My French was neither good nor bad. I had enough to understand what people said to me, but speaking was difficult, and there were times when no words came to my lips, when I struggled to say even the simplest things. There was a certain pleasure in t...
Art then becomes a safety valve for the expression of individual and collective neuroses originating in the inability of coping with the environment. Its products serve as a retarded correction of perception braked by the system of conventions and st...
Abby began to think that all the beauty and ugliness and turbulence one found scattered through nature, one could also find in people themselves, all collected there, all together in a single place. No matter what terror or loveliness the earth could...
In everything, almost in everything, I wrote I was guided by the need of collecting ideas which, linked together, would be the expression of myself, though each individual idea, expressed separately in words, loses its meaning, is horribly debased wh...
When moods go bad, when feelings become sad, when excitement is low, stick it out; don't leave and go. When life gets heavier than Earth and meaningless seems birth, step back and breathe, collect yourself and don't seethe. Remember all gets eventual...
Adam is fading out. It is on account of Darwin and that crowd. I can see that he is not going to last much longer. There's a plenty of signs. He is getting belittled to a germ—a little bit of a speck that you can't see without a microscope powerful...
Something very beautiful happens to people when their world has fallen apart: a humility, a nobility, a higher intelligence emerges at just the point when our knees hit the floor. Perhaps, in a way, that's where humanity is now: about to discover we'...
Magnus glanced at Alec and raised his eyebrows "Boo", he said. Jace was grinning. "Come on,surely you've got a phobia or two. What scares you?" Alec thought for a moment. "Spiders," he said. Clary turned to Luke. "Have you got a spider anywhere?" Luk...
The executive possesses means of distracting Parliament from its proper function; it seduces members by the offer of places and pensions, by retaining them to follow ministers and ministers' rivals, by persuading them to support measures —whereby t...
The Pacific is my home ocean; I knew it first, grew up on its shore, collected marine animals along the coast. I know its moods, its color, its nature. It was very far inland that I caught the first smell of the Pacific. When one has been long at sea...
[the Goonies are collecting coins from a wishing well] Stef: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, stop, stop! You can't do this. Data: Why? Mikey: Why? Stef: Because these are somebody else's wishes. They're somebody else's dreams. Mouth: Yeah, ...
Patrick: I'll tell you Sam, this one is tough. I have received a harmonica, a magnetic poetry set, a book about Harvey Milk, and a mix tape with the song Asleep on it twice. I mean, I have no idea. This collection of presents is so gay that I think I...
Gorman: [Calling Apone over the radio] Look, uh, Apone. [Apone snaps his fingers] Gorman: Look, we can't have any firing in there. I, uh, I want you to collect magazines from everybody. Hudson: Is he fuckin' crazy? Frost: What do you expect us to use...
Kurtzmann: [on Buttle] You see? The population census has got him down as "dormanted." Uh, the Central Collective Storehouse computer has got him down as "deleted." Sam Lowry: Hang on. [goes to a computer terminal] Kurtzmann: Information Retrieval ha...
Jesse: I mean, just once, I'd love to see, some little old lady save up all her money, to go to the fortune teller, and she'd get there, all excited about hearing her future, and the woman would say, "Um-humm. Tomorrow, and all your remaining days wi...
Quand tu veux construire un bateau, ne commence pas par rassembler du bois, couper des planches et distribuer du travail, mais reveille au sein des hommes le desir de la mer grande et large. If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together ...
I owe a huge debt to Anaïs Nin, because I fell into her diaries, essays, and collected letters in my Twenties and Thirties like a fish falling into water. She was, in some ways, a deeply flawed human being, and perhaps she makes a strange kind of he...
Art has been wrecked by a complete consciousness of the universe which shews that the world is to each man only a rubbish-heap limned by his individual perception. It will be saved, if at all, by the next and last step of disillusion; the realisation...
For, dear me, why abandon a belief Merely because it ceases to be true? Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt It will turn true again, for so it goes. Most of the change we think we see in life Is due to truths being in and out of favor. As I sit ...
The city is sore with movement, but still it oscillates. Busy people churn through grey-toned streets, their briefcases held close, rustling against trouser legs. The collective machine is tired, but each worker drives on. Gleaming taxis mirror stile...
When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist.
