Rebecca Quotes

If you act scared, your body produces adrenaline.

Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.

When you work for the thing you believe in You're rich though the whole way is rough- But work that is simply for money Will never quite pay you enough.

The choice between law and justice is an easy one for courageous minds.

You know I hate watching myself on TV, I know a lot of actors say that, but it's true for me.

Unhappy people are dangerous.

As a child I loved ghost stories.

But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example.

To name the world in your own terms, to tell your own story, is an act of authority and power. When you write, you are saying, in effect, 'I have a voice. I have a story. This is what I have to say.'

Nowhere in this country, from sea to sea, does nature comfort us with such assurance of plenty, such rich and tranquil beauty as in those unsung, unpainted hills of Pennsylvania.

A scent that disturbs me and delights me. It smells like ripe pears, vetiver, a bit of violet and something else- something spicy almost biting and exotic.

We have grown used to money. The handling, the increase of it, is the chief business of life now with most of us.

Reform is born of need, not pity.

No man surely has so short a memory as the American.

Memory is an act of meaning-making. It collects the disparate pieces of our lives and distills them.

Every child was taught from his cradle that money was Mammon, the chief agent of the flesh and the devil.

There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.

You were only truly patriotic if you had a laborer for a grandfather and were glad of it.

It has happened to me to meet many of the men of my day whom the world agreed to call great.

TO preach a sermon or edit a newspaper were the two things in life which I always felt I could do with credit to myself and benefit to the world, if I only had the chance.

For, after all, put it as we may to ourselves, we are all of us from birth to death guests at a table which we did not spread.

The only hero known to my childhood was Henry Clay.

I cannot see that art is anything less than a way of making joys perpetual.

A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.

Lentil dhal is the only thing I can cook.

My goals have gone from being an all-star to just being able to play basketball. I always took for granted that I could play. Now I know what a gift it is.

All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.

It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.

The role of government is to create responsible greed to keep boundaries around what people do.

I never claimed to be a low-maintenance gal, but when I'm writing, it's particularly challenging. I lose things constantly: my watch, my glasses, my papers, my mind.

I want to lay up like that, to float unstructured, without ambition or anxiety. I want to inhabit my life like a porch.

International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.

Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself.

I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.

Boredom is a pleasing antidote for fear

You know how some people, when they're together, they somehow make you feel more hopeful? Make you feel like the world is not the insane place it really is?

Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.

Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal.

Contemplate the good things in your life and be grateful for them.

Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.

Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world.

I think the part I enjoy most is reading the scripts and screening films because I'm a bookworm and a movie buff.

Violence always seems to me the worst form of tyranny. It deprives people of their rights, including the right to live.

No great thing happens suddenly.

My only real solace? Sleep. In the absence of an explanation of anything, for everything, I live for it and what it can bring.

I was just glad to be going to work again.

There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.

We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.

I'm quadracontinental. I've got a life in London, New York, L.A. and Hawaii.

My mother is very ideologically based, and her ideology is much more important in many ways than her personal relationships.