69 quotes found
“Hard writing makes easy reading.”
“A poet is somebody who has written a poem.”
“A poem isn't selfish. It speaks to people.”
“Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.”
“I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.”
“Sally has a smile I would accept as my last view on earth...”
“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its ...”
“[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automat...”
“[Y]ou were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase [angle of repose] as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest. As you said, it was too good for mere dirt; y...”
“There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance ... some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which t...”
“What do you mean, 'Angle of Repose?' she asked me when I dreamed we were talking about Grandmother's life, and I said it was the angle at which a man or woman finally lies down. I suppose it is; an...”
“[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.”
“wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.”
“Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.”
“[Friendship] is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is...”
“The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every tim...”
“It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.”
“Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not towisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.”
“The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.”
“To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.”
“I wouldn't live in a colony like that, myself, for a thousand dollars an hour. I wouldn't want it next door. I'm not too happy it's within ten miles. Why? Because their soft-headedness irritates me...”
“You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.”
“Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.”
“Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if hes far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he cant af...”
