Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You can't find peace by avoiding life.
we become the stories we tell ourselves
Please, God, send me something to adore.
a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm
You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.
We always worry about the wrong things, don't we?
I have no useful theories about love and marriage.
I think writing is, by definition, an optimistic act.
A writer should always feel like he's in over his head
Sure, go ahead, simulate life, using only ink and paper.
I seem to produce a novel approximately once every three years.
What do you do when you're no longer the hero of your own story?
I love movies, I love television, I love narratives of all kinds.
I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.
Insomniacs know better than anyone how it would be to haunt a house.
She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric.
She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.
Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?
It's the world, you live in it, even if some boy has made a fool of you.
She is overtaken by a sensation of unbeing. There is no other word for it.
I just don't feel much interested in the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other.
There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.
Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.
Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.
One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.
This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.
That summer when she was eighteen, it seemed anything could happen, anything at all.
. . . he felt himself entering a moment so real he could only run toward it, shouting.
As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.
Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.
I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.
Oh, all you immigrants and visionaries, what do you hope to find here, who do you hope to become?
Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.
The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.
Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It's James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it's Marilyn heading off to bed.
Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself.
You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.
What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half.
I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.
You grow weary of being treated as the enemy simply because you are not young anymore; because you dress unexceptionally.
People are more than you think they are. And they're less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.
What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. And there it is... It was death. I chose life.
There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.
Accept that, like many men, you have a streak of the homoerotic in you. Why would you, why would anyone, want to be that straight?
But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another.
What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.
We’d hoped for love of a different kind, love that knew and forgave our human frailty but did not miniaturize our grander ideas of ourselves.
She will remain sane and she will live as she was meant to live, richly and deeply, among others of her kind, in full possession and command of her gifts.