Goyanes John Quotes

I do not feel an exile from America in any sense. ~ John C. Hawkes

In days of yore, the poet's pen From wing of bird was plunder'd, Perhaps of goose, but now and then, From Jove's own eagle sunder'd. But now, metallic pens disclose Alone the poet's numbers; In iron inspiration glows, Or with the poet slumbers. ~ John Adams

Then it happened. One night as the rain beat on the slanted kitchen roof a great spirit slipped forever into my life. I held his book in my hands and trembled as he spoke to me of man and the world, of love and wisdom, pain and guilt, and I knew I would never be the same. His name was Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky. He knew more of fathers and sons than any man in the world, and of brothers and sisters, priests and rogues, guilt and innocence. Dostoyevsky changed me. The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov, The Gambler. He turned me inside out. I found I could breathe, could see invisible horizons. The hatred for my father melted. I loved my father, poor, suffering, haunted wretch. I loved my mother too, and all my family. It was time to become a man, to leave San Elmo and go out into the world. I wanted to think and feel like Dostoyevsky. I wanted to write.
The week before I left town the draft board summoned me to Sacramento for my physical. I was glad to go. Someone other than myself could make my decisions. The army turned me down. I had asthma. Inflammation of the bronchial tubes.
"That's nothing. I've always had it."
"See your doctor."
I got the needed information from a medical book at the public library. Was asthma fatal? It could be. And so be it. Dostoyevsky had epilepsy, I had asthma. To write well a man must have a fatal ailment. It was the only way to deal with the presence of death. ~ John Fante

More police and courts and more prisons and better investigative techniques are fine, but the only way crime is going to go down is if all of us simply stop accepting and tolerating it in our families, our friends, and our associates...Crime is a moral problem. It can only be resolved on a moral level. ~ John E. Douglas

The reality of having a kid involves day-to-day practicality - not broader philosophical outlooks. ~ John Darnielle

I need to concede a considerable area to what I don't know and can't know, and perhaps don't wish to know. Only to understand in a way I do not quite understand. ~ John Haines

Nevertheless, our constant efforts to lower our estimate of the present world should not lead us to hate life or to be ungrateful toward God. For this life, though it is full of countless miseries, deserves to be reckoned among the divine blessings which should not be despised. Therefore, if we discover nothing of God's goodness in it, we are already guilty of no small ingratitude toward him. ~ John Calvin

This and many others only confirmed me in the opinion, planted when I saw the sale of Martha Ann, and growing steadily thereafter, that slavery was an accursed business, and that the sooner my people were relieved of it, the better. ~ John Sergeant Wise

The undoubted sign of a society well under control or in decline is that language has ceased to be a means of communication and has become instead a shield for those who master it. ~ John Ralston Saul

The culmination of Sehnsucht [Longing, Joy] in the rhapsodic joy of heaven is, for me at least, the strongest single element in Lewis. In one way or other it hovers over nearly every one of his books and suggests to me that Lewis's apocalyptic vision is perhaps more real than that of anyone since St. John on Patmos. ~ Clyde S. Kilby

Today, however, she didn't go looking for urchins or broken shells. She simply walked to the end of the earth and stood a while. ~ John Burnside

Action is its own kind of thinking. We had to fight now: these people were a cancer who had crept into our stomachs and infected us all. We had to be surgeons, bold and clever, not thinkers and talkers. ~ John Marsden

First we only want to be seen, but once we're seen, that's not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

I have to talk about my movies. I have to give interviews to promote what I'm doing. But no one really knows my personal life. And if you don't have a personal life I feel bad for you. ~ John Waters

Your eternal destiny is not cosmic retirement; it is to be part of a tremendously creative project, under unimaginably splendid leadership, on an inconceivably vast scale, with ever-increasing cycles of fruitfulness and enjoyment - that is the prophetic vision which 'eye has not seen and ear has not heard.' ~ John Ortberg

Perfection ... is clearly not achieved simply by being naked, by the lack of wealth or by the rejection of honors, unless there is also that love whose ingredients the apostle described (cf. I Cor. 13) and which is to be found solely in purity of heart. Not to be jealous, not to be puffed up, not to act heedlessly, not to seek what does not belong to one, not to rejoice over some injustice, not to plan evil - what is this and its like if not the continuous offering to God of the heart that is perfect and truly pure, a heart kept free of all disturbance? ~ John Cassian

Most Men are Cowards, all Men should be Knaves.
The Difference lies, as far as I can see,
Not in the thing it self, but the Degree. ~ John Wilmot

You spend so much time in your profession it ought to be something you love. ~ John H. Johnson

It seems strange that visitors to Yosemite should be so little influenced by its novel grandeur, as if their eyes were bandanged and their ears stopped. Most of those I saw yesterday were looking down as if wholly unconscious of anything going on about them, while the sublime rocks were trembling with the tones of the mighty changing congregation of waters gathered from all the mountains round about, making music that might draw angels out of heaven ... God himself is preaching his sublimest water and stone sermons! ~ John Muir

The present in New York is so powerful that the past is lost. ~ John Jay Chapman

It was a good thing, we told ourselves; the eyes grow weary with looking at new things; sleeping late, we said, has its genuine therapeutic value; we would be better for it, would be able to work more effectively. We have little doubt that all this was true, but we wish we could build as good a rationalization every time we are lazy. For in some beastly way this fine laziness has got itself a bad name. It is easy to see how it might have come into disrepute, if the result of laziness were hunger. But it rarely is. Hunger makes laziness impossible. It has even become sinful to be lazy. We wonder why. One could argue, particularly if one had a gift for laziness, that it is relaxation pregnant of activity, a sense of rest from which directed effort may arise, whereas most busy-ness is merely a kind of nervous tic.
...
How can such a process have become a shame and a sin? Only in laziness can one achieve a state of contemplation which is a balancing of values, a weighing of oneself against the world and the world against itself. A busy man cannot find time for such balancing. We do not think a lazy man can commit murders, nor great thefts, nor lead a mob. He would be more likely to think about it and laugh. And a nation of lazy contemplative men would be incapable of fighting a war unless their very laziness were attacked. Wars are the activities of busy-ness. ~ John Steinbeck

Aren't maids the ultimate art critics? ~ John Waters

With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he's so obscure. Every time you say, "He says so and so," he always says, "You misunderstood me." But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that's not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, "What the hell do you mean by that?" And he said, "He writes so obscurely you can't tell what he's saying, that's the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, 'You didn't understand me; you're an idiot.' That's the terrorism part." And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes. ~ John Rogers Searle

I always got very nervous whenever I heard that Margo was about to show up, on account of how she was the most fantastically gorgeous creature that God has ever created. ~ John Green

Linguists traditionally observe that esteemed writers have been using they as a gender-neutral pronoun for almost a thousand years. As far back as the 1400s, in the Sir Amadace story, one finds the likes of Iche mon in thayre degree ("Each man in their degree"). ~ John McWhorter

Neither the inveterateness of the mischief, nor the prevalency of the fashion, shall be any excuse for those who will not take care about the meaning of their own words, and will not suffer the insignificancy of their expressions to be inquired into. ~ John Locke

A collection of short stories is generally thought to be a horrendous clinker; an enforced courtesy for the elderly writer who wants to display the trophies of his youth, along with his trout flies. ~ John Cheever

At Circus of The Wonder, only young women - just the girl acrobats, of a certain age - were trained to be skywalkers (The Wonders themselves). This was also on purpose, and entirely Ignacio's doing. The lion tamer liked young women; he thought that prepubescent girls were the best skywalkers. Ignacio believed that if you were in the audience, you wanted to be worried about the girls falling, not thinking about them sexually; once women were old enough for you to have sexual thoughts about them - well, at least in the lion tamer's opinion, you weren't so worried about them dying if you could imagine having sex with them. Naturally, ~ John Irving

Statistics are somewhat like old medical journals, or like revolvers in newly opened mining districts. Most men rarely use them, and find it troublesome to preserve them so as to have them easy of access; but when they do want them, they want them badly. ~ John Shaw Billings

So Christian went on his way, saying: Here have I seen things rare and profitable; Things pleasant, dreadful; things to make me stable In what I have begun to take in hand: Then let me think on them, and understand Wherefore they showed me where; and let me be Thankful, O good Interpreter, to thee. ~ John Bunyan

A Dear John haiku:

This isn't working.
I hope we can still be friends.
Please don't kill my cat. ~ Tom Dheere

He wasn't Ringo, though. He was more like Paul. Maureen was Ringo, except she wasn't very funny. I was George, except I wasn't shy, or spiritual. Martin was John, except he wasn't talented or cool. Thinking about it, maybe we were more like another group with four people in it. ~ Nick Hornby

Take liberties you shouldn't and you'll find your liberties are taken from you. ~ John Kramer

David: "How the hell did you get dressed so fast?"
Renee: "How do you know I didn't streak naked through the lobby and had clothes waiting for me in the car?"
David: "Heh. Good thing the archaeological paparazzi didn't have a team on duty."
Renee: "I'd have taken 'em out. My whole body is a weapon. ~ John C. Stipa

The key to becoming a more efficient leader isn't checking off all the items on your to-do list each day. It's in forming the habit of prioritizing your time so that you are accomplishing your most important goals in an efficient manner. ~ John C. Maxwell

Competitiveness must be focused exclusively on the process of what you are doing rather than the result of that effort (the so-called winning or losing). ~ John Wooden

…only then did I wake out of the book. ~ John McGahern