“What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could you please tell me what the meaning of it is. I find it just so staggering--that you're supposed to explain the meaning of your book to some total stranger! If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.”
Quote by Margaret Drabble
“Just because we're fictional characters doesn't mean you can pick us up and move us anywhere you want.--the people of Lake Woebegon”
“Nothing is lost that we do not first see as lost. Visions born of fear give birth to our failing. Visions born of hope give birth to our success. What is possible lives within us, and it only remains for us to discover it.”
Source: The Magic Kingdom of Landover Volume 1: Magic Kingdom For Sale SOLD! - The Black Unicorn - Wizard at Large
“If you do politics the right way, I believe, you can actually make people's lives better. And integrity is the minimum ante to get into the game.”
Source: Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics
“Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.”
Source: Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
“Second to the right, and straight on till morning.' That, Peter had told Wendy, was the way to the Neverland; but even birds, carrying maps and consulting them at windy corners, could not have sighted it with these instructions. Peter, you see, just said anything that came into his head.”
Source: Peter Pan (Peter and Wendy) (Annotated Edition)
“What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others.”
Source: The wisdom of Confucius
“He had seen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it.”
Source: The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works
“Inasmuch as art preserves, with the promise of happiness, the memory of the goal that failed, it can enter, as a 'regulative idea,' the desperate struggle for changing the world. Against all fetishism of the productive forces, against the continued enslavement of individuals by the objective conditions (which remain those of domination), art represents the ultimate goal of all revolutions: the freedom and happiness of the individual.”
Source: The aesthetic dimension: toward a critique of Marxist aesthetics
“The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.”
Source: The Portable Emerson: New Edition
“The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.”
Source: The Great Gatsby