Quotes About Wisdom

At some point I asked her if she was at peace with the idea of dying. She looked at me like I was stupid and insane. "No," she said. "I want to live." You idiot! would have finished the sentence nicely. It was one of the only times she seemed really disappointed in me. I realized I had learned everything I know about death from movies. There is no peace in dying.

never underestimate the cool of your elders. They might be a kickass pair of lesbian superwomen who lived exactly the fuck the way they wanted to, even in what we now consider to be less enlightened times.

success does not mean you cannot be tricked.

All men, I think, wonder who the secret man that lives inside them is and whom they will meet in the mirror when they stop shaving. They wonder if that man is better than the one they know. If that elder sage or fantasy wizard or feral mountain man will be wiser than they, and when they are lost, if that dude will light up his staff and guide them through the dwarven mines and out of the wilderness.

Those who say 'you only live once' have never read a book.

You don't spell it, son. You eat it.

Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.

You can't learn everything you need to know legally.

Being wrong about important things is exhausting.

You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.

There's nothing I need or want to know from the writers I admire that isn't in their books. It's better to read a good writer than meet one.

Any contractor who would construct a flat-roofed, two-storey building in Northern New Hampshire was enough of a moron to not know how many assholes a human being had.

Let the grave mound grow a little grass, I always say; then it's safe to look.

It was from just a few sentences that a writer learned anything from another writer.

If you live long enough, Bill - it's a world of epilogues, Richard Abbott said.

He hadn't known many British, but some of them seemed crazy to him, and so it seemed a small thing to agree to—and Wally thought it was wise to agree with whoever it was who held the catheter.

Even I knew better than to sleep with a ghost. And it was the wrong time for a moral dilemma.

That's actually happened?' Ruth asked. 'Everything's happened,' the prostitute said.

Wizened and white, with brown blotched on her face the size and complexity of unshelled peanuts, Midge had a jitter in her head that made her pew like a chicken trying to make up its mind what to peck.

wherever Melony went, she would not be without guidance, she would not be without love, without faith; she had a good book with her. If only she'll keep reading it, and reading it

How I live matters more than what I do. I have ambitions for the quality of how I live. I have no ambition for making money ...and I'd have time to read enough to be a constant source of information, ideas and language.

You should listen to these people, Farrokh," his father was telling him. "It isn't necessary for them to be your moral equals in order for you to learn something from them.

Richard Abbott, who I thought knew everything, answered: "I don't know, exactly.

The past was where he lived most confidently, and with the surest sense of knowing who he was—not only as a novelist.