Famous Quotes & Sayings

Phil Klay

Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure.

Dennis Lehane

Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.

Ben Browder

Farscape is not what you call hard science fiction.

Bill Gates

I don't generally read a lot of fiction.

Frederik Pohl

A lot of science fiction is science-based, and it comes about because people notice something interesting about science and work it into a story.

Philip Dick

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

Cynthia Ozick

I don't like to read contemporary fiction while writing - I need a sense of isolation, a kind of silence, and I don't want a jumble of other people's voices or visions getting in my way. Nineteenth-century voices don't create static in that silence.

Cary Fukunaga

I began writing fictional stories and little screenplays when I was in fifth grade.

David Mitchell

Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction

Charles Dickens

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

Charles Dickens

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies.

Charles Caleb Colton

Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.

Alan Watts

As muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone, it could be argued that those who sit quietly and do nothing are making one of the best possible contributions to a world in turmoil.

Chogyam Trungpa

Enlightenment is ego's ultimate disappointment.

Chogyam Trungpa

When you drop your unnecessary things, you finally can swoop and fly in vast space. It is so blue, so bright, and so nice, so airy and fresh. You can stretch your wings and breathe the air. You can do anything you want. You have experienced cheerfulness and joy, and finally the bliss of freedom occurs in you.

Edward Gibbon

A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against the enterprise of an aspiring prince

Arnold J. Toynbee

We human beings do have some genuine freedom of choice and therefore some effective control over our own destinies. I am not a determinist. But I also believe that the decisive choice is seldom the latest choice in the series. More often than not, it will turn out to be some choice made relatively far back in the past.

Arnold J. Toynbee

The last stage but one of every civilisation, is characterised by the forced political unification of its constituent parts, into a single greater whole.

Source Unknown

Wealth is what gives you the right to preach about the virtues of poverty.

Swedish Proverb

Worry gives a small thing a big shadow.

Russ Feingold

The refusal gives rise to a reasonable inference that the administration has something to hide here. The administration has done this nominee no service by maintaining its intransigent position.

Bill Alexander

We're going to have a strong battery. Our pitching gives us the luxury of a lot of good innings defensively.

Greg Cipes

Usually for cartoons, I record them in the mornings from 9 A.M. to noon, then I have the rest of the day to do on camera. It actually gives me time to work on my own projects.

Bob Venero

With the lower-priced models we now have a door-opener; this gives us an opportunity to play where we've never played before.

Leon Redbone

I think there's a preoccupation with the American market to make excuses and justify its past. If it isn't current, it means somebody has to make an excuse for it. If it's 'cult,' it gives it a sense of illegitimate legitimacy.

Terri Mitchell

We knew without Carolyn on the court, everyone had to do something extra. There are a lot of things Carolyn gives us that we needed to make up for, and we did a lot of great things tonight.

Ivory Latta

The more pressure we put on the guards, that gives Candace more touches, and then she will probably end up getting tired, which she did a lot.

Alan Bean

One of the great things about the universe is that it's fair.

Susan Gibson

We want to show people how they can look great for very little money.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Greatness depends on where you are coming from.

Edward Gibbon

[The] vain and transitory scenes of human greatness are unworthy of a serious thought.

Audrey Hepburn

My greatest victory has been to be able to live with myself, to accept my shortcomings. I'm a long way from the human being I'd liked to be, but I've decided I'm not so bad after all.

Athenaeus

Goodness does not consist in greatness, but greatness in goodness.

Arnold Palmer

Swing your swing. Not some idea of a swing. Not a swing you saw on TV. Not that swing you wish you had. No, swing your swing. Capable of greatness. Prized only by you. Perfect in it's imperfection. Swing your swing. I know, I did.

Willie Kemp

Wayne, he's a great player, but we're moving on. We're still going to be friends.

Denis Waitley

The seeds of greatness are ideas you learn from people who've been great in their service to others.

Zell Miller

What has happened to the party I've spent my life working in?

Robert Gottlieb

Writing happened to me. I didn't decide to start writing or to be a writer. I never wanted to be a writer.

Frank Beamer

We'll see what took place and I'll talk with everyone about what happened before I make any more statements.

Diana Henderson

We are getting real weather. That has not happened for a while.

Nancy Donovan

Unfortunately, I think what's happened is, there's been so much underground work done to prepare the surface that you don't see a lot of that from the roadway.

Bill Tierney

We knew what happened last year. We lost to this team 17-4. We knew how they could score, and we knew we had to not let that happen to have a chance.

Robert Lanza

It's just a real shame that this has happened to him.

Hans Eichel

It's a shame it happened like this, but we have to respect it.

Hal Brown

A lot of them you don't get to know because it happened so long ago, ... We're so lucky to be able to honor (the past presidents), to meet them. Because of their leadership is why we're here today.

Tony Sammons

It's too late for a referendum. If he holds to that, then he will personally have killed the legislation and the joint water-sewer commission.

Anthony Cordesman

It's 50-50 this thing holds together through the spring of 2006. But that is purely a guess.

Dhani Jones

The one thing that holds people back from working out together is that they don't want to smell around other people. Your olfactory sense is the primary sense in your memory, and you don't want to be part of anyone's memory thinking that you smell bad.

Ed Perlmutter

This is a personal issue because it holds out hope for a lot of people.

Mary McCarty

The way this thing is playing out, Commissioner Addie Greene holds this thing in her hands.

Oprah Winfrey

Every show you'll see here holds such profound meaning for me,

Nicole Mayo

We knew from the start that we wanted to be a student-run paper because we didn't want any holds from the administration.

Jeff Reed

Second, I passed one of the numerous records he holds in the NFL. Gary's the most-respected kicker who's been through this league. It means a lot.

Phil Johnson

Phoenix has been very effective. But we'll see how it holds out over the long haul.

Charles Caleb Colton

Much too oft we make life gloomy-- When happy we might be, If we gathered more of sunshine, And not dark shadows see.

Charles Caleb Colton

Evils in the journey of life are like the hills which alarm travelers upon their road; they both appear great at a distance, but when we approach them we find that they are far less insurmountable than we had conceived.

Charles Dickens

While the flowers, pale and unreal in the moonlight, floated away upon the river; and thus do greater things that once were in our breasts, and near our hearts, flow from us to the eternal sea.

Charles Dickens

There either is or is not, that’s the way things are. The colour of the day. The way it felt to be a child. The saltwater on your sunburnt legs. Sometimes the water is yellow, sometimes it’s red. But what colour it may be in memory, depends on the day. I’m not going to tell you the story the way it happened. I’m going to tell it the way I remember it.

Charles Dickens

Anything for the quick life, as the man said when he took the situation at the lighthouse.

Charles Dickens

Oh, a dainty plant is the ivy green, That creepeth o'er ruins old! Of right choice food are his meals, I ween, In his cell so lone and cold. Creeping where no life is seen, A rare old plant is the ivy green.

Charles Dickens

Buy an annuity cheap, and make your life interesting to yourself and everybody else that watches the speculation.

Charles Dickens

Love is not a feeling to pass away Like the balmy breath of a Summer's day....... Love is not a passion of earthly mould As a thirst for honour, or fame, or gold

Charles Dickens

My life is one demd horrid grind.

Frederic Bastiat

There is not a tool, an implement, or a machine that has not resulted in a decrease in the contribution of human labor. Labor is not made permanently idle [though]; when replaced in one special category... it turns its attack against other obstacles on the main road to progress.

Benoit Mandelbrot

Regular geometry, the geometry of Euclid, is concerned with shapes which are smooth, except perhaps for corners and lines, special lines which are singularities, but some shapes in nature are so complicated that they are equally complicated at the big scale and come closer and closer and they don't become any less complicated.

Carl Hiaasen

Like Richard Price and the late, great Elmore Leonard, Matt Burgess is one of those cool, quick and funny writers who can turn a seemingly routine crime caper into something special.

Carl Jung

Special knowledge is a terrible disadvantage.

Edward Furlong

Jim Cameron used to call me 'Special Ed.'

Edmund Wilson

They [the English] have a special word, "civil," for what is elsewhere merely ordinary politeness.

Edna Ferber

I suppose it is a gift, being young, but it isn't special. We've all got it, early in life.

Bill Gates

Polio's pretty special because once you get an eradication, you no longer have to spend money on it; it's just there as a gift for the rest of time.

Bob Seger

Every now and then you'll nail one that's really, really special. And that's what you live for.

Albert Einstein

The tyranny of the ignoramuses is insurmountable and assured for all time.

John Paul Stevens

Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority.

Napoleon Bonaparte

The most insupportable of tyrannies is that of inferiors.