Sam Plotzke > Sam Plotzke's Quotes

“I know how it is to live your life like a dream. To listen and watch, to wake up and try to understand what has already happened.
You do not need a psychiatrist to do this. A psychiatrist does not want you to wake up. He tells you to dream some more, to find the pond and pour more tears into it. And really, he is just another bird drinking from your misery.
My mother, she suffered. She lost her face and tried to hind it. She found only greater misery and finally could not hide that. There is nothing more to understand. that was China. That was what people did back then. They had no choice. they could not speak up. they could not run away. That was their fate.”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“Now you see,' said the turtle, drifting back into the pond, 'why it is useless to cry. Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears.”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.”
― Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“I was sand, I was snow—written on, rewritten, smoothed over.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Home is where the heart is, I thought now, gathering myself together in Betty's Luncheonette. I had no heart any more, it had been broken; or not broken, it simply wasn't there any more. It had been scooped neatly out of me like the yolk from a hard-boiled egg, leaving the rest of me bloodless and congealed and hollow.
I'm heartless, I thought. Therefore I'm homeless.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it's noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“What is the real breath of a man — the breathing out or the breathing in?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“The picture is of happiness, the story not. Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Clarissa will be bereaved, deeply lonely, but she will not die. She will be too much in love with life, with London. Virginia imagines someone else, yes, someone strong of body but frail-minded; someone with a touch of genius, of poetry, ground under by the wheels of the world, by war and government, by doctors; a someone who is, technically speaking insane, because that person sees meaning everywhere, knows that trees are sentient beings and sparrows sing in Greek. Yes, someone like that. Clarissa, sane Clarissa -exultant, ordinary Clarissa - will go on, loving London, loving her life of ordinary pleasures, and someone else, a deranged poet, a visonary, will be the one to die.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“She'd never imagined it like this-when she thought of someone (a woman like herself)losing her mind, she'd imagined shrieks and wails, hallucinations; but at that moment it had seemed clear that there was another way, far quieter; a way that was numb and hopeless, flat, so much so that an emotion as strong as sorrow would have been a relief.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“It's never the changes we want that change everything.”
― Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who's been abandoned by family, husband, children and fortune believes in God.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiation, loved atomically.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory; you won't see it often.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.”
― Rod Serling

“There is nothing in the dark that isn't there when the lights are on.”
― Rod Serling

“Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man, that state is obsolete”
― Rod Serling

“...the worst aspect of our time is prejudice... In almost everything I've written, there is a thread of this - man's seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself.”
― Rod Serling

“According to the Bible, God created the heavens and the Earth. It is man’s prerogative - and woman’s - to create their own particular and private hell.”
― Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories

“for civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized”
― Rod Serling

“We tend to think human knowledge as progressive; because we know more and more, our parents and grandparents are back numbers. But a contrary theory is possible - that we simply recognize different things at different times and in different ways.”
― Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

“It's not when you realise that nothing can help you - religion, pride, anything - it's when you realise that you don't need any aid.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.”
― Leon C. Megginson

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
― Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

“There is more than one kind of freedom," said Aunt Lydia. "Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale