A. > A.'s Quotes

“Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“All great and precious things are lonely.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.”
― John Steinbeck

“Time is the longest distance between two places.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half-finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel.”
― Werner Herzog

“If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
― David Bowie

“My turn shall also come:
I sense the spreading of a wing.”
― Osip Mandelstam, The Selected Poems

“I read for growth, firmly believing that what you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.”
― Elie Wiesel

“What if love wasn't the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?”
― Jodi Picoult, The Tenth Circle

“I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful. But there were dry years too, and they put a terror on the valley. The water came in a thirty-year cycle. There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty-five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of twelve to sixteen inches of rain. And then the dry years would come, and sometimes there would be only seven or eight inches of rain. The land dried up and the grasses headed out miserably a few inches high and great bare scabby places appeared in the valley. The live oaks got a crusty look and the sage-brush was gray. The land cracked and the springs dried up and the cattle listlessly nibbled dry twigs. Then the farmers and the ranchers would be filled with disgust for the Salinas Valley. The cows would grow thin and sometimes starve to death. People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking. Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away. And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams

“Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.”
― Margaret Atwood, Surfacing

“A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you

is that a fact or a weapon?”
― Margaret Atwood

“What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“Know thyself' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, 'Be thyself' shall be written.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

“listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go”
― E.E. Cummings

“The basis of all human fears, he thought. A closed door, slightly ajar.”
― Stephen King, 'Salem's Lot

“Calvin: I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them. I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog! Want to see my book report?
Hobbes: (Reading Calvin's paper) "The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender modes."
Calvin: Academia, here I come!”
― Bill Watterson, Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat

“It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits”
― William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

“As moonlight unto sunlight is that desert sage to other greens.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

“Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

“You are on your way when you decipher the pounding of rain as Morse code for making progress.”
― Kate Harris, Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road

“When I was a child growing up in Salinas we called San Francisco “the City”. Of course it was the only city we knew, but I still think of it as the City, and so does everyone else who has ever associated with it. A strange and exclusive work is “city”. Besides San Francisco, only small sections of London and Rome stay in the mind as the City. New Yorkers say they are going to town. Paris has no title but Paris. Mexico City is the Capital.

Once I knew the City very well, spent my attic days there, while others were being a lost generation in Paris. I fledged in San Francisco, climbed its hills, slept in its parks, worked on its docks, marched and shouted in its revolts. In a way I felt I owned the City as much as it owned me.

San Francisco put on a show for me. I saw her across the bay, from the great road that bypasses Sausalito and enters the Golden Gate Bridge. The afternoon sun painted her white and gold---rising on her hills like a noble city in a happy dream. A city on hills has it over flat-land places. New York makes its own hills with craning buildings, but this gold and white acropolis rising wave on wave against the blue of the Pacific sky was a stunning thing, a painted thing like a picture of a medieval Italian city which can never have existed. I stopped in a parking place to look at her and the necklace bridge over the entrance from the sea that led to her. Over the green higher hills to the south, the evening fog rolled like herds of sheep coming to cote in the golden city. I’ve never seen her more lovely. When I was a child and we were going to the City, I couldn’t sleep for several nights before, out of busting excitement. She leaves a mark.”
― John Steinbeck

“I think it may truly said that if you are tired of San Francisco, you are tired of life.”
― Charles McCabe

“Policemen and security guards wear hats with a peak that comes down low over their eyes. Apparently this is for psychological reasons. Eyebrows are very expressive and you appear a lot more authoritative if you keep them covered up. The advantage of this is that it makes a lot harder for cops to see anything more than six foot off the ground. Which is why painting rooftops and bridges is so easy.”
― Banksy, Wall and Piece

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin