When God wants to do an impossible task, He takes an impossible person and breaks her.
If you want to really know something you have to observe or experience it in person; if you claim to know something on the basis of hearsay, or on happening to see it in a book, you'll be a laughingstock to those who really know.
Stories that pander to your every readerly desire and whim are like overly loyal dogs that live for the simple glow of your approval. I'm a cat person. I like a little aloofness in my pets and my writing.
It is a most repulsive quality, indeed,’ said he. ‘Oftentimes very convenient, no doubt, but never pleasing. There is safety in reserve, but no attraction. One cannot love a reserved person.’ ‘Not till the reserve ceases towards oneself; and ...
If you love someone, you don't act like they annoy you. You like them, and you try and make them think they're the most important person in the world to you.
I believe the more personally removed people are from a major financial event, the less it is to affect their appetite for risk.
One of the the things she most liked about the city -apart from all its obvious attractions, the theatre, the galleries, the exhilarating walks by the river- was that so few people ever asked you personal questions.
In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.' What is it then?' It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, but to hide.
Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.
I miss the days of burning your kind at the stake. For generations we have settled for financial ruin and ostracization of your whorish ancestors - but know this, I will personally gut you and put your head on a pike in my parlor.
All of a sudden I didn't fit in anywhere. Not at school, not at home...and every time I turned around, another person I'd known forever felt like a stranger to me. Even I felt like a stranger to me.
Knowing what environments are a good fit requires a person to know about themselves, in other words, to have self-awareness.
Every other person in the world would have looked at it and thought, Max would hate this. It was girly. It was beautiful. It wasn't made of titanium and black leather with spikes on it. But it seemed exactly right, in a weird, heart-fluttery kind of ...
Personally, I could care less about how people chose their graves. What I do care about is that I don’t want to be dragged along into one, especially by someone who has already lived their life to the fullest.
I’ve learned a lot about love over these last months. And part of what I’ve learned is that you have to want someone for who they are, not who you want them to be. You have to love a real person, not some dream in your head.
Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named...but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant ...
They say that right before you die your whole life flashes before you – a medley of your own personal greatest hits. Well then, I must be about to live, because events that haven’t happened yet are constantly pushing themselves into my head.
I have another friend who gets what I’m really like, and I get her. She scares me. Did you ever see yourself times ten in another person and want to cover your eyes?
So it's not all that important who people really are. Honestly, you could end up spending your life with almost anyone, and it wouldn't matter who - because the person they are to you is totally dependent on your view of them.
In a massive, long-term study of 17,000 civil servants, an almost unbelievable conclusion emerged: the status of a person's job was more likely to predict their likelihood of a heart attack than obesity, smoking or high blood pressure.
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that registered earthquakes ten th...
