Famous Quotes & Sayings

Anthony de Mello

A Jesuit once wrote a note to Father Arrupe, his superior general, asking him about the relative value of communism, socialism and capitalism. Father Arrupe gave him a lovely reply. He said, "A system is about as good or as bad as the people who use it." People with golden hearts would make capitalism or communism or socialism work beautifully.

Anne Sexton

And tonight our skin, our bones, that have survived our fathers, will meet, delicate in the hold, fastened together in an intricate lock. Then one of us will shout, "My need is more desperate!" and I will eat you slowly with kisses even though the killer in you has gotten out.

Anne Sexton

Why are all these dolls falling out of the sky? Was there a father? Or have the planets cut holes in their nets and let our childhood out, or are we the dolls themselves, born but never fed?

Anne Sexton

Frog has no nerves. Frog is as old as a cockroach. Frog is my father's genitals. Frog is a malformed doorknob. Frog is a soft bag of green.

Anna Garlin Spencer

Slowly ... the truth is dawning upon women, and still more slowly upon men, that woman is no stepchild of nature, no Cinderella of fate to be dowered only by fairies and the Prince; but that for her and in her, as truly as for and in man, life has wrought its great experiences, its master attainments, its supreme human revelations of the stuff of which worlds are made.

Anna Deavere Smith

I remember from my father's funeral that the minister kept using a metaphor about life of a prism. And I took that away like a cherished image.

Anita Loos

I was born in the theatre. My father was a small time impresario on the West Coast and I was acting from the age of 7, but I started to write when I was 12 and by the time I was 14 I was making more money than I was acting.

Anita Loos

Fate keeps on happening.

Andrew Sullivan

Al Gore's problem, in my view, is that he never liked politics. He's actually deeply uncomfortable in it but felt he had to do it because of his father. He's much more comfortable in a private sector role and has, in fact, been much more successful in a private sector role, and I admire him for that.

Andrew Sullivan

My father has been a rock for me every since.

Andrew Sullivan

That's what torture does: it creates a miasma of unknowing, about as dangerous a situation in wartime as one can imagine. This hideous fate was made possible by an inexperienced president with a fundamentalist psyche and a paranoid and power-hungry vice-president who decided to embrace "the dark side" almost as soon as the second tower fell, and who is still trying to avenge Nixon. Until they are both gone from office, we are in grave danger the kind of danger that only torturers and fantasists and a security strategy based on coerced evidence can conjure up.

Andrew Solomon

I was in fact anxious about whether I would be any good at being a father. And then I met so many people who had been good parents under difficult circumstances, and I felt inspired by them.

Andrew Solomon

I grew up in a very rationalist household. My father, in particular, came from that mid-century tradition of thinking science will ultimately explain everything.

Czeslaw Milosz

When I curse Fate, it's not me, but the earth in me.

D. A. Carson

It's not as if the New Testament writers came along and said, "The culmination of Old Testament books is more books, New Testament books." In some ways they thought instead of the culmination of Old Testament books being Christ himself, the word incarnate as the opening verses of Hebrews 1 put it. In the past God spoke to the fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his son and the son is revelation.

D. H. Lawrence

[During the Renaissance] the Italians said, "We are one in the Father: we will go back." The Northern races said, "We are one in Christ, we will go on.

D. H. Lawrence

It is time that the Protestant Church, the Church of the Son, should be one again with the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of the Father. It is time that man shall cease, first to live in the flesh, with joy, and then, unsatisfied, to renounce and to mortify the flesh.

D. H. Lawrence

The weakness of modern tragedy[is that] transgression against the social code is made to bring destruction, as though the social code worked our irrevocable fate.

D. H. Lawrence

Let a person only approach his or her own self with a deep respect, even reverence for all that the creative soul, the God-mystery within us, puts forth. Then we shall all be sound and free. . . . The creative spontaneous soul sends forth its promptings of desire and aspiration in us. These promptings are our true fate, which is our business to fulfill. A fate dictated from outside, from theory or from circumstance, is a false fate.

Clifton Fadiman

My son is 7 years old. I am 54. It has taken me a great many years to reach that age. I am more respected in the community, I am stronger, I am more intelligent and I think I am better than he is. I don't want to be a pal, I want to be a father.

Clint Eastwood

Fate pulls you in different directions

Clarence Budington Kelland

Henry James once defined life as that predicament which precedes death, and certainly nobody owes you a debt of honor or gratitude for getting him into that predicament. But a child does owe his father a debt, if Dad, having gotten him into this peck of trouble, takes off his coat and buckles down to the job of showing his son how best to crash through it.

Clancy Brown

It used to be that a son could look at the father, and pretty much know what life was gonna be like as an adult. There was confidence in that, and comfort in that, and frustration also.

Clarence Darrow

The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful toward our friends and fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck of dirt while we are drifting side by side to our common doom.

Danny Huston

I guess I've played a lot of failures, which is a Huston quality, I guess. I love losers, though, and have never met anyone who hasn't been one sometime. I'm always looking to understand them, and my father had an extremely keen eye to be able to dissect and bring that forward in the way he told his stories.

Danny Huston

I resisted the film business as long as I could, because of the big circus act and the amount of money that it costs to make films - I saw my father suffer through that.

Daniel D. Palmer

He who obeys God's laws finds him a father. He who disobeys them, finds him a judge.

Daniel Defoe

Now, said I aloud, My dear Father's Words are come to pass: God's Justice has overtaken me, and I have none to help or hear me: I rejected the Voice of Providence.

Daniel Defoe

The best of men cannot suspend their fate; The good die early, and the bad die late.

Daniel Day-Lewis

I had a very vivid, almost hallucinatory moment in which I was engaged in a dialogue with my father.

Daniel Day-Lewis

It's a source of great sadness to me that my father died without having seen me do anything worthwhile. He was constantly having to make excuses for me.

Daniel Day-Lewis

I still relate to my father very much. I mean, I talk to him in a certain way, as we do talk to the dead.

David Archuleta

Fate rarely calls upon us at a moment of our choosing