Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar.
Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.
People always think the bread of another country is better than their own.
Some things are best learned in calm, others in storm.
If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky i felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, i felt what would be would be.
People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.
The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.
The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify - it was like the light of truth itself.
Every artist knows that there is no such thing as "freedom" in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion.
The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades into grey and embittered middle age: the first flowering takes everything. The great men are those who have developed slowly, or who have been able to survive the glamour of their early florescence and to go on learning from life.
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
A watch is the most essential part of a lecture.
I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.
Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.
The sky was a midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current.
Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.
The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.
Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.
It has long been a tradition among novel writers that a book must end by everybody getting just what they wanted, or if the conventional happy ending was impossible, then it must be a tragedy in which one or both should die. In real life very few of us get what we want, our tragedies don't kill us, but we go on living them year after year, carrying them with us like a scar on an old wound.
One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and hold fast to the days.
The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.
The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.
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