Kathleen Valentine > Kathleen's Quotes

“What I know: every relationship is its own place, a country you live in for awhile and then you leave.”
― Billie Hinton, claire-obscure

“The soul, they say, is divine and the flesh is iniquity. But I am a musician and I ask this - without the wood and the strings of the violin, where would the sonata find form?”
― Kathleen Valentine, The Old Mermaid's Tale: A Novel of the Great Lakes

“I wish I was a woman of about thirty-six dressed in black satin with a string of pearls.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“She was kahuna, creating more life around her than was actually there, heightening the momentousness of each living thing by simply gazing upon it.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you.”
― Richard Peck

“People get stuck in their stories. My advice is to end your story and begin your life.”
― Carlos Santana, The Universal Tone: My Life

“The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat.”
― Fran Lebowitz

“Love of peace is common among weak, short-sighted, timid, and lazy persons; and on the other hand courage is found among many men of evil temper and bad character.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography

“I grew into manhood thoroughly imbued with the feeling that a man must be respected for what he made of himself.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography

“I then believed, and now believe, that the greatest privilege and greatest duty for any man is to be happily married, and that no other form of success or service, for either man or woman, can be wisely accepted as a substitute or alternative.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography

“As a result of our wrong thinking and supineness, we American citizens tend to breed a mass of men whose interests in governmental matters are often adverse to ours, who are thoroughly drilled, thoroughly organized, who make their livelihood out of politics, and who frequently make their livelihood out of bad politics.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography

“It is better for the Government to help a poor man to make a living for his family than to help a rich man make more profit for his company.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography

“Each man should have all he earns, whether by brain or body; and the director, the great industrial leader, is one of the greatest of earners, and should have a proportional reward; but no man should live on the earnings of another, and there should not be too gross inequality between service and reward.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography

“the most confident critics are generally those who know the least about the matter criticised.”
― Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S Grant

“To derive pleasure from a novel is to enjoy the act of departing from words and transforming these things into images in our mind.”
― Orhan Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist

“To read a novel is to wonder constantly, even at moments when we lose ourselves most deeply in the book: How much of this is fantasy, and how much is real?”
― Orhan Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist

“In order to find meaning and readerly pleasure in the universe the writer reveals to us, we feel we must search for the novel’s secret center, and we therefore try to embed every detail of the novel in our memory, as if learning each leaf of a tree by heart.”
― Orhan Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist

“It was a question I asked myself each time one of these studies or field observations came to my attention, and I saw, once again, that no mention was made, even in passing, of those wandering tellers of tales, who seemed to me to be the most exquisite and precious exemplars of that people, numbering a mere handful, and who, in any event, had forged that curious emotional link between the Machiguengas and my own vocation (not to say, quite simply, my own life).”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, The Storyteller

“Difficult as his task may be, so is writing an act that is perpetually longing in its attempt to cull the surreptitious meaning of life, which is always located experiences, beyond the obvious, possible, experience that is renewed with each new writing as if it were lived for the first time is the experience that drives today’s human being to live a perpetual state of tension as he stands face to face with destruction, death, torture, and solitude.”
― Luay Hamza Abbas, Closing His Eyes: Iraqi Short Stories

“Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno