R.E. Butler Quotes
Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status.
The epitaphs on tombstones of a great many people should read: Died at thirty, and buried at sixty.
This desire of knowledge and the wonder which it hopes to satisfy are the driving power behind all the changes that we, with careless, question-begging inference, call progress.
If we are looking for signs of democratization, then surely we are looking as well for forms of living on equal terms in and among cultural differences.
The '80s were the worst period. You had these horrible pop bands growing their hair and calling themselves metal.
When you're doing fantasy, you can get so caught up in the magic of it that you lose the humanity.
My father used to sing to me in my mother's womb. I think I can name about any tune in two beats.
I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.'
The women take so little stock In what I do or say They'd sooner leave their cosseting To hear a jackass bray.
Land of Heart's Desire Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.
The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
The Land of Faery, Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.
The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds.
Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.
Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary.
Youth is like spring, an over praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.
Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.
The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.
The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.
Everyone has a set of presuppositions: what gender is, what it's not. And they may not write them out or they may not be in theoretical books published by Routledge, but they have a theory.
Every man is to be considered in two capacities, the private and public; as designed to pursue his own interest, and likewise to contribute to the good of others.
In Scotland I'm just like a lot of other guys, but in America I'm seen as a very strong, masculine guy.
When you're at dinner with somebody and they are on their phone. I think there's that lost art of conversation and so I just always try to keep my phone far away from me when I'm with people.
A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.
Come away, O human child: To the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.