T. J. Perkins Quotes

I believe the writer... should always be the final judge. I have always held to that position and have sometimes seen books hurt thereby, but at least as often helped. The book belongs to the author.

You ought to stop listening to stereotypes and start forming your own opinions.

But with the slow menace of a glacier, depression came on. No one had any measure of its progress; no one had any plan for stopping it. Everyone tried to get out of its way.

Fill your heart with as much love as you can, and don't hold it in.

How many times can our emotions be tied to someone else's - be pulled and stretched and twisted - before they snap? Before they can never be mended again?

Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time.

If a woman is really injured by her marriage, she should sue under the employer liability act. She should claim damages--not alimony.

A man's honor always seems to want to kill a woman to satisfy it.

Of the whole public not a handful can understand the artist's point of view or the writer's conscience.

I don't believe in fashion. I believe in costume. Life is too short to be same person every day.

After all those days in the cotton fields, the dreams came true on a gold record on a piece of wood. It's in my den where I can look at it every day. I wear it out lookin' at it.

You can always get sympathy by using the word small. With little industries you feel as you do about a little puppy.

I do not think you should read about writing while you are writing.

Everyone makes mistakes. The important thing is to not make the same mistake twice.

Learning is a consequence of thinking.

I wish friends held hands more often, like the children I see on the streets sometimes. I'm not sure why we have to grow up and get embarrassed about it.

Life isn't about what you get, it's about what you DO with what you get.

I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy-store.

For real self esteem is not derived from the great things you've done, the things you won. The mark you've made - but an appreciation of yourself for what you are.

When the mother of the race is free, we shall have a better world, by the easy right of birth and by the calm, slow, friendly forces of evolution.

American and Vietnamese characters alike leap to life through the voice and eyes of a tenyearold girl-a protagonist so strong, loving, and vivid I longed to hand her a wedge of freshly cut papaya.

Boys, don't try to find a woman as wonderful as your mother to marry because if you do, you'll stay single your whole lives.

But reason has no power against feeling, and feeling older than history is no light matter.

The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society - more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.

Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized.

It would have saved trouble had I remained Perkins from the first, this changing of women's names is a nuisance we are now happily outgrowing.

In New York City, everyone is an exile, none more so than the Americans.

What would have been the effect upon religion if it had come to us through the minds of women?

Death? Why this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.

If you're middle aged... where're you going to go to meet someone? You're not going to go to a bar, you're not going to go to a night club; and there are the museums.

Maternal instinct, merely as an instinct, is unworthy of our superstitious reverence.

The softest, freest, most pliable and changeful living substance is the brain-the hardest and most iron-bound as well.

This is the land of dreamings, a land of wide horizons and secret places. The first people, our ancestors, created this country in the culture that binds us to it.

Concepts antedate facts.

The most familiar facts are often hardest to understand.

The time is approaching when we shall consider it abhorrent to our civilization to allow a human being to die in prolonged agony which we should mercifully end in any other creature.

It is peoples' fantasies of what is true that is so extraordinary. That that we were born and that we face eternal extinction after death is an extraordinary fantasy.

Would you love a man of a broken shell after the passing of a women's soul?

All truth is very ordinary. It is peoples' fantasies of what is true that is so extraordinary.

Just because something isn't practical doesn't mean it's not worth creating. Sometimes beauty and real-life magic are enough.

Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.

A blank canvas...has unlimited possibilities.

Never in all her life had she imagined that this idolized millinery could look, to those who paid for it, like the decorations of an insane monkey.

Exciting literature after supper is not the best digestive.

In some ways I'm very structured.

The choices we make within the boundaries of the twists of fate determines who we are

This sounds an extraordinary statement to make, but in fact all truth is very ordinary.

So what do I wish for? Something I'm not sure I want? Someone I'm not sure I need? Or someone I know I can't have?

Seriously, I don't know any American girl who can resist an English accent.

The women who do the most work get the least money, and the women who have the most money do the least work.