“As so often in life, things are not always what it seems.”
Thoughtful feeling
Thoughtful Quotes — page 191 of 303
“Honesty without kindness, humor, and goodheartedness can be just mean.”
“Words themselves are neutral. It's the charge we add to them that matters”
“Oh that simplicity and innocence its own unvalued work so seldom knows!”
“What may be on the surface looks like one thing but it's often a much larger problem.”
“All of us were tuned in during our early development but we lose our connection to intuition over time as other things come into play.”
“Keep my word' is such a strange expression. At first glance, it just means 'Be true to what you agreed on. But it could also mean, 'Hold your words back.' Keep them in. Let your actions speak instead.”
“I doubt if many of my contemporaries, especially the older ones, did many exercises. I have often tried to picture (Godfrey) Evans and (Denis) Compton doing press-ups in the out field before the days play, but so far have failed miserably.”
“The stuff that I have perhaps become known for that's based on fact, and English statesmen shouting at each other all the time, doesn't entirely represent who I am. I am not a politics wonk.”
“I think most people see drawing as subservient to the subject, a sort of meditation, a studying, a searching observation, in my case, for its own sake.”
“I grew up Greenville. And I moved to Raleigh some years later.”
“Processionalism is primary - how you get from one place to another, the relationships and effects of spaces as you move about in them. That's worked out awfully well in the State Theater. I'm a 'straight-in' man myself; I'm too nervous, I like to know where I am. I also like to know where I'm going.”
“I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out, "Is he as crazy as I am?" I don’t need that question answered.”
“The thought of the novelist lies not in the remarks of his characters or even in their introspection but in the plight he has invented for his characters - in the juxtaposition of those characters and in the lifelike ramifications of the ensemble they make: their density, their substantiality, their lived existence actualized in all its nuanced particulars, is in fact his thought metabolized.”
“People were standing up everywhere shouting, "This is me! This is me!" Every time you looked at them they stood up and told you who they were, and the truth of it was that they had no more idea who or what they were than he had. They believed their flashing signs, too. They ought to be standing up and shouting, "This isn't me! This isn't me!" They would if they had any decency. "This isn't me!" Then you might know how to proceed through the flashing bullshit of this world.”
“And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.”
“That can happen when people die, the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration”
“I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface”
“To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.”
“You don't want to repeat yourself for one. You don't want to fall into the clichés for another. And you don't want to be licentious really. You want to be descriptive, if you can be. And you're not setting out to arouse anybody.”