Fifty Quotes - Page 35

• Sometimes I'll be fifty, sixty pages into something and I'll still be calling a character "X." I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don't want to leave them ever.

  Joan Didion

  Book, Character, Talking

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Dec 09, 2012

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• When you decide 'to be a writer,' you don't have the faintest idea of what the work is like. When you begin, you write spontaneously out of your limited experience of both the unwritten world and the written world. You're full of naïve exuberance. 'I am a writer!' Rather like the excitement of 'I have a lover!' But working at it nearly every day for fifty years – whether it is being the writer or being the lover – turns out to be an extremely taxing job and hardly the pleasantest of human activities.

  Philip Roth

  Jobs, Writing, Years

  4 Copy quote

• Be glad you're fifty - andThat you got there while things were nice,In a world worth looking at twice.So here's wishing you many more years,But not all that many. Cheers!

  Kingsley Amis

  Cheer, Nice, Years

  Kingsley Amis (2016). “Collected Poems: 1944-1979”, p.117, New York Review of Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Fifty years after we undertook to make the first synthetic polarizers we find them the essential layer in digital liquid-crystal. And thirty four years after we undertook to make the first instant camera and film, our kind of photography has become ubiquitous.

  Edwin Land

  Photography, Years, Liquid

  8 Copy quote

• It's understandable that the music companies that are comprised of people that are successful by making good creative decisions - they have to decide which out of fifty artists is the next hot one, with no data to go from. It's an intuitive process, and that's what they do well when they're successful. They don't understand technology.

  Steve Jobs

  Successful, Artist, Technology

  Source: www.esquire.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Most people would guess that the sun is fifty or a hundred times brighter than the moon, but it's a half million times brighter - evidence of the amazing capacity of our eyes to adjust to light and dark.

  James Elkins

  Eye, Dark, Moon

  James Elkins (2007). “How to Use Your Eyes”, p.215, Routledge

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• No new reader, however charitable, could open “Fifty Shades of Grey,” browse a few paragraphs, and reasonably conclude that the author was writing in her first language, or even her fourth.

  Anthony Lane

  Writing, Firsts, Shade

  "No Pain, No Gain" by Anthony Lane, www.newyorker.com. February 23 & March 2, 2015.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's a strange thing to think of a man as can lift a chair with his teeth, and walk fifty mile on end, trembling and turning hot and cold at only a look from one woman out of all the rest i' the world. It's a mystery we can give no account of.

  George Eliot

  Women, Thinking, Hot And Cold

  George Eliot (2016). “Adam Bede”, p.119, George Eliot

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Say, Britain, could you ever boast, Three poets in an age at most? Our chilling climate hardly bears A sprig of bays in fifty years.

  Jonathan Swift

  Years, Age, Climate

  'On Poetry' (1733) l. 5

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• You always hear about fashion's success stories. How a starlet lost an earring one night and by the next morning, the entire country was wearing one earring. Or how sweaters made a comeback in a drugstore, or a First Lady influenced how we dressed during her reign. But what about the losers? The fashions that came and went out the same day? The hopes and dreams of designers that were shattered by the sound of fifty million women ... laughing themselves to death.

  Erma Bombeck

  Country, Dream, Fashion

  Erma Bombeck (2013). “The Erma Bombeck Collection: If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?, Motherhood, and The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank”, p.107, Open Road Media

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Sex ages us. Priests are boyish, spinsters stay black-haired until after fifty. We others, the demon rots us out.

  John Updike

  Sex, Black, Age

  John Updike (1981). “Rabbit is Rich: Rabbit Redux ; Rabbit, Run”

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.

  Bill Bryson

  Distance, Two, Feet

  8 Copy quote

• Grief is not just a series of events, stages, or timelines. Our society places enormous pressure on us to get over loss, to get through grief. But how long do you grieve for a husband of fifty years, a teenager killed in a car accident, a four-year-old child: a year? Five years? Forever? The loss happens in time, in fact in a moment, but its aftermath lasts a lifetime.

  Copyright: Elisabeth Kubler-Ross Family Limited Partnership.

  Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

  Husband, Children, Teenager

  81 Copy quote

• Know what Freud wrote in his diary when he was 77? "What do women want? My God, what do they want?" Fifty years this giant brain spends analyzing women. And he still can't find out what they want. So this makes him the world's greatest expert on female psychology?

  Clare Boothe Luce

  Years, Psychology, Brain

  5 Copy quote

• To me personally the only function of philosophy is to teach us to take life more lightly and gayly than the average businessman does, for no businessman who does not retire at fifty, if he can, is in my eyes a philosopher.

  Lin Yutang

  Philosophy, Eye, Average

  Lin Yutang (1937). “The Importance of Living”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A woman's charm is fifty percent illusion.

  Tennessee Williams

  Women, Illusion, Charm

  Tennessee Williams (1947). “A streetcar named Desire”, Signet Book

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The fountain has not played itself out, the Flame still shines, the River still flows, the Spring still bubbles forth, the Light has not faded. But between us and It, there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded.

  R. D. Laing

  Spring, Light, Flames

  11 Copy quote

• True majorities, in a TV-dominated and anti-intellectual age, may need sound bites and flashing lights and I am not against supplying such lures if they draw children into even a transient concern with science. But every classroom has one [Oliver] Sacks , one [Eric] Korn, or one [Jonathan] Miller , usually a lonely child with a passionate curiosity about nature, and a zeal that overcomes pressures for conformity. Do not the one in fifty deserve their institutions as well magic places, like cabinet museums, that can spark the rare flames of genius?

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Lonely, Children, Museums

  Stephen Jay Gould (1995). “Dinosaur in a haystack: reflections in natural history”, Harmony

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• What we really need the poet's and orator's I help to keep alive in us is not, then, the common and gregarious courage which Robert Shaw showed when he marched with you, men of the Seventh Regiment. It is that more lonely courage which he showed when he dropped his warm commission in the glorious Second to head your dubious fortunes, negroes of the Fifty-fourth. That lonely kind of courage (civic courage as we call it in times of peace) is the kind of valor to which the monuments of nations should most of all be reared.

  William James

  Lonely, Men, Needs

  William James, Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, Ignas K. Skrupskelis (1982). “Essays in Religion and Morality”, p.72, Harvard University Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Never say you are too old. You do not say it now, perhaps; but by and by, when the hair grows gray and the eyes grow dim and the young despair comes to curse the old age, you will say, "It is too late for me." Never too late! Never too old! How old are you--thirty, fifty, eighty? What is that in immortality? We are but children.

  Lyman Abbott

  Children, Eye, Hair

  7 Copy quote

• The Tyranni rule fifty worlds; they are outnumbered hundreds to one. In such a position, simple force is insufficient. Devious methods, intrigue, assassination are their specialties. The net they weave across space is a wide one, and close-meshed. I can well believe that it extends across five hundred light-years to Earth.

  Isaac Asimov

  Believe, Simple, Space

  Isaac Asimov (2008). “The Stars, Like Dust”, p.28, Tor Books

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Interviewer: If I gave you fifty dollars, right now, what would you do with it?David Byrne: I would get something to eat.

  David Byrne

  Dollars, Right Now, Interviewers

  4 Copy quote

• The joker in the deck of lesbian fidelity is female vanity: no woman of fifty is going to undress in front of a woman of twenty no matter how much she might lust for her.

  Florence King

  Vanity, Lust, Twenties

  "The Florence King Reader". Book by Florence King, 1995.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• My body, now close to fifty years of age, has become an old tree that bears bitter peaches, a snail which has lost its shell, a bagworm separated from its bag; it drifts with the winds and clouds that know no destination. Morning and night I have eaten traveler's fare, and have held out for alms a pilgrim's wallet.

  Matsuo Basho

  Morning, Night, Clouds

  "Anthology of Japanese literature". Book by Donald Keene, 1955.

  42 Copy quote

  Show source

• The haiku that reveals seventy to eighty percent of its subject is good. Those that reveal fifty to sixty percent, we never tire of.

  Matsuo Basho

  Tire, Haiku, Subjects

  "Collected Haiku Theory". Book by Matsuo Bashō, 1951.

  52 Copy quote

  Show source