Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I learned early in life that to laugh before breakfast was to cry before dinner.
There is no neutrality. There is only greater or lesser awareness of one's bias.
I attacked Dawkins's book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate.
The educator shall help the young to educate themselves in opposition to the age.
I am shy and self-conscious and awkward, so I think that's why I became a writer.
The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.
My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.
Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.
Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent.
I think that the implication of King's assassination has not been fully appreciated.
It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.
Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright.
You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.
If America has a civic religion, the First Amendment is its central article of faith.
My father was the funniest man I ever met. He made Redd Foxx look like an undertaker.
Suicide is the worst form of murder, because it leaves no opportunity for repentance.
Ultimately, change will happen when problems persist and enough people are concerned.
There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.
Surely going to bed with a man before marriage was the most courageous act of my life.
That a literature in our time is living is shown in that way that it debates problems.
The person upon whom the schoolboys' attention centred was, of course, the Headmaster.
To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.
I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device in the face of complexity.
I did not know what it was to be happy for a whole day at a time, scarcely for an hour.
We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.
The free world led by the U.S. fought almost all regimes that trampled on human rights.
Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.
It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people.
biographies are a little like marriages: You only have room in your life for one or two.
For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.
The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.
Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.
I hope that I will be the last victim in China's long record of treating words as crimes.
The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.
Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them.
Touch a university with hostile hands and the blood you draw is prompt, copious, and real.
On the whole, the world was friendly. It chiefly depended on whether one were good or not.