Quotes from Lynn Cullen

First you must believe there is a soul. Do you? If by a soul one means the creature who lives within each of us, a creature born loving, born joyful, but who with each wordly blow shrinks more deeply into its shell until at last, the poor desiccated thing is unrecognizable, even to its own self, yes. I do.

Every heart, it have its own ache.

The principled man is merely one whose ancestors were ruthlessly unprincipled, affording him the option of acting upon fine sentiments.

Magdalena pulls me away by the arm. "I am the stronger one of Titus and I," she says over the marketplace din. "Woman are always the stronger sex." She smiles to herself. "The trick is not appearing to be so.

Tell me," said Miss Fuller, "who is behind a great woman?" She looked around our circle, then stopped at me. "That's right. No one. She has to get there by herself.

People want to be titillated or frightened. They don't want to think.

It is as if producing a creative work tears a piece from your soul. When it is ripped completely free of you, the wound must bleed for a while. How similar it is to letting go of a dream, your hope, or your heart's desire. You must open up and let it drain.

Madness," he said quietly, "is as a drop of ink in water. It sends sly tendrils from the afflicted person into everyone around until all are shaded in black. Soon one does not know who is mad and who is not.

In painting, three things must be considered - the position of the viewer, the position of the object viewed, and the position of the light that illuminates the object.

You and I are poets, Mrs. Osgood. Our job is to raise questions, not to answer them.

Fortunate is the person who can succeed in extracting honey from such a flower as this life, whose root and every petal is bitterness.

Tell me, who is behind a great woman? That's right. No one. She has to get there herself.

Americans are being poisoned, all in the name of profit, producing a weak-minded race of people who are given to lust and desire.

Whenever you see this much wealth, assume that someone dirtied his hands. Fortunes don't come to saints.

What did I expect him to say--that he would leave his wife? To do so was the province of fiction. Real life was not as easy as that.

Whenever you see this much wealth, assume that someone dirtied his hands. Fortunes don't come to saints.

I find that the thoughts spoken between the lines are the most important parts of a poem or story.

Pay attention to fate, Mrs. Osgood. It will always have the last word.

Did Mr. Poe write as a boy? Dear me, yes. It was all he had, what with losing his mother as a toddling child and then being cast aside by his foster father. I think sometimes his pen was his only friend in the world

If by a soul one means the creature who lives within each of us, a creature born loving, born joyful, but who with each worldly blow shrinks more deeply into its shell until at last, the poor desiccated thing is unrecognizable even to its own self, yes. I do.

I had come to realize that you must do what you must for your children, even it if called for the sacrifice of your very soul.

She, Henry Horesman's daughter, was to tell the most important person in this behemoth country, whether or not the vaccine that he'd allowed every person under the age of 20 in the USSR to take (a mind boggling 77 million young people), a vaccine given to him by a scientist from his archenemy - the US - was safe and effective? If it was a flop, or if she misrepresented its efficacy, there would be world war.

An army of scientists had been called to evaluate the trial of Jonas Salk's vaccine in American back in 1955. But to evaluate the design and execution of the hugest vaccine trial of all time, and the validity of the results, there was just her (Dorothy Horstmann). No pressure, whatsoever.

takes a lot of spunk to spin gold from heartache, Mrs. Osgood. A lot of drive. Most of us can't do it. It's a mean world, Mrs. Osgood, mean and spiteful.