Hamlin Garland Quotes
American - Novelist September 14, 1860 - March 4, 1940

Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and numbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me - I am happy.
Hamlin Garland

I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees. The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets.
Hamlin Garland

My recollection of a hundred lovely lakes has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful.
Hamlin Garland

There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers' wives.
Hamlin Garland

Sydney J. Harris Quotes
American - Journalist September 14, 1917 - December 8, 1986


The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.
Sydney J. Harris

The time to relax is when you don't have time for it.
Sydney J. Harris

The two words 'information' and 'communication' are often used interchangeably, but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out; communication is getting through.
Sydney J. Harris

When I hear somebody say 'Life is hard', I am always tempted to ask 'Compared to what?'
Sydney J. Harris

Happiness is a direction, not a place.
Sydney J. Harris

When I hear somebody sigh, 'Life is hard,' I am always tempted to ask, 'Compared to what?'
Sydney J. Harris

A winner rebukes and forgives; a loser is too timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.
Sydney J. Harris

The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, 'I was wrong'.
Sydney J. Harris

The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure.
Sydney J. Harris

If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?
Sydney J. Harris

Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.
Sydney J. Harris

Sometimes the best, and only effective, way to kill an idea is to put it into practice.
Sydney J. Harris

The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, but false progress.
Sydney J. Harris

Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.
Sydney J. Harris

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.
Sydney J. Harris

Intolerance is the most socially acceptable form of egotism, for it permits us to assume superiority without personal boasting.
Sydney J. Harris

When you run into someone who is disagreeable to others, you may be sure he is uncomfortable with himself; the amount of pain we inflict upon others is directly proportional to the amount we feel within us.
Sydney J. Harris

Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.
Sydney J. Harris

Almost no one is foolish enough to imagine that he automatically deserves great success in any field of activity; yet almost everyone believes that he automatically deserves success in marriage.
Sydney J. Harris

Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
Sydney J. Harris

Men make counterfeit money; in many more cases, money makes counterfeit men.
Sydney J. Harris

Middle Age is that perplexing time of life when we hear two voices calling us, one saying, 'Why not?' and the other, 'Why bother?'
Sydney J. Harris

It's surprising how many persons go through life without ever recognizing that their feelings toward other people are largely determined by their feelings toward themselves, and if you're not comfortable within yourself, you can't be comfortable with others.
Sydney J. Harris

An idealist believes the short run doesn't count. A cynic believes the long run doesn't matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run.
Sydney J. Harris

Enemies, as well as lovers, come to resemble each other over a period of time.
Sydney J. Harris

Knowledge fills a large brain; it merely inflates a small one.
Sydney J. Harris

Ignorance per se is not nearly as dangerous as ignorance of ignorance.
Sydney J. Harris

The beauty of 'spacing' children many years apart lies in the fact that parents have time to learn the mistakes that were made with the older ones - which permits them to make exactly the opposite mistakes with the younger ones.
Sydney J. Harris

There's no point in burying a hatchet if you're going to put up a marker on the site.
Sydney J. Harris

Nothing is as easy to make as a promise this winter to do something next summer; this is how commencement speakers are caught.
Sydney J. Harris

The most important thing in an argument, next to being right, is to leave an escape hatch for your opponent, so that he can gracefully swing over to your side without too much apparent loss of face.
Sydney J. Harris

When we have 'second thoughts' about something, our first thoughts don't seem like thoughts at all - just feelings.
Sydney J. Harris

Somebody who never got over the embarrassing fact that he was born in bed with a lady.
Sydney J. Harris

Many a secret that cannot be pried out by curiosity can be drawn out by indifference.
Sydney J. Harris

People who think they're generous to a fault usually think that's their only fault.
Sydney J. Harris

Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.
Sydney J. Harris

Ninety per cent of the world's woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves - so how can we know anyone else?
Sydney J. Harris

The art of living consists in knowing which impulses to obey and which must be made to obey.
Sydney J. Harris


Mario Benedetti Quotes
Uruguayan - Novelist September 14, 1920 - May 17, 2009

An intellectual's weapon is writing, but sometimes people react as if it were a firearm. A writer can do a lot to change the situation, but as far as I know, no dictatorship has fallen because of a sonnet.
Mario Benedetti

I think the only positive thing that came from Uruguay's dictatorship was the spread of Montevideo natives around the world, and I continued writing about them from my various places of exile.
Mario Benedetti

When I have worries, fears or a love affair, I have the luck of being able to transform it into a poem.
Mario Benedetti

The real influence on my work was reality, that of my country and Latin America in general.
Mario Benedetti

My first two books did nada. I ended up paying the publishers.
Mario Benedetti

I believe life is a parenthesis between two nothings. I'm an atheist. I believe in a personal God, which is conscience, and that's what we must be accountable to every day.
Mario Benedetti

I do not write for the reader to come, but for him who is here, short of reading the text on my shoulder.
Mario Benedett


Geraldine Brooks Quotes
Australian - Journalist Born: September 14, 1955

September 11, 2001, revealed heroism in ordinary people who might have gone through their lives never called upon to demonstrate the extent of their courage.
Geraldine Brooks

If somebody from the past doesn't rise up from the grave and start talking to me, I haven't got a book. I have to hear that voice, the voice of the narrator. How she sounds will tell me who she is, and who she is will tell me how she will act - and that starts the plot in motion.
Geraldine Brooks

There are always a few who stand up in times of communal madness and have the courage to say that what unites us is greater than what divides us.
Geraldine Brooks

Certainly I'm still mining my experiences as a journalist. I think it's no coincidence that all three of my novels basically are about how people act in a time of catastrophe. Do they go to their best self or their worst self?
Geraldine Brooks

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.
Geraldine Brooks

When you're writing non-fiction, you go as far as you can go, and then ethically you have to stop. You can't go. You can't suppose. You can't imagine. And I think there's something in human nature that wants to finish the story.
Geraldine Brooks

One thing I believe completely is that the human heart remains the human heart, no matter how our material circumstances change as we move together through time.
Geraldine Brooks

Writing is like bricklaying; you put down one word after another. Sometimes the wall goes up straight and true and sometimes it doesn't and you have to push it down and start again, but you don't stop; it's your trade.
Geraldine Brooks

I'm a praying atheist. When I hear an ambulance siren, I ask for a blessing for those people in trouble, knowing that no one's listening. I think it's just a habit of mindfulness.
Geraldine Brooks

Because I worked as a newspaper reporter for about 14 years before attempting my first novel, I learned to write under almost any circumstances- by candle light, in longhand, in African villages where there was no power, under shelling in Kurdistan.
Geraldine Brooks

Sydney in the 1960s wasn't the exuberant multicultural metropolis it is today. Out in the city's western reaches, days passed in a sun-struck stupor. In the evenings, families gathered on their verandas waiting for the 'southerly buster' - the thunderstorm that would break the heat and leave the air cool enough to allow sleep.
Geraldine Brooks

I was so shy. I used to cross the street so I wouldn't even have to talk to my relatives, much less strangers. That's not shy, that's wise. But I found that that when you had a journalist's notebook in your hand it wasn't really you, you see.
Geraldine Brooks

Yes, it seems we've got this mutant gene in our human personality that makes us susceptible to this same kind of mistake over and over again. It's really uncanny how we build these beautiful multicultural edifices and then allow this switch to be flipped and everybody goes, 'Oh, the other, get them out of here.'
Geraldine Brooks

I think I'm still chewing on my years as a foreign correspondent. I found myself covering catastrophes - war, uprising, famine, refugee crises - and witnessing how people were affected by dire situations. When I find a story from the past, I bring some of those lessons to bear on the narrative.
Geraldine Brooks

You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.
Geraldine Brooks

I write while my son is at school. At about 7:45 A.M., I walk him there, with the dogs, then walk them for another forty minutes or so, go home and chain myself to the desk a little before 9 A.M., and try not to be distracted until I hear my son plunge through the front door at about 3 P.M.
Geraldine Brooks

I can always write. Sometimes, to be sure, what I write is crap, but it's words on the page and therefore it is something to work with.
Geraldine Brooks

My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal.
Geraldine Brooks

The structure of 'March' was laid down for me before the first line was written, because my character has to exist within Louisa May Alcott's 'Little Women' plotline.
Geraldine Brooks

The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.
Geraldine Brooks

While I love to read contemporary fiction, I'm not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it's because the former journalist in me is too inhibited by the press of reality; when I think about writing of my own time I always think about nonfiction narratives. Or perhaps it's just that I find the present too confounding.
Geraldine Brooks

Jewish prayers are mostly about daily things - the sliver of a new moon, dew on the grass, the bread and the wine.
Geraldine Brooks

My mother's family were full-on Irish Catholics - faith in an elaborate old fashioned, highly conservative and madly baroque style. I sort of fell out of the tribe over women's rights and social justice issues when I was just 13 years old.
Geraldine Brooks

I'm very, very leery of nonfiction books where they change timeframes and use - what do they call those things? - composite characters. I don't think that's right.
Geraldine Brooks

The Sarajevans have a very particular world view - a mordant wit coupled with this unbearable sadness and... truckloads of guts, you know.
Geraldine Brooks

If you look at an illuminated manuscript, even today, it just blows your mind. For them, without all the clutter and inputs that we have, it must have been even more extraordinary.
Geraldine Brooks

The day in 2004 when the radiologist told me I had invasive cancer, I walked down the hospital corridor looking for a phone to call my husband, and I could almost see the fear coming toward me like a big, black shadow.
Geraldine Brooks

I had been afraid of breast cancer, as I suspect most women are, from the time I hit adolescence. At that age, when our emerging sexuality is our central preoccupation, the idea of disfigurement of a breast is particularly horrifying.
Geraldine Brooks

If screenwriters have to kill off a female character, they love to give her cancer. We've seen so many great actresses go down to the Big C: Ali MacGraw, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Debra Winger, Susan Sarandon.
Geraldine Brooks

For most people, chemotherapy is no longer the chamber of horrors we often conceive it to be. Yes, it is an ordeal for some people, but it wasn't for me, nor for most of the patients I got to know during my four months of periodic visits to the chemo suite.
Geraldine Brooks

'You've got mail!' exclaims the cheery automaton at America Online. The flag on the mailbox icon waves invitingly on my computer screen. For a second, I'm 10 years old again, waiting for the postman's whistle to slice the stillness of an Australian afternoon.
Geraldine Brooks

We are not the only animal that mourns; apes do, and elephants, and dogs. Yet we are the only one that tortures.
Geraldine Brooks

Sometimes I want to have a mental book burning that would scour my mind clean of all the filthy visions literature has conjured there. But how to do without 'The Illiad?' How to do without 'Macbeth?'
Geraldine Brooks

Even the classics that we read to our young children are full of wolves' fangs and burning ovens and bloody feet and ice shards piercing hearts. Even the New Testament climaxes with an act of unspeakable torture. Might as well just read to our kids from the Amnesty Annual Report and be done with it.
Geraldine Brooks

I do believe that our modern English usage has become way too clipped and austere. I have been reading excerpts from the journals of 18th-century seafarers lately, and even the lowliest press-ganged deck-swabber turns a finer phrase than I do most days.
Geraldine Brooks

I think probably the scaredest I've ever been was in Somalia. I arrived there when the episode that became known as 'Black Hawk Down' was still taking place. The Americans were still pinned down under fire. And everybody else was basically going the other way, and I was the only one putting my hand up for a flight in.
Geraldine Brooks

The dirty little secret of foreign correspondents is that 90 per cent of it is showing up. If you can find a way to get there, the story, the reporting, it's the easiest you'll ever do. 'Cause the drama's everywhere.
Geraldine Brooks

And one of the things that I learned was you can't generalise at all about a woman in a veil. You can't think you know her story, because she will confound you over and over again. She may be an engineer or a diplomat or a doctor. Or she may be an unbelievable babe with bleached hair down to her waist.
Geraldine Brooks

Both my mum and dad were great readers, and we would go every Saturday morning to the library, and my sister and I had a library card when we could pass off something as a signature, and all of us would come with an armful of books.
Geraldine Brooks

So, you know, Nathaniel was my first child, born when I was 40, so, uh... And then in due course, he wanted a brother, and then I thought, 'Oh, that'll be bloody lucky!' So, we ended up adopting a beautiful boy who was then five years old, from Ethiopia.
Geraldine Brooks

There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all, and that's where imagination can work.
Geraldine Brooks

I'd gotten myself into a kind of journalism that wasn't really compatible with rearing an infant. I'd been a foreign correspondent for a long time and had this subspecialty in covering catastrophes. It had spoiled me a little because you have a tremendous amount of autonomy, and I couldn't really see being an editor in an office.
Geraldine Brooks

I had this story that had been banging around in my head and I thought, 'I'll just see if there's anything there.' So I wrote a few chapters of the book that became 'Year of Wonders,' and lucky for me it found its readers.
Geraldine Brooks

I knew I was going to be a journalist when I was eight years old and I saw the printing presses rolling at the Sydney newspaper where my dad worked as a proofreader.
Geraldine Brooks

And when I'd be reporting in Israel, Palestinians would say, the Jews they're not like us, and the Jews would say the same things about the Palestinians, they don't want what we want. And I never bought it as a reporter and I don't buy it as a novelist. I think, you know, the sound of somebody crying for their lost child sounds the same.
Geraldine Brooks

Yes, the small village that we live in, in Virginia, is a very interesting place, in terms of its Civil War history, because it was a town that was founded by Quakers in 1733.
Geraldine Brooks

Both my parents loved words. That was the big deal in our house.
Geraldine Brooks

I was a pretty delicate kid. Anything that was going around I'd get it and I'd generally get it much worse than other people, so I spent a lot of time out of school.
Geraldine Brooks

I loved being away from school. I didn't really fancy school that much when I was little; it wasn't until I was in third or fourth grade that I really settled down at school and I was much happier at home with my mum and she was very creative and sort of fostered all my interests.
Geraldine Brooks

I think that you can honour the sacrifices of a common soldier without glorifying war.
Geraldine Brooks

It is my great good luck the words I use are English words, which means I live in a very old nation of open borders; a rich, deep, multi-layered, promiscuous universe, infused with Latin, German, French, Greek, Arabic and countless other tongues.
Geraldine Brooks

When I write a word in English, a simple one, such as, say, 'chief,' I have unwittingly ushered a querulous horde into the room. The Roman legionary is there, shaking his cap, or head, and Andy Capp is there, slouching in his signature working man's headgear.
Geraldine Brooks

I was a news reporter for 16 years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps the most useful equipment I acquired in that time is a lack of preciousness about the act of writing. A reporter must write. There must be a story. The mot juste unarriving? Tell that to your desk.
Geraldine Brooks