M.K. Alexander Quotes

All that writers can do is keep trying to say what is deepest in their hearts.

It's delicious to have people adore you, but it's exhausting, too. Particularly when your own feelings don't match theirs.

So upright Quakers please both man and God.

Love finds an altar for forbidden fires.

Gentle dullness ever loves a joke.

We must have Christ in our hearts, that He may shine forth from our lives.

To pursue joy is to lose it. The only way to get it is to follow steadily the path of duty.

I think we do better as a country when we go step by step toward a goal, and the goal in this case should be reducing health care costs.

The goal with a big piece of social legislation is to have a bipartisan result, so the country will accept it

You cannot put patience and experience into a parenthesis, and, omitting them, bring hope out of tribulation.

Heaven is endless longing, accompanied with an endless fruition-a longing which is blessedness, a longing which is life.

The grave has a door on its inner side.

All that this world knows of living lies in giving - and more giving; He that keeps, be sure he loses -Friendship grows by what it uses.

A lover is never a completely self-reliant person viewing the world through his own eyes, but a hostage to a certain delusion.

I need to know the price of a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs. I need to know right now.

Sooner or later, I need to begin to do what any candidate does in a presidential race; I need to begin to win.

Young people should investigate where the filmmaker stands on the issue of file sharing, before they spend money on them at all.

Fondly we think we honor merit then, when we but praise ourselves in other men.

None of us knows how we will cope with snakes until the moment arises, and then most of us find out that we do not do it very well.

One of the most destructive things that's happening in modern society is that we are losing our sense of the bonds that bind people together - which can lead to nightmares of social collapse.

Book-publishing is all about politics. Agents, editors, which books will be puffed, which ignored, etc.

If on a friend’s bookshelf You cannot find Joyce or Sterne Cervantes, Rabelais, or Burton, You are in danger, face the fact, So kick him first or punch him hard And from him hide behind a curtain.

Nothing is quite as bad as being without privacy and lonely at the same time.

Fantasy is, I believe, the great nourisher of imagination. To paraphrase Einstein on how to develop intelligence in young people: Read fairy tales. Then read more fairy tales.

Neither refuse to give help when it is needed,... nor refuse to accept it when it is offered.

Antonia was very conscious of the corrosive power of envy and felt that it was this emotion, more than any other, which lay behind human unhappiness. People did not realize how widespread envy was.

Education forms the common mind.

There's this huge number of desperate people.

No more the mounting larks, while Daphne sings, Shall, list'ning, in mid-air suspend their wings.

I actually wanted to be an exotic dancer, but that didn't work out so I thought I'd take on acting.

Great oaks grow from little acorns. He has a green thumb. He has green fingers. He's sowing his wild oats. Here Ceres' gifts in waving prospect stand, And nodding tempt the joyful reaper's hand.

Ask for what end the heavenly bodies shine, Earth for whose use? Pride answers, 'Tis for mine For me kind nature wakes her genial power, Suckles each herb, and spreads out every flower.

Is not absence death to those who love?

And not a vanity is given in vain.

Who are next to knaves? Those that converse with them.

The difficulty with becoming a patient is that as soon as you get horizontal, part of your being yearns, not for a doctor, but for a medicine man.

Astrologers that future fates foreshow.

See the wild Waste of all-devouring years! How Rome her own sad Sepulchre appears, With nodding arches, broken temples spread! The very Tombs now vanish'd like their dead!

It may be added, to prevent misunderstanding, that when I speak of contemplated objects in this last phrase as objects of contemplation, the act of contemplation itself is of course an enjoyment.

Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.

A brave soul is a thing which all things serve.

But unfortunately Locke treated ideas of reflection as if they were another class of objects of contemplation beside ideas of sensation.

The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine! Feels at each thread, and lives along the line.

Most authors steal their works, or buy.

But would you sing, and rival Orpheus' strain. The wond'ring forests soon should dance again; The moving mountains hear the powerful call. And headlong streams hand listening in their fall!

I still feel like I have a lot of growing up to do 'til I find the voice. You know, everybody has their own voice and their own thing they want to say to the world.

All chance, direction, which thou canst not see

The pleased sea on a white-breasted shore-- A shore that wears on her alluring brows Rare shells, far brought, the love-gifts of the sea, That blushed a tell-tale.

In pride, in reas'ning pride, our error lies; All quit their sphere and rush into the skies. Pride still is aiming at the bless'd abodes, Men would be angels, angels would be gods.

How beautiful the yesterday that stood Over me like a rainbow! I am alone, The past is past. I see the future stretch All dark and barren as a rainy sea.