Quotes About Author

My admiration stranger within our gates, who hesitates not to speak the truth.

To suggest the contrary was to infuriate her.

She discovered that a great deal of the suffering in this world is due not so much to original sin, but to a kind of original stupidity, an unimaginative, stubborn stupidity.

Then she had doubts about the reality of her situation and wondered if her imminent departure was not the illusion of a dream.

I'm not sure that there's anything more horrible than staying in a furnished room in Paris, especially

The constant winds of petty appetite dissipate the power of response.

reason told me that wherever we are thrown on earth, no matter how false our position, no matter how debased those beings who surround us, our duty is to work to combat evil and allow good to triumph.

Taisez-vous, sotte et impertinente créature ; vos phrases de roman nous ennuient.

can the title of Donna Bustamente make me any happier?" "It would put you out of reach of the insolent disdain of society." "Society!" said Juliette; "you mean your friends. What is society? I have never known. I have passed through life and made the tour of the globe, but have never been able to discover what you call society.

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

The bible is literature, not dogma.

America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamourous reasonable voice.

She said America was a spoiled child ignorant of grief.

You were torturing a cat, she says. With a freaking prod. A prod I built myself in metal shop, he says. But of course you never mention that.

He never appeared ugly to me, for his face, beaming with boundless kindness and benevolence towards mankind, had the stamp of intellectual beauty.

We can reduce all of writing to this: we read a line, have a reaction to it, trust (accept) that reaction, and do something in response, instantaneously, by intuition.

Even the nuns went racist after the convent was reappraised and it seemed their pension fund was in jeopardy.

never appeared ugly to me, for his face, beaming with boundless kindness and benevolence towards mankind, had the stamp of intellectual beauty.

He seems to have a passable knowledge of how to pretend to churn butter.

all a story is: a limited set of elements that we

We might think of structure as simply: an organizational scheme that allows the story to answer a question it has caused its reader to ask.

We tend, in discussion, to reduce stories to plot (what happens). We feel, correctly, that something of their meaning resides there. But stories also mean through their internal dynamics—the manner in which they unfold, the way one part interacts with another, the instantaneous, felt, juxtaposition of elements.

or said some racist thing out loud at church...

Tennyson shall have his day, and Donne his eclipse.