Quotes About Influence

P. L. Travers once said, 'A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

It would be a different Church if I were running it." And so lifted the burden of that terrible morning with some laughter.

The rich can get whatever they want put into the papers.

As soon as he is regarded as a possession for which one has a particular goal, as soon as one exerts control over him, his natural growth will be violently interrupted.

Oppression and the forcing of submission do not begin in the office, factory, or political party; they begin in the very first weeks of an infant's life. Afterward they are repressed and are then, because of their very nature, inaccessible to argument. Nothing changes in the character of submission or dependency, when it is only their object that is changed.

You can drive the devil out of your garden but you will find him again in the garden of your son.

people who were never respected as children and thus do their utmost to earn that respect at a later stage with the assistance of the gigantic power apparatus they have built up around them.

Sense such humiliation, combined with prohibiting a child's verbal expression, is a constant and universally encountered factor in child-rearing, the influence of this factor in the child's later development is easily overlooked.

His asthma was an expression of this dilemma: "I breathe in so much air but I must not breathe it out again, everything she gives me must be good for me, even if it stifles me." A look back at Proust's childhood casts light on the origins of this tragedy. It explains why he was inextricably bound up with his mother for so long and could not free himself of her influence, although he undoubtedly suffered as a result. Proust

He takes up too much room, on the divan and in one's mind. It is simply impossible for me, in his presence, think of anything but him.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story. [ A Conversation with Alice Munro , BookBrowse, 1998]

Isn't it true that all the people I know in the world so far are hardly more than puppets for me, serving the glossy contrivings of my imagination?

Who would have thought something that happened that long ago could have such power?

I left my mark on that man.

Mi madre era eterna como la luna. Viva o muerta, la madre o la ausencia de la madre siempre determina la vida de una persona.

Almost everyone in heaven has someone on Earth they watch, a loved one, a friend, or even a stranger who was once kind, who offered warm food or a bright smile when one of us needed it.

I had begun to chase my husband as I had once chased my mother, toe to toe, a shadow girl trying to be what I thought they wanted me to be. I

Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain't. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up the flowers, wind, water, a big rock.

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

Those in power must spend a lot of their time laughing at us.

It is the need to be remembered that has caused most of the trouble in the world

Perhaps this is simply the way it is with writers. It's when they don't see you that you matter. Because then you can belong to them in a way that permits them complete possession. You are determined by them. You are controlled. You are, generally speaking, exaggerated.

How we come into this world, how we are ushered in, met, and hopefully embraced upon arrival, impacts the whole of our time on earth.

She used to read to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other folks' habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her voice. She washed us in a river of make-believe, burned us with a lot of knowledge we didn't necessarily need to know.