Michael Gruber Quotes

Farid, you are keeping a hawk; don't expect her to lay eggs like a chicken.

But there's the paradox of fiction - why do you cry when a fake character dies? It's the basis of art. You engage with people who don't exist and care about them as you would your friends and relatives.

It is an animus, she decides, the representation of the Logos in the female, as the anima is the representation of Eros in the male. In its negative aspect it is opinionated, conventional, banal, self-righteous, argumentative ... In its positive aspect, it conveys spirit, feistiness, the capacity for reflection and self-knowledge, the capacity to handle philosophical and religious ideas at the higher levels.

Professors go batty too, perhaps more often than other people, although owing to their profession, their madness is less often remarked.

But it turns out that people who are grounded and secure don't change much under stress. That's what being grounded means.

It's part of what we call the Shadow, all the dark parts of us we can't face. It's the thing that, if we don't deal with it, eventually poisons our lives.

I'll lay a bet," said Sancho, "that before long there won't be a tavern, roadside inn, hostelry, or barber's shop where the story of our doings won't be painted up; but I'd like it painted by the hand of a better painter than painted these." "Thou art right, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "for this painter is like Orbaneja, a painter there was at Ubeda, who when they asked him what he was painting, used to say, 'Whatever it may turn out'; and if he chanced to paint a cock he would write under it, 'This is a cock,' for fear they might think it was a fox." - Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

Well, we start with this outrageous idea that the ground of being, existence itself, is a person, and that this person is intimately concerned with each of our lives and desires us to turn our hearts toward him. Once you accept that level of insanity - or faith, as we prefer to call it - then it makes perfect sense to try to discern what God's purpose is for your life through a disciplined process of prayer and self-examination, discernment, as we say.

I thought I would write non-fiction. I thought I would enter the New York literary scene as copy editor, work my way up, and then write my own books.

You look at us and you see oppression; we see stability and harmony. You see corruption; we see ties of family, friendship, and mutual support. You see feudalism, we see mutual responsibility. You see the oppression of women, we see the defense of modesty.

That's remarkable too, she thought; whenever we make a noble statement it sounds false in our ears.

There are three kind of history. The first is what really happened and that is forever lost. The second is what most people thought happened, and we can recover that with assiduous effort. The third is what the people in power wanted the future to think happened and that is 90 percent of the history in books.

I'm a cult writer now. I have a cult readership.

I've dreamed again of being in hell, vast cliffs with eyes, iron streets populated with gargoyles, half-dressed harpies, and in the streets chariots going of themselves, spitting the stench of pitch and sulphur

Does it matter, when you read, if the person who wrote still lives?

Envy is the one deadly sin that no American can ever admit to ...

There are life events that can destroy the personality, which is a lot more fragile than most people imagine, constructed as it is from bits provided by others in the most haphazard way. People can be torn down to the core, "shattered," as the expression goes, and then they seek sleep. And dreams, which provide the ground for the construction of a new and more integrated self. Providing there's a core, and providing they're willing to do the work.

'The Book of Air and Shadows' was born during a conference with an intellectual property lawyer on a particular afternoon in November of 2003.

They talk about adrenaline, but Marder knew it was much more than adrenaline; it was a mystical cocktail that comes only from this one act, from killing men at the risk of yourself dying, a Pleistocene inheritance, disgusting and marvelous at the same time. Sports, even violent sports, were just a pale shadow of this. Why they'd never abolish war.

ship. The courier just arrived from Paidara.