Quote collection
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"...for the first time in my life, writing was hard. The problem was the teaching...by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I'd spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain."
"We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long."
"They walked back into the world together, wearing the gift that had been given them: just life. Pity was not love, Barbie reflected...but if you were a child, giving clothes to someone who was naked had to be a step in the right direction."
"If life teaches anything at all it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes that there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question."
"The road and the tale have both been long, would you not say so? The trip has been long and the cost has been high... but no great thing was ever attained easily. A long tale, like a tall Tower, must be built a stone at a time."
"How does it happen that a writer who's not even very good - and I can say that, I've read four or five of his books - gets to be in charge of the world's destiny? Or of the entire universe's?" If he's not very good, why didn't you stop at one?" Mrs. Tassenbaum smiled. "Touché. He is readable, I'll give him that - tells a good story."
"A little arrogance (or even a lot) isn't such a bad thing, although your mother undoubtedly told you different. Mine did. "Pride goeth before a fall, Stephen", she said... and then I found out - right around the age that is 19 x 2 - that eventually you fall down, anyway."
"Sometimes dead is better"
"The monster nevers dies."
"What I'm saying is that I'm trying to find rational reasons to explain irrational feelings, and that's neveer a good sign."
"They had become a fixed star in the shifting firmament of the high school's relationships, the acknowledged Romeo and Juliet. And she knew with sudden hatefulness that there was one couple like them in every white suburban high school in America."
"A friend came to visit James Joyce one day and found the great man sprawled across his writing desk in a posture of utter despair. James, what’s wrong?' the friend asked. 'Is it the work?' Joyce indicated assent without even raising his head to look at his friend. Of course it was the work; isn’t it always? How many words did you get today?' the friend pursued. Joyce (still in despair, still sprawled facedown on his desk): 'Seven.' Seven? But James… that’s good, at least for you.' Yes,' Joyce said, finally looking up. 'I suppose it is… but I don’t know what order they go in!"
"Until that afternoon in October four years ago, I hadn't known dogs could scream."
"...it was more like bleeding than crying."
"In the end we always wear out our worries. That’s what Wireman says."
"There seems to be no air in the air she breaths."
"This inhuman place makes human monsters."
"I don't want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share."
"You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself."
"The person healed has an obligation to then ask why— to meditate on God's will, and the extraordinary lengths to which God has gone to realize His will."