Authors' Voices

Like a wild stranger out of wizard-land
He dwelt a little with us, and withdrew;
Black and unblossomed were the ways he knew,
Dark was the glass through which his fire eye shined.
Edwin Arlington Robinson
One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning.
A. E. Housman
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.
Stephen Vincent Benét
I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.
Ray Bradbury
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.
Sylvia Plath
The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
Adrienne Rich
God owns heaven
but He craves the earth.
Anne Sexton
No one worth possessing Can be quite possessed.
Sara Teasdale
Whoso desireth to know what will be hereafter, let him think of what is past, for the world hath ever been in a circular revolution; whatsoever is now, was heretofore; and things past or present, are no other than such as shall be again: Redit orbis in orbem.
Sir Walter Ralegh, “A Collection of Political Observations”
Where both deliberate, the love is slight:
Who ever lov’d, that lov’d not at first sight?
Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander
Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated—thrown aside—a man hesitates to write down his innermost convictions.
William Carlos Williams, The Embodiment Of Knowledge
Time is the only critic without ambition.
John Steinbeck
I am an invisible man. . . . I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Bankers, nepotists, contracts and talkies: on four fingers one may count the leeches which have sucked a young and vigorous industry into paresis.
Dalton Trumbo
The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.
Harper Lee, To Kill to Mockingbird
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.
Tenessee Williams
"He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher."
Walt Whitman
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
Kurt Vonnegut
So many worlds, so much to do,
So little done, such things to be.
Lord Tennyson
A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory.
John Steinbeck
There is a point beyond which even justice becomes unjust."
Sophocles, "Electra"
Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
Arthur Miller
"Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?"
Christopher Marlowe
"Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition."
D. H. Lawrence
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.
Erica Jong
"A lover without indescretion is no lover at all."
Thomas Hardy
"I am two fools, I know,
For loving, and for saying so
in Whining poetry."
John Donne
Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.
Truman Capote
"I respect a man who knows how to spell a word more than one way."
Mark Twain
"O monstrous world! Take note, take note, o world,
To be direct and honest is not safe!"
William Shakespeare, Othello
"I used to think she was quite intelligent, in my stupidity. The reason I did was because she knew quite a lot about the theater and plays and literature and all that stuff. If somebody knows quite a lot about those things, it takes you quite a while to find out whether they're really stupid or not. It tooks me years to find out..."
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
All that we see or seem,
is but a dream within a dream.
Edgar Allen Poe, from the poem "A Dream Within a Dream"
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
George Orwell
"Is it a fact - or have I dreamt it - that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence!"
Nathaniel Hawthorne
"He only earns his freedom and his life
Who takes them every day by storm."
From Faust, by Goethe
"....and thus we beat on, boats against the current...born back ceaselessly into the past....."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Immature poets borrow, mature poets steal.
T. S. Eliot
A word is dead,
When it is said;
Some say. I say
It just began
to live that day.
Emily Dickinson
Truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is boring without it.

I am comforted by life's stability, by earth's unchangeableness. What has seemed new and frightening assumes its place in the unfolding of knowledge. It is good to know our universe. What is new is only new to us.
Pearl Buck
Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise.- "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings", 1969

There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you.
Maya Angelou
Reflect on your present blessings, of which every man has many, not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.

Keep up appearances whatever you do.

There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.
Charles Dickens


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