It is not merely enough to love literature if one wishes to spend one's life as a writer. It is a dangerous undertaking on the most primitive level. For, it seems to me, the act of writing with serious intent involves enormous personal risk. It entai...
My best advice is to first write for yourself and stay in your story and just pour all of your good stuff and bad stuff into it. By 'stuff,' I mean all the experiences and pleasures and little hurts that make up a life. Because even (and especially) ...
I learned that dying is just a part of our journey of life. We are all on this journey and dying is a part of it for each of us. That does not mean that hope is hone. Hope just changes to a very realistic, practical hope... Sometimes hope becomes mor...
Archivist: In your Revelation, you spoke of the consequences of an individual's life rippling through eternity. Does this mean that you believe in an afterlife? In a heaven or a hell? Sonmi-451: I believe death is only a door. When it closes, another...
Jade Fox: You deserve to die, but the life I was hoping to take was Jen's. Ten years I devoted to you, but you deceived me! You hid the manual's true meaning. I never improved but your progress was limitless. You know what poison is? An eight year-ol...
Ned: Do you have life insurance, Phil? Because if you do, you could always use a little more, right? I mean, who couldn't? But you wanna know something? I got the feeling... [whistles] Ned: ... you ain't got any. Am I right or am I right? Or am I rig...
Dr. Wagner: You must protect her from any kind of excitement. And I do mean any kind, Mr. Kerner. Alexander Kerner: Any kind of excitement. Dr. Wagner: It would be life-threatening. Alexander Kerner: And this here? [Shows the doctor a newspaper readi...
House owner: I mean Pottersville. Don't you think I know where I live? What's the matter with you? [He proceeds toward his house. George is completely bewildered] George Bailey: Oh, I don't know. Either I'm off my nut, or he is... [to Clarence] Georg...
Alyssa: Look, I thought I was helping you. Sam: It would help me if I could kiss you. Alyssa: No. Look I thought we were just friends. Sam: Well, what you think you know doesn't necessarily have much to do with reality. I mean I hope I'm not the firs...
Ava Fontaine: I feel like all I've done my whole life is be pretty. I mean, all I've done is be born! I'm a failed actress, a failed artist... I'm not much good as a mother. Come to think of it, I'm not even that pretty anymore. I have failed at ever...
Sheba Hart: This is going to sound sick, but something in me felt... entitled. You know, I've been good all my adult life. I've been a decent wife, a dutiful mother coping with Ben. This voice inside me kept saying "why shouldn't you be bad, why shou...
We have one crystal clear reason apart from the blessed happiness of this way of life. It is this: prayer is the core of our day. Take prayer out, and the day would collapse, would be pithless, a straw blown in the wind. But how can you pray--really ...
I sail through life with great trust in my heart. Whoever stains and breaks that trust will be in a cold water best left behind. I felt the cold breeze of monetary means through the low ethics of money driven minds. I securely docked in a shore I cal...
Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying ...
The standard of a true leader is that he sets also his own rules rather than merely and blindly obeying the set of standard rules, even if it means being treated as an idiot or a crazy by the fools. And to follow his noble dream to attain his cherish...
Having personality does not mean being violent, rather honouring life by taking a stand. In this era so devoid of values, where people think it is safe to do everything that comes to mind, there is a need for purity. Man can and must have direction. ...
And although this (marital love) cannot be portrayed artistically, then let your consolation be, as it is mine, that we are not to read about or listen to or look at what is highest and the most beautiful in life, but are, if you please, to live it. ...
So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions, the best educated mind being the mind which has the largest stock of them, ready to meet the largest possib...
But a shift has occurred since I stepped up to take Prim’s place, and now it seems I have become someone precious. At first one, then another, then almost every member of the crowd touches the three middle fingers of their left hand to their lips a...
It is a part of our nature to survive. Faith is an instinctive response to aspects of existence that we cannot explain by any other means, be it the moral void we perceive in the universe, the certainty of death, the mystery of the origin of things, ...
No critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language's capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility. For English is a language that simply cannot be fixed, not can its use ...
