H.P. Oliver Quotes

Death is not a word to fear, any more than birth is.

Life must be considered sui generis; it is not a form of energy, nor can it be expressed in terms of something else.

The old series of sittings with Mrs. Piper convinced me of survival for reasons which I should find it hard to formulate in any strict fashion, but that was their distinct effect.

We don't need a head of state who guts our defenses and draws phony red lines with a pink crayon.

And of course there is so much of World War II that is documented that we never have seen

I'm like John Wayne. I only play good guys. Describing his cameo role on a TV series.

Writers are storytellers. So are readers.

I don't think there is another person in America that wants to tell this story as much as I do.

You're just looking for the thing that makes this scene sort of imperative, why you have to know what changes by the end of the scene so you're really looking to find the essence of it.

I believe my woman shouldn't work outside the home.

People are still living in the moment, and they feel the passion of now.

I'm interested, I suppose, in tortured power.

Even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being stumbled over.

Leverage is everything-don't begin to pry until you've got the long arm on your side.

For nothing burns with such amazing speed, As the dry sticks of a religious creed.

See how he throws his baited lines about,/And plays his men as anglers play their trout.

Life as we call it, is nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence when it comes upon soundings.

Most people have died before they expire; died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.

To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death.

The difference between gossip and philosophy lies only in one's way of taking a fact.

Nothing can be so perfect while we possess it as it will seem when remembered.

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

But the word "right" is one of the most deceptive of pitfalls; it is so easy to slip from a qualified meaning in the premise to an unqualified one in the conclusion. Most rights are qualified.

The history of what the law has been is necessary to the knowledge of what the law is.

The only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas, or, at least not to express them.

It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste.

To think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists.

A great man represents a great ganglion in the nerves of society, or to vary the figure, a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists in his being there.

Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used till they are seasoned.

It is very grand to die in harness, but it is very pleasant to have the tight straps unbuckled and the heavy collar lifted from the neck and shoulders.

I know many lives worth living.

Poetry is a life-cherishing force.

Sudden shifts and changes are no bad preparation for political life.

One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.

People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.

And you can't love, not fully, unless you are loved in return.

It shattered something inside me that hadn't been broken before.

Hunky Heroes, rescuing distressed women, captive princesses, and girls without wheels since 1684. p. 450

But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.

Nothing has ever been so painful or delicious as being so close to him and being unable to do anything about it: like eating ice cream so fast on a hot day you get a splitting headache.

Maybe before you die, it's your ghosts you see.

Still reading but learning a lot about true education and the process of guiding our children in their educational pursuits.

Everyone just wasting time because they have so much of it to waste, minutes slipping by on who's with who and did you hear.

No guest rooms.” I shake my head resolutely. “I want to be in a room room. A lived-in room.

Get over it, Roo. If you have friends who actually like you, you’re popular enough.

And there it is: Even though we’re standing in the same patch of sun-drenched pavement, we might as well be a hundred thousand miles apart.

I don't understand how everything changes, how the layers of your life get buried. Impossible. At some point, at some time, we must all explode.

This is one of my favorite things about the Underground: the crashing of the cymbals, the screeching guitar riffs, music that moves into the blood and makes you feel hot and wild and alive.

My first kiss. A new kind of kiss, like the new kind of music still playing, softly, in the distance - wild and arrhythmic, desperate. Passionate.

For a second, I feel a sense of overwhelming grief: for how things change, for the fact that we can never go back. I'm not certain of anything anymore. I don't know what will happen--