T Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with T. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
“To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.”
Source: The Magus
“To write poetry is to be very alone, but you always have the company of your influences. But you also have the company of the form itself, which has a kind of consciousness. I mean, the sonnet will simply tell you, that's too many syllables or that's too many lines or that's the wrong place. So, instead of being alone, you're in dialogue with the form.”
“To write poetry, like sincere poetry, it is like performing heart surgery on yourself without anesthesia...in public...You are peeling back layers. You are dissecting yourself...You do not know what they [the audience] is going to do when you reach into yourself and rip out your organs to be displayed”
“To write prescriptions is easy, but to come to an understanding with people is hard.”
Source: The Metamorphosis: And Other Stories
“To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.”
“To write requires an ego, a belief that what you say matters. Writing also requires an aching curiosity leading you to discover, uncover, what is gnawing at your bones.”
Source: When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
“To write rhythmic prose one must go deep into oneself and find the anonymous and multiple rhythm of the blood. Prose needs to be built like a cathedral. There, one is truly without a name, without ambition, without help; on scaffoldings, alone with one's consciousness.”
“To write simply is as difficult as to be good.”
“To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.”
“To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator.”
“To write the history of neighborhood strife during this period of time without describing the efforts of people like Louis Wirth and his collaboration with the psychological warfare establishment during World War II, or the American Friends Service Committee and their work in both Philadelphia and Chicago, or Paul YIvisaker and his creation of the Gray Areas grants for the Ford Foundation and their subsequent takeover by a quintessential establishment figure like McGeorge Bundy, or Leon Sullivan, one of the players created by the Ford Foundation, and his collaboration with Robert Weaver while head of the Federal Housing Administration, is to tell less than half of the story. It is to do a remake of King Kong without the gorilla. It is also a bad example of whiggish history, a genre depressingly familiar to anyone who has done any reading in the conventional accounts of the sexual revolution and the civil rights movement, where effects have no causes and actual people making actual decisions in actual rooms are replaced by broad historical forces and Enlightenment melodramas like the triumph of liberation over bondage and light over darkness.”
Source: The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing
“To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.”
“To write the poem of the human conscience, were it only of a single man, were it only of the most infamous of men, would be to swallow up all epics in a superior and final epic. The conscience is the chaos of chimeras, of lusts and of temptations, the furnace of dreams, the cave of the ideas which are our shame; it is the pandemonium of sophisms, the battlefield of the passions. At certain hours, penetrate within the livid face of a human being who reflects, and look at what lies behind; look into that soul, look into that obscurity. There, beneath the external silence, there are combats of giants as in Homer, mêlées of dragons and hydras, and clouds of phantoms as in Milton, ghostly labyrinths as in Dante. What a gloom enwraps that infinite which each man bears within himself, and by which he measures in despair the desires of his will, and the actions of his life!”
Source: Les Misérables
“To write the true natural history of the world, we should need to be able to follow it from within. It would thus appear no longer as an interlocking succession of structural types replacing one another, but as an ascension of inner sap spreading out in a forest of consolidated instincts. Right at its base, the living world is constituted by conscious clothes in flesh and bone.”
Source: The Phenomenon of Man
“To write three series a year you only need to commit to writing 10 pages per day, or editing 50 pages of text per day. Plus, writing is my job, and I need to write to eat, so I'm highly motivated to get up and get to work!”
“To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.”
Source: Species of Spaces and Other Pieces
“To write tragedy, a man must feel tragedy. To feel tragedy, a man must be aware of the world in which he lives. Not only with his mind, but with his blood and sinews.”
Source: The Conquest of Happiness
“To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm's way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin.”
Source: Selected essays
“To write well about the elegant world you have to know it and experience it to the depths of your being... what matters is not whether you love it or hate it, but only to be quite clear about your position regarding it.”
Source: Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985
“To write well and speak well is mere vanity if one does not live well.”
“To write well consists of continuously making small erosions, wearing away grammar in its established form, current norms of language. It is an act of permanent rebellion and subversion against social environs.”
“To write well is to think well, to feel well, and to render well; it is to possess at once intellect, soul, and taste.”
“To write well it is first necessary to have something to say.”
“To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.”
“To write well, to have style ... is to paint. The master faculty of style is therefore the visual memory. If a writer does not see what he describes-countrysides and figures, movements and gestures-how could he have a style, that is originality?”
“To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.”
“To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write [...] so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write [...] so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on. If there is good to be said, the writer should say it. If there is bad to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living. The true artist [...] gets his sense of worth and honor from his conviction that art is powerful--”
“To write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers pay within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.”
“To write you had to read so I backed into reading.”
“To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.”
“To write, you must read!
To speak, you must listen!”
“To write, you have to know how to act and know about directing. To act, you also need to know how to write and direct.”
“To write, you must first belong to yourself.”
Source: The aerial letter
“To write, you need to find what you love.”
“To write? Because all this is going to vanish. The only thing left will be the prose and poems, the books, what is written down. Man was very fortunate to have invented the book. Without it the past would completely vanish, and we would be left with nothing, we would be naked on earth.”
“To wrong those we hate is to add fuel to our hatred. Conversely, to treat an enemy with magnanimity is to blunt our hatred for him.”
Source: THE TRUE BELIEVER
“To Xeniades, who had purchased Diogenes at the slave market, he said, "Come, see that you obey orders."”
“To Yelena, our newest food taster. May you last longer than your predecessor.”
Source: Poison Study
“To Yesterday's Companionship and Tomorrow's Reunion.”
“To yield readily—easily—to the persuasion of a friend is no merit with you."
"To yield without conviction is no compliment to the understanding of either.”
Source: Pride and Prejudice
“To yield readily--easily--to the persuasion of a friend is no merit.... To yield without conviction is no compliment to the understanding of either.”
Source: Jane Austen: 8 Books in 1
“To yield reverence to another, to hold ourselves and our lives at his disposal, is not slavery; often, it is the noblest state in which a man can live in this world.”
Source: Selections and Essays
“To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be. If you believe in God (and I do) you must declare Resistance evil, for it prevents us from achieving the life God intended when He endowed each of us with our own unique genius.”
Source: The War Of Art
“To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be.”
Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles
“To yield to the threat or actual use of violence is a surrender of one's self respect and religious conviction.”
Source: India of My Dreams
“To Yossarian, the idea of pennants as prizes was absurd. No money went with them, no class privileges. Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.”
Source: Catch-22: A Novel
“To you a pious young girl who goes to mass and communion, seems pretty silly and childish; you take us for innocents... Well, let me tell you, sometimes we know more about evil than people who have only learned to offend God.”
“To you alone, Eldest,
the Fates have given unassailable rule.
Time alters all things,
except this one thing.
For you alone,
the wind that bellows the sails of rule
makes no shift.”
“To you character is a psychosis. Integrity is a complex.”
Source: A Confederacy of Dunces