John Burnham Schwartz Quotes

The difference between great actors and the rest of us isn't simply that they know how to make more out of less, but that, like lions at the watering hole, they will always take more than their share from the pool of available resources - extra air from the room, added knowledge from our faces. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

There's no backward and no forward, no day other than this. You fill your cart as you go, and that's that. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

By almost every account he's a fine young man. I'm simply trying to figure out why I should care that he's three centimeters taller than he was in May. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

Without hope, the need to punish is the one true religion. Blame must be fixed on some soul other than one's own. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

I have long admired the visceral storytelling and moral complexity of John Vaillant's brilliant non-fiction about humankind's tragically ambivalent relationship with the natural world. Now he brings his abundant literary gifts to a debut novel set in a very real borderland in which human beings are themselves treated like animals. The Jaguar's Children is a beautifully rendered lament for an imperiled culture and the brave lives that would preserve it. You should read it. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

I want to tell this right. I was thirty-eight years old. I had spent my entire adult life reading meanings into other people's stories, finding the figure in the carpet, the order in things. God in the details and no place else. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

She was Mattie Tucker now, mother of three and a good forty pounds heavier, casting that burning eye over them all, reaching way back for a southern pleasantry that was more like a Halloween apple with a razor blade in it: 'Well, don't y'all make just the perfect family of four? ~ John Burnham Schwartz

A girl never can predict who might wander into her boudoir during a bubble bath. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

I was 12. Our, teacher made us write an autobiography and I realised that I wasn't very interesting. I began to make things up, and that's when I thought maybe I was a writer, or at least a fiction writer. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

Along the wide curving moat surrounding the palace, rows of cherry trees announced the end of their seasonal beauty. Some of the trees were weeping: blossoms in white and palest pink, ponderous with decreptitude, eddying on the brown water, stirred by the paddling of ducks. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

That a child is not an event, alleged or otherwise, a mistake or accident or crime ... he is by definition more than this, sum rather than division, a living promissory note. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

In 1986, when I was 21, I lived in Tokyo for four months, boarding with a Japanese family and working for an American company. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

Why? What had she ever done? What had any of them ever done? To give a child only to take him away. To make and then unmake, as if a family weren't built of lives but of things that could be broken, returned, thrown out
~ John Burnham Schwartz

It is one thing to recognise certain potentially useful affinities, and another to act on them. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

I've discovered something interesting," she said. "If you ever want to avoid somebody, this city's as small as a postage stamp. But if you ever really want to run into somebody, if you really hope and pray, it's as big as an ocean. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

I sat thinking. How it was she who'd mentioned love first. How she seemed to be waiting, the door still between us, for me to act. And I imagined that if I reached for her I would find her where she lay waiting in the water, and my fingers would glide over her bare wet skin until every inch of her, every crook and hollow, would become mine. I would vouch for her with my life. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

For a couple of years at the end of the 1970s, Dustin Hoffman was a fixture in our family. My father was his lawyer and friend. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

In Japan, more than in any other country I've ever been in, one is not supposed to write about the people in the glass bubble; that is why they are in the glass bubble. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

There was before her and now there is after her, and that is the difference in my life. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

The burden of being intelligent and shy and young is that you will always know, cannot not know; have grown up in a fiction of perpetual responsibility, believing that whatever cracks in life you find must be your cracks, that anything at all can be your fault. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

Because it was the endless wanting that would break you, I thought. The constant craving for a love that might never be fulfilled that would bring you low, bit by bit, until one day you'd no longer be able to recognize any part of yourself. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

Certain experiences you never forget, no matter how old you become. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

There are heroes, and there are the rest of us. There comes a time when you just let go the ghost of the better person you might have been. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

Had I not gone to Japan in 1986, had I stayed home and majored in English literature as I'd intended to do, I might indeed have become an investment banker, an outcome that perhaps would have proved a more severe blow to the health of the U.S. economy than to the history of the novel. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it. ~ John Irving

Sing lustily and with a good courage. Beware of singing as if you were half dead, or half asleep; but lift up your voice with strength. ~ John Wesley

By all accounts, John Frankenheimer was singularly obsessed with The Manchurian Candidate, a film that, according to Daniel O'Brien, the director regarded "as his first truly personal project, feeling that the story made an all too valid point regarding the political manipulation and conditioning of American society. ~ James Kaplan

People are never able to outperform their self-image. ~ John C. Maxwell

It is this, at its most basic, that makes science a humane pursuit; it acknowledges the commonality of people's experience. ~ John Charles Polanyi

Knowledge Is Power! Train smart and obtain power! ~ John Webster

I have never been able to conjure up (as some great Evangelical missionaries have) the appalling vision of the millions who are not only perishing but will inevitably perish. On the other hand ... I am not and cannot be a universalist. Between these extremes I cherish and hope the majority of the human race will be be saved. And I have a solid biblical basis for this belief. ~ John Stott

I read a review on the Herald, it says it takes 40 minutes to get to the first sex session apparently and the whole movie only contains 11 minutes of forbidden fruit, ~ John Key

I don't wanna wrestle Big Show tonight because I'm scared that he's gonna eat me! ~ John Cena

May your body be blessed.
May you realize that your body is
a faithful and beautiful friend of your soul.
And may you be peaceful and joyful and
recognize that your senses are sacred thresholds.
May you realize that holiness is mindful gazing,
feeling, hearing and touching.
May your senses gather you and bring you home.
May your senses always enable you to celebrate
the universe and the mystery and possibilities
in you presence here.
May the Eros of the Earth bless you. ~ John O'Donohue

He sits at the filthy bar and silently witnesses the change of watch from his will to his independently operating motor skills. ~ John O'Brien

Confusing the weight of sins actually hurts our ability to resist temptation. ~ John Eldredge

When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior ignorance of its bureaucrats. ~ John Le Carre

God neither wills nor decrees anything without having long before directed it to its proper end. People ~ John Calvin

None are so poor that they have nothing to give ... and none are so rich that they have nothing to receive. ~ Pope John Paul II

I have more engagement with New Zealand than people might think. Unlike the impression I have of the American president, who sits in the Oval Office and people come to them. ~ John Key

His Charles Bronson-like demeanour together with his Clint Eastwood stare and his John Wayne swagger, created from a diet of westerns and Eighties TV mixed with a lifetime of planning, organising, managing, and leading, were now gelled together with the battle-hardened soldier he had become. ~ Connor Fitzgerald

May I have the courage today to live the life I would love ... to postpone my dream no longer. But do at last what I came here for and waste my heart on fear no more. ~ John O'Donohue

Will Cato's alien buddies come en masse and invade Earth? He's not sure but he'll try to keep humanity in the loop. ~ John Hopkins

Ah gentle pair, ye little think how nigh Your change approaches, when all these delights Will vanish and deliver ye to woe, More woe, the more your taste is now of joy. ~ John Milton

I had a lot of fun in those days. It was a great experience being in the Eastern Hockey League for the simple reason that you did not have a staff. ~ John Muckler

I sometimes think it would be beneficial if people thought of each other as "historical factorials." Thus, (Myrtle!) would be understood not just as present-day Myrtle but as the product of all her past experiences. ~ John Allen Paulos

Which scientific puzzle confounds the genius of Hawking? "Women," he said. "They are a complete mystery. ~ John M. Gottman

Caroline was always moody and miserable, but I liked it. I liked feeling as if she had chosen me as the only person in the world not to hate, and so we spent all this time together just ragging on everyone, you know? ~ John Green

Maybe I'll just write books. I'd like to make another movie, but I don't want to go back and [do] what they want you to do, to make it for a million dollars. I did that. I don't need a lot, but I need what I used to get, and they don't give you that anymore. ~ John Waters

Sweet intercourse of looks and smiles; for smiles from reason flow. ~ John Milton

Attack another's rights and you destroy your own. ~ John Jay Chapman

I never quite understand why we watch the news. There doesn't really seem much point watching somebody tell you what the news is when you could quite easily listen to it on the radio. ~ John Hurt

Albanian dogs go "ham ham." In Catalan, dogs go "bup bup." The Chinese dogs say "wang wang," the Greek dogs go "gav gav," the Slovenians "hov hov," and the Ukrainians "haf haf." In Iceland, it's "voff," in Indonesia, it's "gong gong," and in Italian, it's "bau bau. ~ John Lloyd

A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility. ~ John Keats

Why not learn to enjoy the little things-there are so many of them. ~ Saint John Chrysostom

This soirée was followed by a longer and more serious session in Pommeroy's, which had ended once again, I regret to say, with Henry and me recalling the great hits of Dame Vera Lynn. So now I turned my face to the wall, closed my eyes and knew what it was like to stand on the edge of eternity. ~ John Mortimer

He who loves is not ashamed before men of what he does for God, neither does he hide it through shame though the whole world should condemn it. ~ John Of The Cross

I hold that there is a mysterious connection between the fate of this country and that of Mexico; so much so that her independence and capability of sustaining herself are almost as essential to our prosperity and the maintenance of our institutions as they are to hers. ~ John C. Calhoun

Please thaw my permafrost heart. ~ John Mark Green

Sure I wave the American flag. Do you know a better flag to wave? Sure I love my country with all her faults. I'm not ashamed of that, never have been, never will be. ~ John Wayne

There is no man but carries in his breast the makings of a story, which, though never told, comes more home to him, than any the mind of another man can find and fashion in words

("The Watcher O' The Dead") ~ John Guinan

Some men run out of stories, of conversation, in no time at all. Either so little has happened to them or, more likely, they are incapable of understanding or retaining what has happened to them, and so they soon find themselves with nothing to say. Such a man makes a terrible companion. ~ John Marsden

They were glad and proud and humble to be men in a world where men were valuable. ~ John Steinbeck

The enemy you flee is not exterior to yourself ~ John Barth

The Best for the Group comes when everyone in the group does what's best for himself AND the group. ~ John Nash

Good works are indispensable to salvation - not as its ground or means, however, but as its consequence and evidence. ~ John Stott

Nothing in heaven or earth is content to be alone, and so there must always be something more. The universe is governed by a principle no more complicated than this: that a solitary body will forever attract another to itself. ~ John Pipkin

Minimalism is not defined by what is not there but by the rightness of what is
and the richness with which this is experienced. ~ John Pawson

This delight which God has in his creature's happiness cannot properly be said to be what God receives from the creature. For it is only the effect of his own work in and communications to the creature, in making it and admitting it to a participation of his fullness, as the sun receives nothing from the jewel that receives its light and shines only by a participation of its brightness. ~ John Piper

It's a good thing Doom 3 is selling very well ... ~ John Carmack

...There is no friendship in the desert, there is no love. The Sahara only knows allies and accomplices. [Hopkins quoting B. Gysin's The Process] ~ John Hopkins

[W]hen you're shooting a doc, you're trying to class it up because you can. You know, you're trying to make this feel like cinematic experience. And when you're doing fiction you're trying to do the opposite thing you're trying to take this very artificial experience this very artificial experience and make it feel real and visceral. ~ John Hyams

It is asserted by most respectable writers upon our government, that a well-regulated militia, composed of the yeomanry of the country, have ever been considered the bulwark of a free people. Tyrants have never placed any confidence on a militia composed of freemen. ~ John L. DeWitt