Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Anybody who has ever tried to rectify an injustice or set a record straight comes to feel that he is going mad.
Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty; it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils.
Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.
You know what my favourite quotation is?.. It's from Chaucer... Criseyde says it, "I am myne owene woman, wel at ese."
I was going to get myself recognized at any price. If I could not win fame by goodness, I was ready to do it by badness.
There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.
The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers; suspicion is reserved for friends.
The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof
You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk.
An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.
... the average Catholic perceives no connection between religion and morality, unless it is a question of someone else's morality.
The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.
If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.
The fact is that gardening, more than most of our other activities except sometimes love-making, confronts us with the inexplicable.
The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.
If someone tells you he is going to make a 'realistic decision', you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.
In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.
Illiteracy at the poverty level (mainly a matter of bad grammar) does not alarm me nearly as much as the illiteracy of the well-to-do.
The consumer today is the victim of the manufacturer who launches on him a regiment of products for which he must make room in his soul.
Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.
The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the brother of talk after dinner.
As soon as you become a writer, you lose contact with ordinary experience or tend to. ... the worst fate of a writer is to become a writer.
Morality did not keep well; it required stable conditions; it was costly; it was subject to variations, and the market for it was uncertain.
Any sizeable Portuguese town looks like a superstitious bride's finery - something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.
Europeans used to say Americans were puritanical. Then they discovered that we were not puritans. So now they say that we are obsessed with sex.
The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero.
Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.
Once the state is looked upon as the source of rights, rather than their bound protector, freedom becomes conditional on the pleasure of the state.
Feminism is ridiculous. Feminists are silly idealists who want to be on top. There is no real equality in sexual relationships - someone always wins.
Modern neurosis began with the discoveries of Copernicus. Science made men feel small by showing him that the earth was not the center of the universe.
I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you've given away trade secrets.
When an American heiress wants to buy a man, she at once crosses the Atlantic. The only really materialistic people I have ever met have been Europeans.
Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret.
... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.
The only form of action open to a child is to break something or strike someone, its mother or another child; it cannot cause things to happen in the world.
I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that you really must make the self.
The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable.
With extramarital courtship, the deception was prolonged where it had been ephemeral, necessary where it had been frivolous, conspiratorial where it had been lonely.
Our language, once homely and colloquial, seeks to aggrandize our meanest activities with polysyllabic terms or it retreats from frankness into a stammering verbosity.
For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved by a tornado.
Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.
The rationalist mind has always had its doubts about Venice. The watery city receives a dry inspection, as though it were a myth for the credulous- poets and honeymooners.
America is indeed a revelation, though not quite the one that was planned. Given a clean slate, man, it was hoped, would write the future. Instead, he has written his past.
What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake. If you're interested in the cake, you get rather annoyed with people saying what species the real plum was.
I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that - how to express this - you really must make the self.
Venice is the worlds unconscious: a misers glittering hoard, guarded by a Beast whose eyes are made of white agate, and by a saint who is really a prince who has just slain a dragon.
Laughter is the great antidote for self-pity, maybe a specific for the malady, yet probably it does tend to dry one's feelings out a little, as if by exposing them to a vigorous wind.
The famous Florentine elegance, which attracts tourists to the shops on Via Tornabuoni and Via della Vigna Nuova, is characterized by austerity of line, simplicity, economy of effect.
Understanding is often a prelude to forgiveness, but they are not the same, and we often forgive what we cannot understand (seeing nothing else to do) and understand what we cannot pardon.
All dramatic realism is somewhat sadistic; an audience is persuaded to watch something that makes it uncomfortable and from which no relief is offered - no laughter, no tears, no purgation.