Smithie Spotlight Quotes & Sayings

I think I really produce my best work in Iran. — Abbas Kiarostami

I feel blessed to have had such a background, where animals, food raising, harvesting and canning were a natural part of life. — Trina Paulus

I don't think any poetry is written that isn't primarily written to the self, in a way ... I'm always talking to myself. But I seem to want somebody else to listen to it. I need, I do want an audience. So it's a strange thing. It's a very private conversation that then, you make public, kind of like the starfish flipping its stomach out. — Kay Ryan

One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it. One should have lived first and then made one's philosophy to fit life ... Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of ideas, everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. Was it surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy? — Aldous Huxley

The true measure of our belief in the validity of our values is our willingness to act upon them. — Bill Crawford

Ah, why can't I know if I love, or if I hate? — Jean Racine

Making a self can be like writing, and now I think writing can be like home: a space you make that you dwell in and roam through for hours every day, a space that's absolutely yours. — Jane Alison

We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate. — Joan Didion

A good runner leaves no footprints. — Laozi

Throughout the Middle East, there is a great yearning for the quiet miracle of a normal life. — William J. Clinton

As soon as an idea is accepted it is time to reject it. — Holbrook Jackson

I don't want to leave my successor and my children to pay for France's debt. — Francois Hollande

They've been fairly positive, as firm as they could be in regards to the derivatives operations in Montreal. We didn't sense that there was a hesitation about it. But things change. — Jean Charest