Famous Quotes & Sayings

Chris Abani

The Internet is really our meeting place. We have this amazing listserv. Every time I log onto it I feel a sense of pride, because if you log on and say, "Oh I was just in San Diego and I was in a park and I saw a lion," the flurry of replies on average is just like--wow! All these existential questions about what it means to be an African, and never having seen a lion at home, but having seen a lion here. Everything you say turns into this real philosophical debate--it's incredible in so many ways. And it's an invigorating place to be.

Chloe Sevigny

My room was a real way of expressing myself. It was like a little nest that I could settle into.

Chogyam Trungpa

Luxury is experiencing reality

Chogyam Trungpa

The idea of buddha mind is not purely a concept or a theoretical, metaphysical idea. It is something extremely real that we can experience ourselves. In fact, it is the ego that feels that we have an ego. It is ego that tells us, My ego is bothering me. I feel very self-conscious about having to be me. I feel that I have a tremendous burden in me, and I wonder what the best way to get rid of it is. Yet all those expressions of restlessness that keep coming out of us are the expression of buddha nature: the expression of our unborn, unobstructed, and nondwelling nature.

Chogyam Trungpa

Any perception can connect us to reality, properly and fully. What we see doesn't have to be pretty, particularly; we can appreciate anything that exists. There is some principle of magic in everything, some living quality. Something living, something real, is taking place in everything.

Chogyam Trungpa

The experience of a sad and tender heart is what gives birth to fearlessness. Conventionally, being fearless means that you are not afraid or that, if someone hits you, you will hit him back. But we aren't talking about that street-fighter level of fearlessness. Real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world.

Chogyam Trungpa

Sometimes one touches on a very painful spot where one is almost too shy to look into it, but somehow one still has to go through it. And by going into it, one finally achieves a real command of oneself. One gains a thorough knowledge of oneself for the first time.

Chinua Achebe

Real tragedy is never resolved. It goes on hopelessly for ever.

Chinua Achebe

The reality of today, different as it is from the reality of my society one hundred years ago, is and can be important if we have the energy and the inclination to challenge it, to go out and engage with its peculiarities, with the things that we do not understand. The real danger is the tendency to retreat into the obvious, the tendency to be frightened by the richness of the world and to clutch what we always have understood.

Chinua Achebe

To answer oppression with appropriate resistance requires knowledge of two kinds: in the first place, self-knowledge by the victim, which means awareness that oppression exists, an awareness that the victim has fallen from a great height of glory or promise into the present depths; secondly, the victim must know who the enemy is. He must know his oppressor's real name, not an alias, a pseudonym, or a nom de plume!

Chinua Achebe

It is difficult to express the reality of Ibo society in classical English.

Chinua Achebe

Literature, whether handed down by word or mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality.

Chinua Achebe

The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.

China Mieville

I think there's something quite interesting about the almost tragic quality of a lot of overwrought prose, because it has a much more self-conscious awareness of its own failure to touch the real.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Perhaps it is time to debate culture. The common story is that in real African culture, before it was tainted by the West, gender roles were rigid and women were contentedly oppressed.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I had consumed a lot of American culture, but I was not quite prepared for the reality of American poverty.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The real tragedy of our postcolonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world.

Dave Franco

Everyone always says it's a blessing to look a lot younger than my age, but sometimes I just want to look my real age.

Darren Shan

I don't think anyone ever remembers what they were really like as kids. Adults think they do, but they don't. Photos and videos don't capture the real you, or bring back to life the person you used to be. You have to return to the past to do that.

Dave Chappelle

When I'm on stage, I get real happy there. Maybe that's the only time in my adult life I feel like myself.

Dave Chappelle

I got real important relationships in my life that are very empowering relationships.

David Shore

You have to be driven by the stories that you want to tell. You can't simply be responding, or there won't be any real heart to those stories anymore.

David Shields

Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any,

David Shields

To me, the moment you're talking about nonfiction you're talking about reality.

David Schwimmer

I didn't want to be a victim of my own message [in Trust film]. I didn't want to take advantage of a 14-year-old actor. I didn't want there to be any nudity, or any real overt violence. I think it's more terrifying that there is no violence, in that moment. There's control and there's power, but there's no violence.

David Sedaris

The woman in charge of costuming assigned us our outfits and gave us a lecture on keeping things clean. She held up a calendar and said, "Ladies, you know what this is. Use it. I have scraped enough blood out from the crotches of elf knickers to last me the rest of my life. And don't tell me, 'I don't wear underpants, I'm a dancer.' You're not a dancer. If you were a real dancer you wouldn't be here. You're an elf and you're going to wear panties like an elf.

David Sedaris

The only real advice you can give anyone is to keep writing.

David Morrell

A thriller becomes great when it carries a feeling of reality and truth.

David Morrissey

I'm not a perfectionist at all. I find perfectionists boring because the real creative heart is in the mess somewhere.

David McCullough

I want people to see that all-important time in a different way-in the way it was. For of a number of reasons, including the absence of photographs, we tend to see the men and women of the Revolution as not quite real. And we have far too little sense of what they suffered.

David McCullough

Real success is finding your life work in the work that you love. That's it. Don't worry about making a living, don't worry about popularity or fame. Make what you do ... count more than what you own.

David McCullough

People often ask me if I'm working on a book. That's not how I feel. I feel like I work in a book. It's like putting myself under a spell. And this spell, if you will, is so real to me that if I have to leave my work for a few days, I have to work myself back into the spell when I come back. It's almost like hypnosis.