Famous Quotes & Sayings

Chris Rankin

The smoke was so thick it blocked out daylight.

Brooke Bingaman

We do see spring in our future. There will be a block of dry weather early next week that could transition us into more typical spring weather than the persistent rain we've been experiencing for so long.

Richard Bach

We are each given a block of marble when we begin a lifetime, and the tools to shape it into sculpture. We can drag it behind us untouched, we can pound it to gravel, we can shape it into glory. Examples from every other life are left for us to see, lifeworks finished and unfinished, guiding and warning. Near the end our sculpture is nearly finished, and we can smooth and polish what we started years before. We can make our progress then, but to do it we must see past the appearances of age.

Richard Turner

Anytime I see someone blocking the aisle in the supermarket while talking on a phone, I want to ram that person with my shopping cart.

Thomas Sowell

The grand delusion of contemporary liberals is that they have both the right and the ability to move their fellow creatures around like blocks of wood - and that the end results will be no different than if people had voluntarily chosen the same action

Robert Guillaume

Racism may be as systemic as it always was. It is the great problem of America. It's the one stumbling block that I don't believe was ever smoothed over.

Robert Ashley

Opera on television in Europe is very important. If you think about it in the broadest sense: a lot of the dramas made in India with music are practically operas. They're not sung but they have a very big appeal. I don't know why American television people are so stupid but at the moment, they just seem to have some sort of a block. They just do what they do and they do it for a certain number of years. Then it wears out and they try something else. It's just a matter of time I think.

Robert B. Parker

Writer's block? I've never heard of a plumber complain about plumber's block.

Robert Anton Wilson

Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission.

Brandon Sanderson

I am a writer who works from an outline. What I generally do when I build an outline is I find focal, important scenes, and I build them in my head and I don't write them yet, but I build towards them.

Barbara Mertz

I have no writing habit. I work when I feel like it, and I work when I have to - mostly the latter.

Brian Aldiss

A writer should say to himself, not, How can I get more money?, but How can I reach more readers (without lowering standards)?

Brenda Ueland

the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.

Jane Hirshfield

The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled.

Jami Attenberg

I wish I could write while I'm on the road but it never works for me. I need to be sitting still.

Jami Attenberg

I've been told by people who write historical novels that you just sort of write the emotional truth first, the story at the core, and then you go back and research it at the end.

Jascha Heifetz

I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.

Gary L. Francione

We need to reshape the movement as one of grassroots activists, and not 'professional activists' who populate the seemingly endless number of national animal rights groups. For many people, activism has become writing a check to a national group that is very pleased to have you leave it to them. Although it is important to give financial support to worthy efforts only, giving money is not enough and giving to the wrong groups can actually do more harm than good.

Brandon Routh

Superman is there to unite us all, I think. I'm proud of Bryan for respecting that and not making it just about us.

Bailee Madison

I was trying to get into the business from a young age, but I don't think I really realized how much I loved it until I booked my first movie and found myself in New Zealand for six months filming Bridge to Terabithia.

Ashton Eaton

I think a challenge for myself is to see how many times I can get above 9,000. That would be a good challenge.

Azar Nafisi

A bad author can take the most moral issue and make you want to just never, ever think about that moral issue.

Azar Nafisi

I think Islam is in a sense, in crisis. It needs to question and re-question itself.

Ayn Rand

Now look at me! Take a good look! I was born and I knew I was alive and I knew what I wanted. What do you think is alive in me? Why do you think I'm alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest the food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food to digest? Or because I know what I want, and that something which knows how to want—isn't that life itself? And who—in this damned universe—who can tell me why I should live for anything but for that which I want?

Bertrand Russell

Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.

Jane Goodall

What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.

Jane Goodall

Every stage of my life set the scene for the next, and at each point all I had to do was say "yes" and not think too much about the consequences.