Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an immediate knowledge of its ugly side.

We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.

From '86 until the summer of last year, wherever I went, people would say, ''You would have made a great James Bond! Weren't you going to be James Bond? You should have been, you could have been, you may have been.'' Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. It was like unfinished business in my life. I couldn't say no to it this time around.

The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

Dan: "Wow, I'm a complete idiot!" James: "Okay hold on, lemme get this on paper.

You're so violent. You watch James Bond.

Henry James created more convincing women than Iris Murdoch put together.

Erwin: "Where are you going?" James: "To my woom" Erwin: "Your WOMB? That's a long, tight trip!

The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.

You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who have ever been alive.

Be careful what you set your heart upon -- for it will surely be yours.

Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt.

Old friends are best. King James used to call for his old shoes; they were easiest for his feet.

The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.

Dan: "Ya know when cats are fat they're bigger than the ones who aren't fat, did ya know that?" James: "No Dan I didn't. Please do expand" Dan: "Huh?

No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and the passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all -- save ''a man with a red moustache,'' ''a young man in gray smoking a pipe.''

Deborah: My friend said she might come to the next meeting. James: Is she hot? Deborah: No, but she's Canadian!

We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other -- male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.

If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

Carter This is the United States of James Carter here. I'm the president, I'm the emperor, I'm the king. I'm Michael Jackson, you Tito

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

Why don't you write books people can read?;"Nora Joyce, to her husband James

Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

When the book comes out it may hurt you -- but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty -- necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.

There is a ''sanctity'' involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.

The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

The paradox of education is precisely this -- that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.

Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.

Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations.

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.

Experience that destroys innocents also leads one back to it.

Experience is a private, and a very largely speechless affair.

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

The future is... black.

It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.

I have always hated that damn James Bond. I'd like to kill him.

Journalism consists largely in saying ''Lord James is dead'' to people who never knew Lord James was alive.