P. O'Brien Quotes

August is a wicked month.

... we have so many voices in us, how do we know which ones to obey?

There was I, devouring books and yet allowing a man who had never read a book to walk me home for a bit of harmless fumbling on the front steps.

jealousy is the direct result of self-betrayal.

Death in its way comes just as much of a surprise as birth.

What matters is the imaginative truth.

Oh, God, who does not exist, you hate women, otherwise you'd have made them different. And Jesus, who snubbed your mother, you hate them more.

Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.

I'm a tuning fork, tense and twanging all the time.

When you fall in love, it is spring no matter when. Leaves falling make no difference, they are from another season.

Wherever there were horses or ponies the mushrooms always sprang up.

There was always a real reason for everything - why spoons tarnished, and jam furred, and people declined into God, or drink, or card games.

Oh, love, what an unreasoning creature it grew to be.

It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it.

I knew I had done something awful. I had killed love, before I even knew the enormity of what love meant.

We love the night and it's quiet.

I saw that my witticism was unperceived and quietly replaced it in the treasury of my mind.

Could Henry Ford produce the Book of Kells? Certainly not. He would quarrel initially with the advisability of such a project and then prove it was impossible.

Our odd idea of the classical world, the white Washington, D.C., is based on buildings that were originally brightly painted.

I have never really liked gigantic-scale painting. I think that so many artists are seduced by scale - "Well, if I make it that big then it has to go in a museum."

I think lowering the age of consent to thirteen in New Jersey was a great idea. It might give boys a better chance to get girls before maga­zines. That's when they get hooked, in junior high.

University students are rarely able to cope with universals and death is the most embarrassing universal.

To increase aid to the Pakistan government when religious freedom is not upheld is tantamount to an anti-Christian foreign policy.

I've liked women but I've never felt I wanted to give up my life completely. I've never wanted to go to bed with anybody.

I hope that increasing numbers of Christians adopt the practice of wearing a cross in a simple and discreet way as a symbol of their beliefs.

My message to David Cameron, as the head of our government, is to seriously think again about this Robin Hood tax, the tax to help the poor by taking a little bit from the rich.

If marriage can be redefined so that it no longer means a man and a woman but two men or two women, why stop there? Why not allow three men or a woman and two men to constitute a marriage?

No Government has the moral authority to dismantle the universally understood meaning of marriage.

The only way two ever live more cheaply than one is if one of them gives up what he or she wants.

time stood still. I fell into that beloved space that writers fall into, the reason most write, as it's better than drugs or alcohol ... a high without hangover, an affair without pain.

Solitude is the natural dwelling place of truth…It is there you will wrestle. It is there you will be tested by fire and by darkness.

Providence The will of God acting together with human will. But he respects our will absolutely. He does not force. Love never forces. It only invites. ... There is a war between good and

...life without coffee is not really life.

There are nearly 1 million Americans who visit the emergency room each year because of dental pain at a cost that runs into the hundreds of millions.

Even though we know freedom as an idea we're not really as free as we think we are.

I’m one of those people who never really joined the grown-ups.

I would have loved to have been in The Stand. I would also loved to have been in The Mask.

However, there's three reasons for doing things in this particular world. One is love, one is prestige and the other's money. If you get all three together, that's fine.

To play a role where you get to reveal intellectual change is wonderful.

It is difficult to go on the next night after you receive a sandbagging.

You can't see the water until you run into it. A little boy took off running through it. He got all muddy.

I think we have to think about strategies that will help kids who have disabilities.

I look forward to beginning a relationship with Al Jazeera America, which has made a commitment to producing quality programming and pursuing underreported stories.

Honestly, the challenge about being a mom is when something goes wrong - someone's sick, getting someone to doctor's appointments.

I don't think being beautiful takes away from your credibility.

My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.

A place where your life exists before you live it, and where it goes afterwards.

But this too is true: stories can save us.

Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea.

In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.