Quote collection
226 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time."
"Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts."
"Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own."
"If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made."
"...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow."
"We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can."
"I am very selfish, really. I lived for love."
"No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language."
"There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail."
"And now the moment. Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment; it is transient as all moments are; it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name; let us call it the Fullness of Time."
"Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time."
"Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied."
"An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply"
"Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would."
"You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair."
"The world is now multicultural the same way the world is round. It's not a selling point, it's not a 'quirky' feature, it's not a cynical marketing ploy, it's not an artistic statement, it's not even a plot device. It's a fact, like seedless grapes."
"I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated."
"The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport."
"She had that thing most people don't have - curiosity. She might not have always got the right answers, but she wanted to ask the questions. It's very hard if you are interested in ideas and all that, ideas and the philosophies of the past, it's very hard to find someone around here to really talk to. That's the tragedy of the thing really I mean, when you think about it. Certainly I can't find anyone around here to talk to anymore. And for a woman it's even harder you see. They can feel very trapped - because of the patriarchy. I do feel everyone needs to have these little chats now and then."
"The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life."