Quote collection
256 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Physical beauty is passing - a transitory possession - but beauty of the mind, richness of the spirit, tenderness of the heart - I have all these things - aren't taken away but grow! Increase with the years!"
"The name of a person you love is more than language."
"The nervous system of any age or nation is its creative workers, its artists. And if that nervous system is profoundly disturbed by its environment, the work it produces will inescapably reflect the disturbances, sometimes obliquely and sometimes with violent directness."
"Nothing's more determined than a cat on a hot tin roof."
"Luck is believing you're lucky."
"Youth must be wanton, youth must be quick, Dance to the candle while lasteth the wick."
"There are no 'good' or 'bad' people. Some are a little better or a little worse, but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other's hearts."
"If you can't be yourself, what's the point of being anyone else?"
"Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence."
"It's hard enough for me to write what I want to write without me trying to write what you say they want me to write which I don't want to write."
"When I was fourteen, my father decided to initiate me into the ways of manhood, and took me to the local whorehouse. The woman spread her legs, and made me look between them. All I could see was something that looked like a dyin' orchid; consequently, I have never been comfortable around women or orchids."
"Openings come quickly, sometimes, like blue space in running clouds. A complete overcast, then a blaze of light."
"What on earth can you do on this earth but catch at whatever comes near you, with both your fingers, until your fingers are broken?"
"I don't believe in "original sin." I don't believe in "guilt." I don't believe in villains or heroes - only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents. This is so simple I'm ashamed to say it, but I'm sure it's true. In fact, I would bet my life on it! And that's why I don't understand why our propaganda machines are always trying to teach us, to persuade us, to hate and fear other people on the same little world that we live in."
"All good art is an indiscretion."
"The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It's inflammatory."
"I can't expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself."
"Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense."
"The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment."
"I think that hate is a feeling that can only exist where there is no understanding."