Famous Quotes & Sayings

Oliver Goldsmith

Don't let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter.

Margaret Atwood

It had helped to keep her sane, that writing. Then, when time had begun again and real people had entered it, she'd abandoned it here. Now it's a whisper from the past. Is that what writing amounts to? The voice your ghost would have, if it had a voice?

Margaret Atwood

What is the real breath of a man — the breathing out or the breathing in?

Margaret Atwood

I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.

Margaret Atwood

Not real can tell us about real.

Margaret Atwood

History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.

Margaret Atwood

I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing…. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.

Margaret Atwood

I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

Margaret Atwood

Karen wasn't hard, she was soft, too soft. A soft touch. Her hair was soft, her smile was soft, her voice was soft. She was so soft there was no resistance. Hard things sank into her, they went right through her, and if she made a real effort, out the other side. Then she didn't have to see them or hear them, or even touch them.

Margaret Atwood

Imagine a famine. Now imagine a piece of bread. Both of these things are real but you happen to be in the same room with only one of them. Put yourself into a different room, that’s what the mind is for.

Margaret Atwood

Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful.

Margaret Atwood

There may not be one Truth - there may be several truths - but saying that is not to say that reality doesn't exist.

Margaret Atwood

I'm a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one's life trying to pretend that non-existent people are real: though no odder, I suppose, than what government bureaucrats do, which is trying to pretend that real people are non-existent.

Margaret Atwood

Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there’s something dead about it, something deserted.

Margaret Atwood

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

Margaret Atwood

The trickle-down theory of economics has it that it's good for rich people to get even richer because some of their wealth will trickle own, through their no doubt lavish spending, upon those who stand below them on the economic ladder. Notice that the metaphor is not that of a gushing waterfall but of a leaking tap: even the most optimistic endorsers of this concept do not picture very much real flow, as their language reveals" pg. 102.

Margaret Atwood

Reality simply consists of different points of view.

Margaret Atwood

There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.

Marcus Thomas

Suffering is basically the mind's refusal to accept reality as it is.

Marcus Thomas

You're all Buddhas, pretending not to be. You're all the Christ, pretending not to be. You're all Atman, pretending not to be. You're all love, pretending not to be. You're all one, pretending not to be. You're all Gurus, pretending not to be. You're all God, pretending not to be. When you're ready to stop pretending, then you're ready to just be the real you. That's your home.

Marcus Samuelsson

While I hold my own views, it's important not to get too wrapped up in individual candidates and personalities, but instead to focus on the real issues

Marcus Luttrell

The real battle is won in the mind. It's won by guys who understand their areas of weakness, who sit and think about it, plotting and planning to improve. Attending to the detail. Work on their weaknesses and overcome them. Because they can.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

It is not easy to distinguish between true and false affection, unless there occur one of those crises in which, as gold is tried by fire, so a faithful friendship may be tested by danger.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Friendship is not to be sought for its wages, but because its revenue consists entirely in the love which it implies.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

It is virtue itself that produces and sustains friendship, not without virtue can friendship by any possibility exist.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

It is like taking the sun out of the world, to bereave human life of friendship.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

For he, indeed, who looks into the face of a friend beholds, as it were, a copy of himself.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Friendship embraces innumerable ends; turn where you will it is ever at your side; no barrier shuts it out; it is never untimely and never in the way.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Friendship is the only point in human affairs concerning the benefit of which all, with one voice, agree.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

It is virtue, virtue, which both creates and preserves friendship. On it depends harmony of interest, permanence, fidelity.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

The real friend is another self.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

The rabble estimate few things according to their real value, most things according to their prejudices.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Friendship is nothing else than entire fellow feeling as to all things human and divine with mutual good-will and affection; and I doubt whether anything better than this, wisdom alone excepted, has been given to man.