Lionel Quotes

However gnawing a deficiency, satiety is worse... We are meant to be hungry.

Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .

Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat

Worse, the deadly accuracy of filial faultfinding is facilitated by access, by trust, by willing disclosure, and so constitutes a double betrayal.

I didn't care about anything. And there's a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Ask Kevin.

...some people coddle their own afflictions the way others spoil small pedigreed dogs with cans of pate.

...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.

I have never in all my life considered you other people.

You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.

The only way my head was going truly somewhere else was to travel to a different life and not a different airport.

The most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one.

The fact that my clothing has been visually available to other people I do not find upsetting. The body is another matter. It is mine; I have found it useful; but it is an avatar.

I seem to remember even from when I was very young that when you loved someone you also hated them for making you love them, since loving someone is so incredibly humiliating.

For that matter, thinking of one's self as exceptional is probably more the rule than not.

Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.

Notoriety is cheap. It's just easier to get noticed by doing something bad.

You can't be stylish and petty at the same time.

It was important to me to put together a future history that would scan, and serve as the backdrop to the domestic story. Economics is really what drives the plot.

The penalty for getting the woman you want is that you must keep her.

To be patriotic, hate all nations but your own; to be religious, all sects but your own; to be moral, all pretenses but your own.

One should be just as careful about lying as about telling the truth.

Economics and ethics are not mutually exclusive.

To those who think that the law of gravity interferes with their freedom, there is nothing to say.

After all, no one is ever taken in by the happy ending, but we are often divinely fuddled by the tragic curtain.

The diminution of the reality of class, however socially desirable in many respects, seems to have the practical effect of diminishing our ability to see people in their difference and specialness.

Immature ists imitate. Mature ists steal.

This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.

Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader

If one defends the bourgeois, philistine virtues, one does not defend them merely from the demonism or bohemianism of the artist but from the present bourgeoisie itself.

I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.

We have all in some degree become anarchistic.

There's something about being there, on the set, in costume, in the moment, where you start to get a feel for the scene, which is not the same as sitting in your office writing it.

You always think you can do better. No question about that. In a way, you want to try and do every aspect better.

People need to stop accepting the evidence of reality, and start questioning it.

While death and darkness girdle meI grope for immortality.

Wasn't there only one respectable memento of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi?

Those who reach for the Sun, usually drop the world.

Sometimes, you have to step into oblivion, in order to paint success.

Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

I am not a man of fear, but I am a man that knows how to fear. Without fear, we become lazy. Without fear, we become reckless. Fear doesn't limit a man, it keeps the man sharp.

A man who does not doubt the courage of a woman, is a man that is subjugated by her will and allure.

Reading time is precious. Don't waste it. Reading bad books, or books that are wrong for a certain time in your life, can dangerously put you off the activity altogether.

They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him - because broken machines are easier to fix.

We'd been assured it wouldn't be painful, though she might experience 'discomfort, ' a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn't yours.

Come! our world is done:For all the witchery of the world is fled, And lost all wanton wisdom long since won.

The mind is a universe, and it has the power to completely create any possibility.

Power is the gem of necessity. Without observing power, identity remains undiscovered.

In the most secret heart of every intellectual ... there lies hidden ... the hope of power, the desire to bring his ideas to reality by imposing them on his fellow man.

The illusion is reality. The only contradiction is the observer.

Had I catalogued the downsides of parenthood, "son might turn out to be a killer" would never have turned up on the list. Rather, it might have looked something like this:1. H