anteaters! Everything is the matter!
As he flushed, an unexpected realization hit him. This is the Pope's toilet, he thought. I just took a leak in the Pope's toilet. He had to chuckle. The Holy Throne.
I didn't understand how funny this play Much Ado About Nothing truly was until I became an English teacher and had to teach it. There is no wittier dialogue anywhere.
You can point to the alleged miracles of the Bible, or any other religious text, but they are nothing but old stories fabricated by man and then exaggerated over time.
I spent some time in India and thought I might write about Hinduism. But it's so far removed from my experience I couldn't even get my mind around it to write about it.
From Santi's earthly tomb with demon's hole, 'Cross Rome the mystic elements unfold. The path of light is laid, the sacred test, Let angels guide you on your lofty quest.
When his brain died, all of the memories held in his gray matter, along with all of the knowledge he had acquired, would simply evaporate in a flood of chemical reactions.
Imagine how they would have mocked you if you proclaimed, 'Not only is the world a sphere, but there is an invisible, mystical force that holds everything to its surface'!
We have plenty of technologies we could use to destroy the planet, and we don't. There's more love on this planet than hate; there's more creativity than destructive power.
Two thousand years ago, we lived in a world of Gods and Goddesses. Today, we live in a world solely of Gods. Women in most cultures have been stripped of their spiritual power.
We did not have a television while I was growing up, and so I read voraciously. My earliest memory of being utterly transfixed by a book was Madeleine L'Engle's 'A Wrinkle in Time.
We did not have a television while I was growing up, and so I read voraciously. My earliest memory of being utterly transfixed by a book was Madeleine L'Engle's 'A Wrinkle in Time.'
I have written a lot about the fine arts, but I'd never written about the literary arts, and so on some level Dante really, you know, spoke to me, as new ground but also familiar ground.
I am a completely horizontal author. I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I've got to be puffing and sipping.
Madness is the WHO staring into the abyss and denying it is there. Madness is an ostrich who sticks her head in the sand while a pack of hyenas closes around her. - Lanky Man with green eyes
If you believe the people who love you, you get lazy. And if you believe the people who hate you, you become... maybe intimidated, or whatever the word might be, and you don't write as well.
Although I studied Dante's Inferno as a student, it wasn't until recently, while researching in Florence, that I came to appreciate the enduring influence of Dante's work on the modern world.
Angels and demons were identical--interchangeable archetypes--all a matter of polarity. The guardian angel who conquered your enemy in battle was perceived by your enemy as a demon destroyer.
When swimming into a dark tunnel,there arrives a point of no return when you no longer have enough breath to double back.your choice is to swim forward into the unknown....and pray for an exit
I don't know where I would place myself in the literary landscape. I really just write the book that I would want to read. And I put on the blinders, and I really - it is, for me, that simple.
The information was kept hidden for the same reason we keep matches from children. In the correct hands, fire can provide illumination... but in the wrong hands, fire can be highly destructive.
I still get up every morning at 4 A.M. I write seven days a week, including Christmas. And I still face a blank page every morning, and my characters don't really care how many books I've sold.
Langdon whispered to Vittoria. 'Ever fire anything other than a tranquilizer gun?' 'Don't you trust me?' 'Trust you? I barely know you.' Vittoria frowned. 'And here I thought we were newly-weds.
God created... light anddark, heaven and hell-science claims the same thing as religion, that the Big Bang createdeverything in the universe with an opposite."Including matter itself, antimatter"
In my mind, the men and women of NASA are history's modern pioneers. They attempt the impossible, accept failure, and then back to the drawing board while the rest of us stand back and criticize.
Everyone thinks that religion is the ball and chain. But the reality is that sin is the ball and chain. A relationship with Christ is the freedom that people are looking for in alcohol and drugs.
I read nonfiction almost exclusively - both for research and also for pleasure. When I read fiction, it's almost always in the thriller genre, and it needs to rivet me in the opening few chapters.
…Our sunsets have been reduced to wavelengths and frequencies. The complexities of the universe have been shredded into mathematical equations. Even our self-worth as human beings has been destroyed.
As strange as this may sound, I very seldom read fiction. Because my novels require so much research, almost everything I read is non - fiction - histories, biographies, translations of ancient texts.
It's funny, I don't know where I would place myself in the literary landscape. I really just write the book that I would want to read. I put on the blinders, and I really - it is, for me, that simple.
Because most Christians want it both ways. They want to be able to proudly declare they are believers in the Bible and yet simply ignore those parts they find too difficult or too inconvenient to believe.
In which year did a Harvard sculler last outrow an Oxford man at Henley?" Langdon had no idea, but he could imagine only one reason the question had been asked. "Surely such a travesty has never occurred.
Skepticism has become a virtue. Cynicism and demand for proof has become enlightened thought. Is it any wonder that humans now feel more depressed and defeated than they have at any point in human history?
The Last Supper is supposed to be thirteen men. Who is this woman? "Everyone misses it, our preconceived notions of this scene are so powerful that our mind blocks out the incongruity and overrides our eyes.
I'm fascinated by power, especially veiled power. Shadow power. The National Security Agency. The National Reconnaissance Office. Opus Dei. The idea that everything happens for reasons we're not quite seeing.
Believe me, I know what it's like to feel all alone...the worst kind of loneliness in the world is isolation that comes from being misunderstood, it can make people lose their grasp on reality. - Sienna Brooks
I'm constantly trying to keep people guessing as to what I'm doing, and I will spend enormous amounts of time looking at manuscripts and asking questions, and people will say, 'I know what his next book is about.'
I have great admiration for the fact-checking team. Considering it takes me years to gather all the facts in my books, it's a daunting task for the fact-checkers to review all of that material in a matter of weeks.
I was already writing 'The Lost Symbol' when I started to realize 'The Da Vinci Code' would be big. The thing that happened to me and must happen to any writer who's had success is that I temporarily became very self-aware.
Religion is like language or dress. We gravitate toward the practices with which we were raised. In the end, though, we are all proclaiming the same thing. That life has meaning. That we are grateful for the power that created us.
I'm not a car person. Three years after 'The Da Vinci Code' came out, I still had my old, rusted Volvo. And people are like, 'Why don't you have a Maserati?' It never occurred to me. It wasn't a priority for me. I just didn't care.
There is a statistic I heard a number of years ago: if you know somebody who is 85 years old, that person was born into a world that had a third as many people as the world does today. The population has tripled in the past 85 years.
Of course you can't stop. It is physically impossible for the human mind to think of nothing. The soul craves emotion, and it will continue to seek fuel for that emotion-good or bad. Your problem is that you're giving it the wrong fuel.
The challenge for a writer looking at history is to figure out what is history and what is myth. After all, what you are looking at is an interpretation of history, and so at some level, it becomes an interpretation of an interpretation.
She cried for the life she could not control. She cried for the mentor who had died before her eyes. She cried for the profound loneliness that filled her heart. But, above all, she cried for the future ... which suddenly felt so uncertain.
I think I was a shy kid. I grew up without television. I had a dog, and we lived up in the White Mountains in the summer, and I had no friends up there. And I would just go play hide-and-seek with my dog and probably had some imaginary friends.
Washington, D.C., has everything that Rome, Paris and London have in the way of great architecture - great power bases. Washington has obelisks and pyramids and underground tunnels and great art and a whole shadow world that we really don't see.
I often will write a scene from three different points of view to find out which has the most tension and which way I'm able to conceal the information I'm trying to conceal. And that is, at the end of the day, what writing suspense is all about.
Faith is universal. Our specific methods for understanding it are arbitrary. Some of us pray to Jesus, some of us go to Mecca, some of us study subatomic particles. In the end we are all just searching for truth, that which is greater than ourselves.