Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.
To die alone, on rock under sun at the brink of the unknown, like a wolf, like a great bird, seems to me very good fortune indeed.
The love of a man for his wife, his child, of the land where he lives and works, is for me the real meaning of mystical experience.
The critics say that Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony has no form. They are wrong; it has the form of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony.
Vaughan Telecom installers and contractors ensure the highest quality service for data and network cabling in Toronto and GTA area.
Beware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.
Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines.
It is an author's most solemn obligation to honor truth. If the free and independent writer does not speak truth to power, who will?
It is not the writer's task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if necessary, subversive.
Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today.
A leader leads from in front, by the power of example. A ruler pushes from behind, by means of the club, the whip, the power of fear.
I am my brother's keeper, says the chickenshit liberal. Perhaps he does not realize that he now has more than 2 1/2 billion brothers.
The best argument for Christianity is the Gregorian chant. Listening to that music, one can believe anything -- while the music lasts.
It seems clear at last that our love for the natural world-Nature-is the only means by which we can requite God's obvious love for it.
The Proustian aquarium: grotesque and gorgeous fish drifting with languid fins through a subaqueous medium of pale violet polluted ink.
Nearly all of Latin America, from Chile to Mexico, is one long rack of torture. Financed, equipped, and refined by the U.S. government.
If we had the power of ten Shakespeares or a dozen Mozarts, we could not produce anything half so marvelous as one ordinary human child.
A shelf of classics for our young adults: Tolkien, Hesse, Casteneda, Kerouac, Salinger, Tom Robbins, and _The Last Whole Earth Catalog_.
Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.
I would like to evoke the sense of wonder and magic in the reader but without invoking the mystical, the supernatural or the transcendent.
The basic science is not physics or mathematics but biology -- the study of life. We must learn to think both logically and bio-logically.
Men love their ideas more than their lives. And the more preposterous the idea, the more eager they are to die for it. And to kill for it.
Of course I litter the public highway. Every chance I get. After all, it's not the beer cans that are ugly; it's the highway that is ugly.
Guns don't kill people; people kill people. Of course, people with guns kill more people. But that's only natural. It's hard. But it's fair.
WEALTH AND HOW TO ACHIEVE IT: Let us define the wealthy man as he who has everything he desires. How to reach that happy condition? Two ways
We judge individual man and women as we do nations and races -- by the character of their achievement and by their achievement of character.
America My Country: last nation on earth to abolish human slavery; first of all nations to drop the nuclear bomb on our fellow human beings.
Preacher to me: 'A dollar for the Lord, brother?' Me to preacher: 'That's all right, I'm headed his way. I'll give it to him when I see him.'
I know my own nation best. That's why I despise it the most. And know and love my own people, too, the swine. I'm a patriot. A dangerous man.
The rich can buy everything but health, virtue, friendship, wit, good looks, love, pride, intelligence, grace, and, if you need it, happiness.
May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
It is not death or dying that is tragic, but rather to have existed without fully participating in life- that is the deepest personal tragedy.
New Yorkers like to boast that if you can survive in New York, you can survive anywhere. But if you can survive anywhere, why live in New York?
I've wrecked and ravaged half my life in the pursuit of women, and I suffer the pangs of about seventeen regrets -- the seventeen who got away.
Proust again: One can only wish that a man with such powers of total recall had led a less tedious life, moved among somewhat livelier circles.
Is the Archbishop's blessing any more meaningful than the Politician's handshake? The come, they go, with bigger things than us on their minds.
If you're never ridden a fast horse at a dead run across a desert valley at dawn, be of good cheer: You've only missed out on one half of life.
It may be true that there are no atheists in foxholes. But you don't find many Christians there, either. Or, about as many of one as the other.
England has never enjoyed a genuine social revolution. Maybe that's what's wrong with that dear, tepid, vapid, insipid, stuffy, little country.
The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.
A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles.
The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space.
That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, and indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding.
Every writer has his favorite coterie of enemies: Mine is the East Coast literati -- those prep school playmates and their Ivy League colleagues.
Once upon a time, I dreamed of becoming a great man. Later, a good man. Now, finally, I find it difficult enough and honor enough to be -- a man.
The response to my books from my East Coast friends has been wildly various, running the gamut from 'bad' to 'very bad.' (Is there another gamut?)
Writers should avoid the academy. When a writer begins to accept pay for talking about words, we know what he will produce soon: nothing but words.
I wish to be an inspector of volcanoes. I want to study cloud formations and memorize the wind and learn by heart the habits of the ponderosa pine.
Our contemporary Tories prefer the term 'ordered liberty' to 'freedom'. The word 'freedom' scares them; it has too much of a paleolithic ring to it.
When guns are outlawed, only the Government will have guns. The Government - and a few outlaws. If that happens, you can count me among the outlaws.