J. F. Powers Quotes

If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.

High school sports: where lessons of life are still being learned, and where athletes still compete for the love of the game and their teammates.

Educate the heart. Let us have good men.

What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.

I want to feel that every trip I make has enhanced me as a person.

If god created man in his own image, how come I'm not invisible?

There will be something anguish or elation that is peculiar to this day alone. I rise from sleep and say: hail to the morning! come down to me, my beautiful unknown.

I have the ability to create and be in touch with God. I can't change bread and wine into body and blood, but I can take the scum or the slime of the earth and make it into a man or woman.

I was a pilot flying an airplane and it just so happened that, where I was flying, made what I was doing spying.

Packing is always a nightmare.

When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder.

Unfortunately, sometimes people don't hear you until you scream.

Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.

Dad, I left my heart up there.

They say that a good cook can ignite sparks by the way he kisses. The way I see, just because a guy can turn on the stove doesn't necessarily make him a good cook.

Betrayal, in one form or another, is at the very heart of the world of intelligence.

The Spoonsize Boys steal the dollhouse toys while the cat by the fire is curled. Then away they floats in their eggshell boats, down the drains to their underground world.

The wages of courage is death, lad, but it's the wages of everything else, too.

To understand the world, one’s place in it, is to be always at the risk of drowning.

Certainly no valid answer is ever gained by excluding any factors of the problem; that was the Puritans' error.

We are never so lost that our angels cannot find us.

Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

There is a sharp distinction between what is remembered, what is told and what is true.

I can't envision an honest war novel that left war in a positive light.

All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours.

Yeah, there's some unlikely beasts in the world, and it's best to stay near the ones that you've bought drinks for.

Life is just an ongoing process.

I'm functioning on a lung and a half, but I have proved that it's possible to challenge yourself.

Animals are very easy to love and be friends with.

Journalists have made celebrities into an industry.

The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.

I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.

My personal opinion is that if someone writes honestly about war, it will inherently be anti-war.

We have to stop thinking about ourselves so much and start thinking about the environment. We have to change.

I would say the flip side to my fascination with systems is a fascination with components. So many of my books are dialogues between little and big.

I'd like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I'm doing. That's one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation.

It's not just: you get off the plane, you're back home, everything's fine. Maybe the physical danger ends, but soldiers are still deeply at risk of being injured in a different way.

We're so bereft of support of theatre in this day and age.

If you are going to a destination where the food might be more exotic than usual, always err on the side of caution.

'Bossy' is someone who bosses people around without reason.

Camp life is demanding, and even the simplest daily routine becomes a chore in a climate with 90 per cent humidity, not to mention the bugs.

Your thoughts, vividly imagined and repeated, charged with emotion, become your reality.

A trembling in the bones may carry a more convincing testimony than the dry documented deductions of the brain.

All choices are illusions, or if they are not illusions their strength is illusory, for one choice must contend with the choices of all the other men and women deciding anything in that moment.

The first 10 years I was a professional actor, I did Shakespeare.

The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.

As human beings, we have the blessing and the curse that we're able to adapt to almost anything. No matter how extreme the circumstances you're in, they become normal.

It wasn't fair, but fairness was something you had to go get; it wasn't delivered like the mail.

The first rule in keeping secrets is nothing on paper: paper can be lost or stolen or simply inherited by the wrong people; if you really want to keep something secret, don't write it down.

The world that our children will inherit is going to look substantially different, very quickly, than the world we have today. It's alarming.