Other Voices Other Rooms Quotes & Sayings

Because rooms were always full, full of memories and voices and people who were either dead or impossible to love. — Benjamin Alire Saenz

The poet Gary Snyder's finely unpoetic image of composting is useful here. Stuff goes into the writer, a whole lot of stuff, not notes in a notebook but everything seen and heard and felt all day every day, a lot of garbage, leftovers, dead leaves, eyes of potatoes, artichoke stems, forests, streets, rooms in slums, mountain ranges, voices, screams, dreams, whispers, smells, blows, eyes, gaits, gestures, the touch of a hand, a whistle in the night, the slant of light on the wall of a child's room, a fin in a waste of waters. All this stuff goes down into the novelist's personal compost bin, where it combines, recombines, changes; gets dark, mulchy, fertile, turns into ground. A seed falls into it, the ground nourishes the seed with the richness that went into it, and something grows. But what grows isn't an artichoke stem and a potato eye and a gesture. It's a new thing, a new whole. It's made up. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Her heart may be cracked, but it is pure. She may be jaded, but she is hopeful. She may be broken, but she is strong. She may be here, but she will leave. — LeAnne Mechelle

Before we ask where the leaders are, we should look in a mirror and ask the person we see "Why are you not leading"? — Carlos Wallace

(About parenting ... all that tedium, broken up by little spurts of high drama. — Anne Tyler

Who is against democracy? Is it the one who calls for peaceful resistance, or the one who bombs people, sheds their blood and leads them away from the leaders under feeble and dirty pretexts? — Muqtada Al Sadr

In the courtyard there was an angel of black stone, and its angel head rose above giant elephant leaves; the stark glass angel eyes, bright as the bleached blue of sailor eyes, stared upward. One observed the angel from an intricate green balcony - mine, this balcony, for I lived beyond in three old white rooms, rooms with elaborate wedding-cake ceilings, wide sliding doors, tall French windows. On warm evenings, with these windows open, conversation was pleasant there, tuneful, for wind rustled the interior like fan-breeze made by ancient ladies. And on such warm evenings this town is quiet. Only voices: family talk weaving on an ivy-curtained porch; a barefoot woman humming as she rocks a sidewalk chair, lulling to sleep a baby she nurses quite publicly; the complaining foreign tongue of an irritated lady who, sitting on her balcony, plucks a fryer, the loosened feathers floating from her hands, slipping into air, sliding lazily downward. — Truman Capote

My biggest competition is me. — Ciara

She lived in shades of black and gray - sometimes a dark purple will slip in in the form of shoelaces or a headband - but she painted the entire world with color. She painted my entire world with color. — Nicole Williams

The worst thing you can do is end up with a network show on cable or end up with a cable show on network. — Shawn Ryan

Our place had just four rooms and voices had a way of carrying, you couldn't sneeze in one room without somebody in another saying bless you. — Justin Cronin

Writing is a funny business. You sit in your room and listen to voices and write everything down. What kind of a profession is that? — William Kittredge

And in time we may remember, collecting every little memory, all the bits and pieces, into a larger memory, rebuilding a great layered and labyrinthine, now imagined, international hotel of many rooms, the urban experiment of a homeless community built to house the needs of temporary lives. And for what? To resist death and dementia. To haunt a disappearing landscape. To forever embed this geography with our visions and voices. To kiss the past and you good-bye, leaving the indelible spit of our DNA on still moist lips. Sweet. Sour. Salty. Bitter. — Karen Tei Yamashita

We burned down rooms. We knew what everything meant. We understood terror and fury as no one else had. It hurt to be together and hurt more to be apart. Our mouths clashed. Our teeth scraped. Our arms ached from the meld. We knew each other's smells and heard each other's voices and told each other things that no one else ever had. — James Ellroy

Poetry is my understanding with the world, my intimacy with things, my participation in what is real, my engagement with voices and images. This is why a poem speaks not of ideal life but of actual life: the angle of a window; the reverberation of streets, cities, rooms; shadows along a wall. — Sophia De Mello Breyner Andresen

The right of free speech cannot be parceled out based on whether we want to hear what the speaker has to say or whether we agree with those views. It means, quite often, tolerating the expression of views that we find distasteful, perhaps even repugnant. — Andrew Rosenthal

If you want peace, work for justice. — Pope Paul VI

I wanted someone to follow, I wanted him to be brave. But he wants to be brave for me; and no one can do that. — Mary Renault

I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas. Kennedy himself was 9/10ths the way around the clock or he wouldn't have accepted such an enervating and enfeebling job
meaning President of the United States of America. How can I be concerned with the murder of one man when almost all men, plus females, are taken from cribs as babies and almost immediately thrown into the masher? — Charles Bukowski

Other voices, other rooms, voices lost and clouded, strummed his dreams. — Truman Capote

Give God what's right, not what's left! — Adrian Rogers

Never fear, spa products are here."
Grinning, she kicks off her shoes and pads over to the recliner. Squeezing in on the other side of me, she pinches my face in one hand and studies it with puckered lips.
"Kara, if you're trying to kiss me, I should warn you, I'm nothing but a heartbreaker. — Rachel Harris

Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing. — Margaret Chittenden

This sound, which like all music--indeed, like all pleasure--I had been numbly unresponsive to for months, pierced my heart like a dagger, and in a flood of swift recollection I thought of all the joys the house had known: the children who had rushed through its rooms, the festivals, the love and work, the honestly earned slumber, the voices and the nimble commotion, the perennial tribe of cats and dogs and birds, "laughter and ability and Sighing, And Frocks and Curls." All this I realized was more than I could ever abandon, even as what I had set out so deliberately to do was more than I could inflict on those memories, and upon those, so close to me, with whom the memories were bound. And just as powerfully I realized I could not commit this desecration on myself. — William Styron

Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego. — William Kennedy

There is something disorderly about the death of a young person. In a universe disturbed by so much over which we have no control, an untimely tragedy rattles the teeth of our already shaken confidence. We want to domesticate death, fight it on our own turf, in familiar rooms with shades drawn evenly, top sheets turned back, and a circle of hushed voices closing in. — Faye Moskowitz

I clicked the gate shut and slipped down the alley. Through one fence after another, I caught glimpses of people in their dining rooms and living rooms, eating and watching TV dramas. Food smells drifted into the alley through kitchen windows and exhaust fans. One teenaged boy was practicing a fast passage on his electric guitar, with the volume turned down. In a second floor window, a tiny girl was studying at her desk, an earnest expression on her face. A married couple in a heated argument sent their voices out to the alley. A baby was screaming. A telephone rang. Reality spilled out into the alley like water from an overfilled bowl - as sound, as smell, as image, as plea, as response. — Haruki Murakami

It was just a different kind of battle, one he'd have to learn to win — Cinda Williams Chima

They talk to kids in their regular voices and say things that they would say in their own living rooms. Their bulletin boards are always a little raggedy, and their desks are always a little messy, and their libraries are always a little out of order, but kids love them because they talk about real things with real voices and they always tell the truth. — Matthew Dicks

A large house left deserted by those who have filled its rooms with emotions and life, expresses a silence, a quality all its own. A house unfurnished and empty seems less impressively silent. The fact of its devoidness of sound is upon the whole more natural. But carpets accustomed to the pressure of constantly passing feet, chairs and sofas which have held human warmth, draperies used to the touch of hands drawing them aside to let in daylight, pictures which have smiled back at thinking eyes, mirrors which have reflected faces passing hourly in changing moods, elate or dark or longing, walls which have echoed back voices - all these things when left alone seem to be held in strange arrest, as if by some spell intensifying the effect of the pause in their existence. — Frances Hodgson Burnett