Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The last clear definite function of man — muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need — this is man.
I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion.
I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly, slow reluctance to leave the stage. It's bad theater as well as bad living.
A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers.
To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.
When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch.
The literature of science is filled with answers found when the question propounded had an entirely different direction and end.
A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory
On all levels American society is rigged. I am troubled by the cynical immorality of my country. It cannot survive on this basis.
Kino heard the little splash of morning waves on the beach. It was very good -- Kino closed his eyes again to listen to his music.
Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.
There is one thing pleasantly unconfusing about medicine. The direction and the end are fixed and the patient never works backward.
I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.
How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive?
Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn’t quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you have gone.
His ear heard more than what was said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought.
So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out.
Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers.
Well, every little boy thinks he invented sin. Virtue we think we learn, because we are told about it. But sin is our own designing.
But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There's no godliness there.
Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.
It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.
It was a day as different from other days as dogs are from cats and both of them from chrysanthemums or tidal waves or scarlet fever.
The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for they can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain.
Critics are the eunuchs of literature. They stand by in envious awe while the whole man and his partner demonstrate the art of living.
I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.
A good writer always works at the impossible.There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights.
A boy gets to be a man when a man is needed. Remember this thing. I have known boys forty years old because there was no need for a man.
And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man.
Riches seem to come to the poor in spirit, the poor in interest and joy. To put it straight - the very rich are a poor bunch of bastards
Give me a used Bible and I will, I think, be able to tell you about a man by the places that are edged with the dirt of seeking fingers.
Men really need sea-monsters in their personal oceans. An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep.
There are people who will say that this whole account is a lie, but a thing isn't necessarily a lie even if it didn't necessarily happen.
I know now why confusion in government is not only tolerated but encouraged. I have learned. A confused people can make no clear demands.
In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.
The first grave. Now we're getting someplace. Houses and children and graves, that's home, Tom. Those are the things that hold a man down.
For every man in the world functions to the best of his ability, and no one does less than his best, no matter what he may think about it.
When you know a friend is there you do not go to see him. Then he's gone and you blast your conscience to shreds that you did not see him.
There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.
I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.
I would like to sit still for a while but I'm restless you know and sitting still is only an ideal like celibacy and complete cleanliness.
The story [Henny-Penny] has the best opening in all literature-"The sky is falling," cried Henny-Penny, "and a piece of it fell on my tail.
The people say that the two seemed to be removed from human experience; that they had gone through pain and had come out on the other side.
She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do.
[He] fell right into the oldest conviction in the world-- that the girl you are in love with can't possibly be anything but true and honest.
Three hours of writing require twenty hours of preparation. Luckily I have learned to dream about the work, which saves me some working time.
It is a nice thing to be working and believing in my work again. I hope I can keep the drive. I only feel whole and well when it is this way.
It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another-but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.
What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can only read a few and those perhaps not accurately.
It is possible, even probable, to be told a truth about a place, to accept it, to know it and at the same time not to know anything about it.