Popular quotes in last 24 hours

The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they might be related to one another in ways frowned on by the Old Testament.

If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order to survive, to protect some aspect of myself that was now in constant retreat.

The novels were an escape from reality in the sense that we could marvel at their beauty and perfection. Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities,...

It's frightening to be free, to have to take responsibility for your decisions.

those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account.

It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else's shoes and understand the other's different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere...

I told them this novel was an American classic, in many ways the quintessential American novel. There were other contenders: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter. Some...

With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem.

Art is as useful as bread.

A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and...

What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you squarely in the eye and said he would rather die than be killed in combat

She resented the fact that her veil, which to her was a symbol of scared relationship to god, had now become an instrument of power, turning the women who wore them into political signs and symbols.

Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies.

The Bishop blessed him and helped him to his feet."May God have mercy on you," he said. And erased him from his heart.

Poshlust, Nabokov explains, is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.

In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This affirmation lies in the way...

The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in ones own home." Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced...

The revolution taught me not to be consoled by other people's miseries, not to feel thankful because so many others had suffered more. Pain and loss, like love and joy, are unique and personal; they...

The more we die, the stronger we will become

I eat my heart out alone.

I'm a perfectly equipped failure.

I am suddenly left alone again on the sunny path, with a memory of the rain.

A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic - not that it advocates...

The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own...

Honor is love, so I used to hear my mother saying

Science has eliminated distance.

Will he come to me, Dream Angus, Come quietly through the evening light, Come when I do not expect him, and I am sleepy, Come when I am drowsy, when I am ready for rest; Will he come to me, Dream...

...you'll see, he said, they'll go back to dividing everything up among the priests, the gringos and the rich, and nothing for the poor, naturally, because they've always been so fucked up that the...

...I reminded him that the weak cannot enter the kingdom of love, because it is a harsh and strict kingdom, and that women only surrender to determined men, because they give them the reassurance they...

The only thing that hurts me about dying is that it's not about love.

A photograph may speak to the photographer's envy or disappointment just as much as it may reveal his anger or disapproval. And even if a photograph records a joyous occasion, behind it there may...

She explains that lost love is still love.Life has to end but love doesn't

Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.