“My business was great, and in such a case as mine a man may strain courtesy.”
Thoughtful feeling
Thoughtful Quotes — page 157 of 303
“To be now a sensible man, by and by a fool, and presently a beast!”
“Take it in what sense thou wilt.”
“Everything is tedious when one does not read with the feeling of the Author.”
“I now began for the first time to envy those young cubs at the university who had fine scholars to tell them what was what; professors who had devoted their lives to mastering and focusing ideas in every branch of learning; who were eager to distribute the treasures they had gathered before they were overtaken by the night. But now I pity undergraduates, when I see what frivolous lives many of them lead in the midst of precious fleeting opportunity. After all, a man's Life must be nailed to a cross either of Thought or Action. Without work there is no play.”
“A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle.”
“My performances may have elements that some may find entertaining, but that's not my main purpose.”
“When it comes to performance art, I am more interested in the failures then the so-called successes. I have never cared for entertaining anyone.”
“You've got to separate the singer and the songs.”
“On sober reflection, I find few reasons for publishing my Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German Monk toward the end of the fourteenth century...First of all, what style should I employ?”
“If you want to become a man of letters and perhaps write some Histories one day, you must also lie and invent tales, otherwise your History would become monotonous. But you must act with restraint. The world condemns liars who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, and it rewards poets, who lie only about the greatest things.”
“I don't want to be a propagandist, no matter how good the cause. I want to tell stories. It's just that the stories have to square with my consciousness as a woman and my conscience as a human being.”
“But it's hard for me to pinpoint where all my characters and dialogue come from - imagination or real life. My memoir, of course, was all about my past, and many of the short stories cleave very closely to my life, but the more stories I wrote in the collection, the more that seemed to be invented, but who knows... I think I'm writing about a young woman with acne who shoplifts, but I'm really writing about myself.”
“It's a waste of time to think that if you colored a painting red what might have happened if you painted it black.”
“We don't talk about tennis. I figure she knows what she's doing. I mean, what am I going to tell her?”
“I want people to come away from my book with questions. Questions about virtue and goodness. Not answers.”
“Beatrice. We should think of our family. But. But we must also think of ourselves.”
“Some persons' letters seem almost framed to afford a series of alibis for their personality.”
“The unsaid part is the best of every discourse.”
“The walls of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions.”