Old Black Quotes

When someone talks about Western films, you probably think of those old black and white cowboy films your granddad likes. But the Western is a wonderful genre because it is usually a story of a lone hero fighting against corruption in a dangerous world. ~ Caroline Lawrence

Old black water, keep on rollin'
Mississippi moon won't you keep on shinin' on me? ~ Patrick Simmons

I love to snuggle up on the sofa wrapped in my duvet watching old black and white films, and catching up with friends and family on the phone. ~ Martine McCutcheon

Punching a woman is like punching a one-year old black baby in the face ~ Sebastian Fors

No female - young, old, black or white - could ever play the knight-on-charger with meager experience. If she presented herself as the human embodiment of national unity and world peace, everyone would have fallen down laughing. ~ Froma Harrop

It's when I'm around some people that my entire vocabulary goes on vacation. Like now, when Dave's walking next to me wearing an old black singlet and board shorts and the tattoo of a bird on his wrist, every single word in my head except "no" and "huh" is lying somewhere on a beack getting a suntan ~ Cath Crowley

And, let me compliment your fashionable attire, my friend. Is naked the new black?" said Rodrigo. Apparently, the two men could see each other. That figures; all monsters can see in dark. "I am uncertain of what happened to the old black while I have been indisposed," Niccolo replied flatly. ~ Mimi Jean Pamfiloff

I used to think that I could be successful if I pretended to be a 23-year-old black woman. I wanted to find a young black woman who would be willing to go in on this with me. I would write her novels, and then she would do the touring. I always thought I was too old and the wrong color. ~ Edmund White

When I first saw California, it was extraordinary. Because I came from old, black, dark England, still recovering from World War II. I grew up with bomb sites everywhere. ~ Geoffrey West

The TV shouted an old black-and-white film he didn't recognize, wheelchairs facing it like church pews. ~ Sere Prince Halverson

I was the only black girl at my junior high school. I had an afro, a Jamaican accent, I looked really old. ~ Grace Jones

My entertainment was going to the local dollar movie theatre on the weekend, where I watched old black and white movies. If you wanted current movies, you had to drive to the big city. ~ L'Wren Scott

I was raised to believe that you had to do things better than white people in order to succeed. The old black shows were better than the white shows. The Jeffersons was a lot better. Good Times was way funnier. Sanford and Son. Now, though, everyone thinks we're equal, so we submit the same s ... that everyone else submits. And then we get mad when they won't air it. You got to go back to the old attitude of it has to be twice as good. ~ Chris Rock

Gone are the days when my heart was young and gay,
Gone are my friends from the cotton fields away,
Gone from the earth to a better land I know,
I hear their gentle voices calling Old Black Joe. ~ Stephen Foster

What do you think it is to be normal?'
Why in the world would you want to be?' she says.
I don't know. I guess that's the problem.'
I don't think normal is that great.'
But so many people choose it,' I reply.
I don't think that's it at all. I think most everyone is normal and some of us, for whatever reason, choose to reject that and wear ruby red slippers or old black hats.'
Well, why do we choose the hard road? ~ Patrick Jones

A true nature is a gloomy monolith, sort of like that old black rotary phone that I had to sing 'Happy Birthday' to Grandpa on. But novelists, damn us, still need true natures - so we can give them to our protagonists. And so readers can vaguely predict how they'll behave when we trap them in 'situations' that they can't IM their way out of. ~ Walter Kirn

I always say when you see that old black-and-white footage of the rocket on the launch pad and it falls over and explodes, that's because people had slide rules. Not having the decimal point is a real drawback. You want the decimal point, take it from me. ~ Bill Nye

For years I happily wrote nothing but carefully researched and argued cultural history. Now with fiction I can begin where the archives end. It's like turning old black and white photos into a full-color video. Research reveals the past; fiction puts it in motion. And once history comes to life, it's clear that people then wrestled with troubles a lot like our own.
I love writing mysteries because they're ultimately about justice, and what's more complicated than guilt and innocence? I especially relish writing about crimes that pit the law against my characters' moral code. In the end justice is often about power, and the struggle over who gets to decide what's right or wrong makes for great stories in any genre. Historical mysteries are a great way into the life's most meaty stuff. ~ Marlowe Benn

Suspense is like a woman. The more left to the imagination, the more the excitement. ... The conventional big-bosomed blonde is not mysterious. And what could be more obvious than the old black velvet and pearls type? The perfect 'woman of mystery' is one who is blonde, subtle and Nordic. ... Although I do not profess to be an authority on women, I fear that the perfect title [for a movie], like the perfect woman is difficult to find. ~ Alfred Hitchcock

I watched him walk behind the bamboo bars. Black stripes and sunlit white fur flashed through the slits in the dark bamboo; it was like watching the slow-down reels of an old black-and-white film. He was walking in the same line, again and again - from one end of the bamboo bars to the other, then turning around and repeating it over, at exactly the same pace, like a thing under a spell. He was hypnotizing himself by walking like this - that was the only way he could tolerate this cage ~ Aravind Adiga

I guess to the outside observer, all my movies look like musty old black-and-white artifacts, but my earlier movies had been more static and tableaux-ish. ~ Guy Maddin

I'll give you an example. Henry, the old black guy who cooks the corn bread, he worked on the railroads for about 20 years so he knows how to lay and build track. ~ Marc Singer

I see no reason for denying so fundamental an urge, ruin or no. It is more important to live the life one wishes to live, and to go down with it if necessary, quite contentedly, than to live more profitably but less happily. Yet to achieve content under sometimes adverse circumstances, requires first an adjustment within oneself, and this I had already made, and after that, a recognition that one is not unique in being obliged to toil and struggle and suffer. This is the simplest of all facts and the most difficult for the individual ego to accept. As I look back on those first difficult times at the Creek, when it seemed as though the actual labor was more than I could bear, and the making of a living on the grove impossible, it was old black Martha who drew aside a curtain and led me in to the company of all those who had loved the Creek and been tormented by it. ~ Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Renaissance man, woman, either way it's a worthy pursuit! Like the painters of Emilia's day, I was raised in an environment that encouraged creative expression. Both my parents were artists, who didn't think much of TV and refused to upgrade our old black and white set. To entertain myself, I made art and wrote puppet shows. ~ Mary Pope Osborne

My Deep-Fried Pork Cutlet with Fondue Lunch Set is ready to eat!"
A Lunch Set?! With fondue even?!
Wow, that's, um... a really Soma thing to make!
"So I'm assuming the cheese is a dipping sauce? And it's in this little pot?"
"Yep, you got it. Go on and give it a good dunking."
"Here we go...
huh?
It's black?! Wait a minute, isn't this supposed to be cheese?!"
Mmm! Sooo gooood! It's so light and tender! The crunchy outer shell practically melts in your mouth the second you bite into it!
And the sauce is mellow and rich, melding together with the cutlet in indescribable deliciousness!
"Wait... what is this sauce?!"
"At a glance, it looks like tonkatsu sauce- the plain old black paste that always goes with pork cutlets. But it's really a black cheese sauce!
I made an eggplant puree from chunks of eggplant I grilled over a brazier until their skins were charred good and black. Then I took that puree, rich with the unique aroma of charcoal grilling, and blend it with cheese!"
"Ah! Now I see! The soft flavors of cheese and chargrilling work together, lingering in the mouth as a light but rich aftertaste!
That's how you managed to give such a refined and elegant deliciousness! ~ Yuto Tsukuda

Young has a personal relationship with electricity. In Europe, where the electrical current is sixty cycles, not fifty, he can pinpoint the fluctuation --- by degrees. It dumbfounded Cragg. "He'll say, 'Larry, there's a hundred volts coming out of the wall, isn't there?' I'll go measure it, and yeah, sure --- he can hear the difference."

Shakey's innovations are everywhere. Intent on controlling amp volume from his guitar instead of the amp, Young had a remote device designed called the Whizzer. Guitarists marvel at the stomp box that lies onstage at Young's feet: a byzantine gang of effects that can be utilized without any degradation to the original signal. Just constructing the box's angular red wooden housing to Young's extreme specifications had craftsmen pulling their hair out.

Cradled in a stand in front of the amps is the fuse for the dynamite, Young's trademark ax--Old Black, a '53 Gold Top Les Paul some knot-head daubed with black paint eons ago. Old Black's features include a Bigsby wang bar, which pulls strings and bends notes, and Firebird picking so sensitive you can talk through it. It's a demonic instrument. "Old black doesn't sound like any other guitar," said Cragg, shaking his head.

For Cragg, Old Black is a nightmare. Young won't permit the ancient frets to be changed, likes his strings old and used, and the Bigsby causes the guitar to go out of tune constantly. "At Sound check, everything will work great. Neil picks up th ~ Jimmy McDonough

Look at me
a big old black man under all of this makeup, and if I can look beautiful, so can you. ~ RuPaul

Son unas cualquieras, she mutters. Nobodies. No culture, no family life, illiterates, she means. The kind of people who make her cross to the other side of the street if she meets them in the dark on payday. They're her worst nightmare of what a Latin girl can become in the United States. Their big hoop earrings and plucked eyebrows, their dark lips painted like those stars in the old black-and-white movies, their tight T-shirts that show too much curve and invite boys' touches. ~ Meg Medina

He was looking at Mr. Nancy, an old black man with a pencil moustache, in his check sports jacket and his lemon yellow gloves, riding a carousel lion as it rose and lowered, high in the air; and, at the same time, in the same place, he saw a jeweled spider as high as a horse, its eyes an emerald nebula, strutting, staring down at him; and simultaneously he was looking at an extraordinarily tall man with teak colored skin and three sets of arms, wearing a flowing ostrich-feather headdress, his face painted with red stripes, riding an irritated golden lion, two of his six hands holding on tightly to the beast's mane; and he was also seeing a young black boy, dressed in rags, his left foot all swollen and crawling with black flies; and last of all, and behind all these things, Shadow was looking at a tiny brown spider, hiding under a withered ochre leaf. Shadow saw all these things, and he knew they were the same thing. ~ Neil Gaiman

What could be worse than dead? But all around him, the evidence was clear. Only weeks before, the NYPD had shot down a fifteen-year-old black boy, a student, for next to nothing. The shooting had started the riots, pitting young black men and some black women against the police force. The news made it sound like the fault lay with the blacks of Harlem. The violent, the crazy, the monstrous black people who had the gall to demand that their children not be gunned down in the streets. ~ Yaa Gyasi

An old black ram is tupping your white ewe ~ William Shakespeare

I fall in love with one special hat, but it happens to be on the head of the old Indian who is waiting on us. It is an old black hat, broken with white lines where it must have been crumpled and stepped on and kicked, and its brim droops like a hound's ear all along one side, but it is a wonderful hat, a magic hat. D'Artagnan wore a hat like that when he came up from Gascony, and Don Quixote wore a hat like that when he went home at last. Around the crown its owner has placed a thin silver band, as simply made as a wedding ring. They do look long-married, the old man and his black hat. ~ Peter S. Beagle

I grew up watching old black and white movies where Marlene Dietrich or Jean Harlow would go walking down some cobblestone street in ripped stockings and head into some smoky boite and sing for a pathetic living. That's so what I wanted to be. ~ Ellen Greene

If it makes you feel any better, you're not as bad as Keith. He was here earlier today and was so nervous, he literally kept looking over his shoulder." Lee paused thoughtfully. "I think it might have been because Adrian kept laughing like a mad scientist at those old black-and-white movies he was watching. ~ Richelle Mead

Her voice was like a line from an old black-and-white Jean-Luc Godard movie, filtering in just beyond the frame of my consciousness. ~ Haruki Murakami

And the lives of these old black women were synthesized in their eyes- a puree of tragedy and humor, wickedness and serenity, truth and fantasy. ~ Toni Morrison

How I go to the woods
Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single
friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore
unsuitable.
I don't really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds
or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of
praying, as you no doubt have yours.
Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit
on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds,
until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost
unhearable sound of the roses singing.
If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love
you very much. ~ Mary Oliver

The other two things are ... well, I had a huge appetite for old black and white movies on BBC 2. At the weekends they used to run matinees, and the more romantic the better. ~ Ewan McGregor

My old black cat, he passed away this morning. He never knew what a heartache was. Woke up late and he danced till noon. If questioned why, answered just because. He never spoke much, preferring silence. Eight lost lives was all he had. ~ Ian Anderson

I just dress like ... I'm an old black man. Sorry! Like I'm an old Jewish black man. I just dress like it's still the '50s. ~ Amy Winehouse

If she had looked out the window, she might have seen a great, hoary old black owl alight on the branch of the oak tree. She might have seen the owl lean perilously forward on his green-black branch and, without taking his gaze from her window, fall hard - thump, bash! - onto the streetside. She would have seen the bird bounce up, and when he righted himself, become a handsome young man in a handsome black coat, his dark hair curly and thick, flecked with silver, his mouth half-smiling, as if anticipating a terribly sweet thing. ~ Catherynne M Valente

I don't think of God as an old white man with no belly button, nor even an old black woman with no belly button. But I agree that God is something eternal. Something cannot come out of nothing. I believe God is Everything. And I believe in infinity. ~ Pete Seeger

MOTHER – By Ted Kooser

Mid April already, and the wild plums
bloom at the roadside, a lacy white
against the exuberant, jubilant green
of new grass and the dusty, fading black
of burned-out ditches. No leaves, not yet,
only the delicate, star-petaled
blossoms, sweet with their timeless perfume.

You have been gone a month today
and have missed three rains and one nightlong
watch for tornadoes. I sat in the cellar
from six to eight while fat spring clouds
went somersaulting, rumbling east. Then it poured,
a storm that walked on legs of lightning,
dragging its shaggy belly over the fields.

The meadowlarks are back, and the finches
are turning from green to gold. Those same
two geese have come to the pond again this year,
honking in over the trees and splashing down.

They never nest, but stay a week or two
then leave. The peonies are up, the red sprouts,
burning in circles like birthday candles,
for this is the month of my birth, as you know,
the best month to be born in, thanks to you,
everything ready to burst with living.

There will be no more new flannel nightshirts
sewn on your old black Singer, no birthday card
addressed in a shaky but businesslike hand.

You asked me if I would be sad when it happened
and I am sad. But the iris I moved from your house
now hold in the dusty dry fists of the ~ Ted Kooser

I don't do drugs. Because my grandmother raised me. I think like an old, black, Southern woman. If I'd have done coke, I'd probably be cooking pancakes. ~ Paul Mooney

The blacksmith's boy went out with a rifle
and a black dog running behind.
Cobwebs snatched at his feet,
rivers hindered him,
thorn branches caught at his eyes to make him blind
and the sky turned into an unlucky opal,
but he didn't mind.
I can break branches, I can swim rivers, I can stare out
any spider I meet,
said he to his dog and his rifle.

The blacksmith's boy went over the paddocks
with his old black hat on his head.
Mountains jumped in his way,
rocks rolled down on him,
and the old crow cried, You'll soon be dead.
And the rain came down like mattocks.
But he only said,
I can climb mountains, I can dodge rocks, I can shoot an old crow any day,
and he went on over the paddocks.

When he came to the end of the day, the sun began falling,
Up came the night ready to swallow him,
like the barrel of a gun,
like an old black hat,
like a black dog hungry to follow him.
Then the pigeon, the magpie and the dove began wailing
and the grass lay down to pillow him.
His rifle broke, his hat blew away and his dog was gone and the sun was falling.

But in front of the night, the rainbow stood on the mountain,
just as his heart foretold.
He ran like a hare,
he climbed like a fox;
he caught it in his hands, the colours and the cold -
like a bar of ice, like the column of a fountain,
like a ring of gold.
Judith A. Wright

That old black magic has me in its spell. ~ Johnny Mercer

Cal's blood might be silver, but his heart is black as burned skin. ~ Victoria Aveyard

We are moving into a new world and the old negativity will be left behind. Through the law of cause and effect, we can change the world, one person at a time. ~ Dolores Cannon

Even if you meet the perfect person, it ain't gonna be at the perfect time. You're married, they're single. That's right. You're Jewish, they're Palestinian. You're a Mexican, they're a raccoon. You're a black woman, he's a black man. ~ Chris Rock

I used to love you I still do So Selfish I love the old you The you that didnt shoot drugs ... The you that didnt get beat on by men You laugh in my face and call me a fool But its true I still love you Sometimes,I can see the old you When your eyes flash When you almost look alive ~ Henry Rollins

There is no human failure greater than to launch a profoundly important endeavour and then leave it half done. This is what the West has done with its colonial system. It shook all the societies in the world loose from their old moorings. But it seems indifferent whether or not they reach safe harbour in the end. ~ Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson Of Lodsworth

Time dims memory. But not that kind. Somewhere in a corner of the brain, one little cell never forgets. It keeps the song that, heard again, recreates the room, the person, the moment. It preserves the phrase or the laugh or the gesture that resurrects a friend long gone. It knows precisely where you were and what you were doing when you heard about Pearl Harbor if you're old enough, or Kennedy's assassination, or Martin Luther King's, or the Challenger explosion. Every detail is frozen in memory, despite all the years. It keeps the innocuous question, too. The question that sometime later, when all the synapses are working, produces the epiphany, the moment when you're driving along and you realize that finally you understand. And why did it take you so long? ~ Kay Mills

Since everyone around you agrees ever since there were people on earth that land is value, or labor is value, or learning is value, or title, degree, necklaces, murex shells, the ownership of slaves. Everyone knows bees sting and ghosts haunt and giving your robes away humiliates your rivals. That the enemies are barbarians. That wise men swim through the rock of the earth; that houses breed filth, airstrips attract airplanes, tornadoes punish, ancestors watch, and you can buy a shorter stay in purgatory. The black rock is holy, or the scroll; or the pangolin is holy, the quetzal is holy, this tree, water, rock, stone, cow, cross, or mountain--and it's all true. The Red Sox. Or nothing at all is holy, as everyone intelligent knows. ~ Annie Dillard

I knew how to read a contract by 10 years old, but I didn't know what it meant for somebody to come in and tell me they loved me and kiss me goodnight. That's a problem. ~ Corey Feldman

Yeah, sci-fi is definitely a big influence on Fear Factory. I've had people tell me we always sing about the same thing but it's like well, if we were a black metal band we'd sing about Satan, you know? What if we were a Christian metal band? All the songs would be about how much we loved Jesus. ~ Dino Cazares

I've had a lot of people tell me they watched 'Old Dogs' with their kids and had a good time. ~ Robin Williams

What was the matter with her? She'd already decided she didn't want to make love with him, so why did she keep conjuring up erotic scenes from old sheikh movies? It must be the wine. ~ Jane Toombs

A young man who is unable to commit a folly is already an old man. ~ Paul Gauguin

To be young, gifted and black! ~ Nina Simone

It was the eyes, the cold black eyes with layers of black wrinkles around them. Great eyes. Unforgettable eyes. His hair was white and thin on top with thickets around the ears, and the whiteness contrasted sharply with the rest of his face. When he spoke, the eyes narrowed and the black pupils glowed fiercely. Sinister eyes. Knowing eyes. ~ John Grisham

That old unionism was, however, very different from the kind we live with now. We do not live with an ideal, sometimes on the defensive, of union. We live with the overriding, overwhelming fact, a fact so technologically, economically, and politically validated that we usually forget to ask how fully this fact represents a true community, the spiritually significant communion which the old romantic unionism had envisaged. ~ Robert Penn Warren

I was four or five, and my mother gave me a big black tablet, because I kept complaining that I was bored. She said, "Then write something. Then you can read it." In fact, I had just learned to read, so this was a thrilling kind of moment. The idea that I could write something - and then read it! ~ Joan Didion

George Floyd's death may have compelled you to post a black image on your social-media accounts but what it should really have done is made you question yourself and find within you those dark places where intolerance might be hiding for who among us can stand tall and proclaim that they have never been prejudiced towards a certain ethnicity, gender, colour or faith? ~ Aysha Taryam

The audience
the book's actual cast
quickly realized what had happened. The reason the movie dropped everything that made the novel real was because there was no way the parents who ran the studio would ever expose their children in the same black light the book did. The movie was begging for our sympathy whereas the book didn't give a shit. And attitudes about drugs and sex had shifted quickly from 1985 to 1987 (and a regime change at the studio didn't help) so the source material
surprisingly conservative despite its surface immorality
had to be reshaped. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

Gamaun is a dainty steed,
Strong, black, and of a noble breed,
Full of fire, and full of bone,
With all his line of fathers known;
Fine his nose, his nostrils thin,
But blown abroad by the pride within;
His mane is like a river flowing,
And his eyes like embers glowing
In the darkness of the night,
And his pace as swift as light. ~ Bryan Procter

Young humans can be impulsive. The trick is keeping them around long enough to become old humans. ~ Martha Wells

There is nothing new in Wall Street. There can't be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again. ~ Jesse Lauriston Livermore

When old Bobby does Elvis, you swear it's the real mccoy. Another Friday night in the life of a country boy. ~ Kenny Chesney

On Tuesday, Utah Candidate Mia Love became the first black Republican woman elected to Congress. She's also a Mormon. Yeah, a black female Republican Mormon. Even unicorns are saying, 'Not buyin' it.' ~ Jimmy Fallon

It was said of old Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, that she never puts dots over her I s, to save ink. ~ Horace Walpole

And why had those prayers focused heavenward? Well, kind of made sense, didn't it? Even when there were no more options for the body, the heart's wishes find a way out, ans as with all warmth, love rises. Besides, the will to fly was in the nature of the soul so its home had to be up above. And gifts did come from the sky, like spring rain and summer breezes and fall sun and winter snow. ~ J.R. Ward

Southern people are raised with a work ethic. My son is 5 years old and does chores. My mom was a dance teacher, and the training and discipline it takes to be a dancer I've carried with me in Hollywood. ~ Jaime Pressly

It was a reaction from the old idea of "protoplasm", a name which was a mere repository of ignorance. ~ John B. S. Haldane

A Life like Mine:

Round and round, round and round, this is how life is feeling at the very moment. Why on earth, would anyone want to live in a life that is never ending chaos? Not me, she thought to herself. Gloria Jacobson, 19 years old, was on her way to a life of success when she was finally looking into a life of school, love, and a family that could look up to her for being the next honor roll student. Well, ok, technically speaking, she wasn't an "Honor roll" Student, and she wasn't in love yet. But she did have one thing, and that was a family that loved her. Skeptical or not, as she was, she was headed to sleep after a long day's journey through thoughts and school. She went to a College Prep school, so it wasn't exactly the easiest. In fact, sometimes school to her could become one of the toughest things.
She rolled up her jean legs and through on her purple hooded jacket then slipped out the door. "Mom will hopefully allow her to go to the school ball tomorrow night"; she thought as she crossed her fingers. It was going to be a school formal, and all the way through elementary and middle school, she wasn't ever allowed to go. Why on earth wouldn't her parents ever let her just be a normal teenage girl. After all she only turns 20, towards the end of graduation. Her entire life was devoted to school work, college apps, and volunteer work at different places after school, and church activities. She never seemed to have any time for boys or even f ~ Ann Clifton

That sounded like something Mother would say, throwing color onto a black-and-white picture. ~ Ruta Sepetys

I once laughed at the vanity of women of thirty or forty who whitened their ruddy old skin with lead, but now I know such salves are not disguises for old crones who wish to catch a young husband. Instead they are only a mask we wear so that we can, for a little while, still recognize ourselves. ~ Rebecca Johns

WE ARE MADE OF STARDUST, THE SCIENTISTS SAY - THE iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, and the chlorine in our skin forged in the furnaces of ancient stars whose explosions scattered the elements across the galaxy. From the ashes grew new stars, and around one of them, a system of planets and asteroids and moons. A cluster of dust coalesced to form the earth, and life emerged from the detritus of eight-billion-year-old deaths. ~ Rachel Held Evans

If travel has momentum and wants to stay in motion, as I mentioned earlier, then adventure has the gravitational pull of a black hole. The more you do it, the more you find a way to keep doing it. ~ Josh Gates

I just think that for a lot of people - not to take the focus off of myself - that feeling of imminent dread, like a cloak of black dust, was always around me. ~ Matthew Shultz

So much is kept off limits these days. There are things we don't speak of, things we not only don't remember but carefully forget, places we do not stray into, memories we bury or reshape. That is the way we all live nowadays: driving a long a road between hallucination and amnesia. As long as you are moving, you are OK -- you have negotiated safe passage, for the moment. It is only when you come to a stop like this, in a black night in the middle of nowhere, that things wobble a bit and you wonder about the purpose of roads. You sit in the dark, frightened at the life you've led and things you've led undone. You can only hope that in the long run it won't matter, but that in itself is no consolation at all. ~ Romesh Gunesekera

Age is foolish and forgetful when it underestimates youth. ~ J.K. Rowling

For a moment, my lights picked out like searchlights the girl's naked body, slight as a child's, ivory white against the dead white of the snow, her hair bright as spun glass. She did not look in my direction. Motionless, she kept her eyes fixed on the walls moving slowly towards her, a glassy, glittering circle of solid ice, of which she was the centre. Dazzling flashes came from the ice-cliffs far over her head; below, the outermost fringes of ice had already reached her, immobilised her, set hard as concrete over her feet and ankles. I watched the ice climb higher, covering knees and thighs, saw her mouth open, a black hole in the white face, heard her thin agonised scream. ~ Anna Kavan

When asking about ones age the question asked is how old are you.I would hereby like to advocate rephrasing this as - how young are you? ~ Amit Abraham

I've heard that people spend a really long time finding their soul mates."
I squeeze Lily's shoulder. She's been in her soul mate's arms since she was little.
"It took you two long enough, didn't it?" Lo says. "No thanks to me." He pauses. "But I want you two to know - from the bottom of my black, decaying heart - I love you both, and the only perfect world has Ryke standing beside Daisy and Daisy standing beside Ryke. Anything less is fucked up. Remember that, will you? ~ Krista Ritchie

Just like "All American" means "White," "All Lives" means "White. ~ Darnell Lamont Walker

Earlier in the day, while killing some hours by circling in blue ballpoint ink every uppercase M in the front section of a month-old New York Times, Chip had concluded that he was behaving like a depressed person. Now, as his telephone began to ring, it occurred to him that a depressed person ought to continue staring at the TV and ignore the ringing - ought to light another cigarette and, with no trace of emotional affect, watch another cartoon while his machine took whoever's message. That his impulse, instead, was to jump to his feet and answer the phone - that he could so casually betray the arduous wasting of a day - cast doubt on the authenticity of his suffering. He felt as if he lacked the ability to lose all volition and connection with reality the way depressed people did in books and movies. It seemed to him, as he silenced the TV and hurried into his kitchen, that he was failing even at the miserable task of falling properly apart. ~ Jonathan Franzen

Literature is as old as human language, and as new as tomorrow's sunrise. And literature is everywhere, not only in books, but in videos, television, radio, CDs, computers, newspapers, in all the media of communication where a story is told or an image created.

It starts with words, and with speech. The first literature in any culture is oral. The classical Greek epics of Homer, the Asian narratives of Gilgamesh and the Bhagavad Gita, the earliest versions of the Bible and the Koran were all communicated orally, and passed on from generation to generation - with variations, additions, omissions and embellishments until they were set down in written form, in versions which have come down to us. In English, the first signs of oral literature tend to have three kinds of subject matter - religion, war, and the trials of daily life - all of which continue as themes of a great deal of writing. ~ Ronald Carter