Quotes About Influence

As an adolescent, Vonnegut made my life bearable.

Newspapers abound, and though they have endured decades of decline in readership and influence, they can still form impressive piles if no one takes them out to the trash.

We're often wrong at predicting who or what will transform us. Encountering certain people, books, music, places, or ideas Ã¢â'¬Â¦ at just the right time can immediately make our lives happier, richer, more beautiful, resonant, or meaningful. When it happens, we feel a kind of instant love for them, both deep and abiding. Now and then it can be something as trifling as a children's book, a returned telephone call, or a night at a seaside bar in Mykonos.

Like a spider web that you walk into, it is not so easy to get all the tendrils of real love off after you have passed through it.

Politics can make people do terrible things

The phallic symbolism of his plane, The Spirit of St. Louis, is obvious. Lindbergh, in effect, is trapped inside an enormous penis which carries him onwards to an inevitable destination which cannot be changed. Is this how you feel as a director, trapped inside your own masculinity?

You know she wanted you to vote the other way. It's her future, you know. She's the one who's going to be around the longest.

This book is full of passion. Full of anger, anyway. If it communicates anything at all, it's how much I hate these people, how evil they are, how much they've spoiled everything, with their vested interests and their influence and their privilege and their stranglehold on all the centres of power; how they've got us all cornered, how they've pretty well carved up the whole bloody country between them.

Patty knew, in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went to go on to make, the really big life mistake, was to go along with Walter's version of her in spite of knowing that it wasn't right. He seemed so certain of her goodness that eventually he wore her down.

It's like having one red sock in a load of white laundry. One red sock, and nothing is ever white again.

Katz couldn't have said exactly why Walter mattered to him. No doubt part of it was simply an accident of grandfathering: of forming an attachment at an impressionable ago, before the contours of his personality were fully set.

It's like there are these words, they're out there in the world, and you start wondering what it would be like to say them. Words have their own power—they create the feeling, just by the fact of your saying them.

It was clear to everyone that day, and in the months that followed, that Patty's greatest warming influence was on Walter himself. Now, instead of speeding by his neighbors in his angry Prius, he stopped to lower his window and say hello. On weekends, he brought Patty over to the patch of clear ice that the neighborhood kids maintained for hockey and instructed her in skating, which, in a remarkably short time, she became rather good at.

We girls are supposed to at least have these amazing sexual powers, but in my recent experience this is just a lie told by men to make them feel better about having ALL the power.

If you substituted networks for socialism, you got the Internet. Its competing platforms were united in their ambition to define every term of your existence.

With public opinion, he said, there's weather, and then there's climate. You're trying to change the climate, and that takes time.

Some of the most influential novels of recent years, by Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard, take the method of self-conscious first-person testimony to a new level. Their more extreme admirers will tell you that imagination and invention are outmoded contrivances; that to inhabit the subjectivity of a character unlike the author is an act of appropriation, even colonialism; that the only authentic and politically defensible mode of narrative is autobiography.

She was like a bank too big in her mother's economy to fail

When have you ever done anything but intercede for me? Everything I am I owe to you. Mother.

I segreti erano potere. I soldi erano potere. Essere necessari a qualcuno era potere. Potere, potere, potere: com'era possibile che il mondo girasse intorno alla lotta per una cosa che creava solitudine e angoscia in chi la possedeva?

Ora si rendeva conto […] che aveva sempre odiato essere la figlia di un pastore. I padri delle sue amiche progettavano edifici, curavano malattie, perseguivano criminali. Suo padre era come un fabbricante di croci, però peggio. La sua fede ardente, la sua santità, erano un odore che aveva sempre minacciato di aderire a lei, come la puzza delle Chesterfield, però peggio, perché non si poteva lavare via.

Of] particular importance is the relationship between education and the political process.

One hundred years before the present government existed, a powerful leader, Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia, stated his views in clear, unflinching terms. I thank God, he said, that there are no free schools nor printing [in this land]. For learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing hath divulged them...God save us from both!

Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself.