Bryce Courtenay

First with the head, then with the heart.

Pride is holding your head up when everyone around you has theirs bowed. Courage is what makes you do it.

But I was still alive, and in my book, where there's life, there's hope.

I have found in life that everything, no matter how bad, comes to an end.

Good conversational debate is an end in itself, and talking for the love of conversation is what makes us human.

You've got to be quick on your feet in this world if you want to survive. Though once you know the rules, it is not too hard to play the game.

It's nothing to be ashamed of. There comes a time in everything when you don't know something.

Generosity overpowers greed.

Innocents, the meat in a ghastly sandwich between an uncaring society and a vengeful state.

Your brain, Peekay, has two functions; it is a place for original thought, but also it is a reference library. Use it to tell you where to look, and then you will have for yourself all the brains that have ever been.

Greg Bear

Once, poets were magicians. Poets were strong, stronger than warriors or kings — stronger than old hapless gods. And they will be strong once again

Conservatism is not about tradition and morality, hasn't been for many decades... It is about the putative biological and spiritual superiority of the wealthy.

Welcome to the truth of our world-a massive seed shot out to the stars, filled with deadly children. A seed designed to slay everything it touches.

You can take the barbarian out of the tavern, but he can take the blood out of your body.

I will learn by screwing up.

When all hopes are lost, only then does reality acquire that sharp focus that defines who we are and what we have become.

Tracy Chevalier

It's a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids.

He saw things in a way that others did not, so that a city I had lived in all my life seemed a different place, so that a woman became beautiful with the light on her face.

Jane Austen easily used half a page describing someone else's eyes; she would not appreciate summarizing her reading tastes in ten titles.

You're so calm and quiet, you never say. But there are things inside you. I see them sometimes, hiding in your eyes.

I had walked along that street all my life, but had never been so aware that my back was to my home.

Say something worth the words.

So many (too many) books are published every year, and it seems everyone is writing a book. Perhaps we should all be reading more and writing less!

My father was often impatient during March, waiting for winter to end, the cold to ease, the sun to reappear. March was an unpredictable month, when it was never clear what might happen. Warm days raised hopes until ice and grey skies shut over the town again.

Mina Loy

Love of others is the appreciation of one's self. MAY your egotism be so gigantic that you comprise mankind in your self-sympathy.

The flux of life is pouring its aesthetic aspect into your eyes, your ears - and you ignore it because you are looking for your canons of beauty in some sort of frame or glass case or tradition.

Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.

If you want to realize yourselves all your pet illusions must be unmasked

There is no Space or Time
Only intensity, 
And tame things
Have no immensity

J. R. R. Tolkien

Many are the strange chances of the world … and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter.

Wars are not favourable to delicate pleasures.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

"Never laugh at live dragons, Bilbo you fool!" he said to himself, and it became a favorite saying of his later, and passed into a proverb.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

If any of the Wise should with this Ring overthrow the Lord of Mordor, using his own arts, he would then set himself on Sauron's throne, and yet another Dark Lord would appear...

The Tree in the Court of the Fountain is still withered and barren. When shall I see a sign that it will ever be otherwise?

Reynolds Price

Stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you.

Strength just comes in one brand - you. Stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you and keep your hair combed.

Life is short and often stingy; feast the heart with what it craves, short of cruelty, and let the world wonder.

Many Americans would die naked in the middle of the road before they'd tell you what's hurt them most. But a born Southerner will show you the cell in their heart that burns the hardest. They'll hold it out to you in their bare right hand.

Almost all of my really good times have been silent but have had to end.

Every other way is like that -- him waiting for something to happen to him, daring somebody to do something nice such as come up and touch him just so he could say, 'Why in the world did you do that?' and hold on tight till whoever bothered him vanished -- and nothing about him since has ever surprised me.

Richard K. Morgan

A preoccupation with the next world clearly shows an inability to cope credibly with this one.

We all get our dreams stamped on from time to time, right? And if it didn’t hurt, what kind of second-rate dreams would they be

If they asked how I died tell them: Still angry.

The way I see it, anyone who's proud of their country is either a thug or just hasn't read enough history yet

When they ask how I died, tell them: still angry.

It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped about me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death.

The echo of the first shot, like the first sip of whiskey, burning...

Sebastian Faulks

I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.

It was entirely silent and I tried to breathe its peace.

I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.

I'd become more adept at being with other people; I'd lowered my expectations of them and learned to let my mind drift into neutral when they spoke.

It's better to have a malign providence than an indifferent one.

This intimacy is not necessary; no one is compelling me to open my inmost self and lay it naked, undefended, against that of another – merely for the joy of the communion.

Shakespeare drew a map of the human mind as clearly as Newton mapped the heavens. Wht is one considered science and the other fir only to be mocked with jokes about pretty girls and drury lane?

Robert Pinsky

No aspect of poem is more singular, more unique, than its rhythm.

There are no rules. However, principles may be discerned in actual practice; for example, in the way people actually speak, or in the lines the poets have written.

I am very interested in memorization which is the process of incorporating a poem, so, I would say the kind of poetry I write is the kind that emphasises the physical qualities of the words.

Poetry is the most bodliy of arts, the medium of poetry is the column of breath rising from the diaphragm in the individual's chest to be shaped into meaning sounds inside the mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.

It is the nature of poetry to emphasize that the physical sounds of words come from a particular body , one at a time, in a particular order.

he poetry I love is written with someone’s voice and I believe its proper culmination is to be read with someone’s voice. And the human voice in that sense is not electronically reproduced or amplified.

Alice Walker

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men.

He has told me he likes men as well as he likes women, which seems only natural, he says, since he is the offspring of two sexes as well as two races. No one is surprised he is biracial; why should they be surprised he is bisexual? This is an explanation I have never heard and cannot entirely grasp; it seems too logical for my brain.

Activism is the rent I pay for living on the planet.

Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to get attention we do, except walk?

The world is changing, I said. It is no longer a world just for boys and men.