Thieir Quotes & Sayings

Whenever an art form - music, book, drama, song - is dragged into the seminar rooms, it is finished as a force. Nothing is more deadly than the anatomizing of scholarship, since the study of art, any art - even the obscene, semiliterate yawp and grunt of rap - drains the life from it. — Paul Theroux

What can my enemies do to me?
I have in my breast both my Heaven and my Garden.
If I travel they are with me, and they never leave me.
Imprisonment for me is a religious retreat [khalwa].
To be slain for me is martyrdom [shahada]
And to be exiled from my land is a spiritual journey [siyaha]. — Ibn Taymiyyah

Real flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part of the same movement. Not A before B, but all together. — Thomas Pynchon

Storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning,
Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing,
I tread day and night such roads. — Walt Whitman

How we like to hold on! Sometimes we're unwilling to let things go just because we know them, and they feel "safe" to us, even if we're talking about something like behaviors that harm us, like defensiveness or addictions. We hesitate to let go because doing so will expose us to the unknown in our own lives, and we'll have to deal with life without this part of ourselves that we've grown so accustomed to. But if we're ever to move on to the next thing in life, if we're to grow and develop as people, we may have to let go of things that are holding us back - behaviors and beliefs and sometimes even people. There is no formula that can tell us what we should let go of and what we should hold on to. But if we listen to our hearts, we can know what still serves us well, and what is keeping us from moving on and becoming better people. — Tom Walsh

And when your wife is not the same person you fell in love with eight years ago, where exactly does that leave you? Do you try to get to know who she has become, and hope for the best? Or do you keep deceiving yourself in the hope that she might wake up one morning and have gone back to the woman she used to be? — Jodi Picoult

So instead of the Super Bowl, we've got the Stupor Bowl. Two once-proud teams, now 0-4 and stumbling through the season like zombies. And if you think the Cowboys are bad (and they are), the Redskins are so bad that every few plays you have to put a mirror under thieir noses to make sure they're still breathing. — Tony Kornheiser

For some musicians it becomes self-reflexive to think, "I have to write some of my kind of songs now." — Alan Licht

I thought that if I accomplished enough, that somehow I would be let off the hook in the future. Like I didn't have to keep striving and achieving because I had done that already, and it would add up to being enough. — Portia De Rossi

She considered hypothesis 3 to be quite unlikely, since she didn't feel the least bit psychopathic, but included it in the list out of respect for the scientific method. — Neal Stephenson

The right book, like the right song or the right love, can change the entire cosmos, for the right person, of course. And then it spills out from there. — Wm. Paul Young

You were worried about me?" "Of course I was, buddy. I would never have forgiven myself if something had happened. You didn't think I'd be worried about you?" "No. I didn't think you cared." Dad looks sad. And surprised. I'm not sure why. "Really, buddy? You didn't think I cared?" "No." "Well, I do. A lot." "Okay." "I guess I need to do a better job of showing you." "Yes. You could do a better job." Dad laughs. And he hugs me again. — Stacy Kramer

The religious imagery and fairytales that formed our shared cultural references have been replaced by the cult of celebrity. Marilyn is the sex goddess, Camilla Parker Bowles is cast as the wicked witch, Che Guevara is the revolutionary. Celebrities have become visual shorthand for narratives that shape our lives. — Alison Jackson

I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books. — C.S. Lewis