[I]ndividual readers may conceivably choose (or be led) to regard a given text as literary in cases where such a response is not shared by others, but until their individual responses lose their idiosyncratic nature by being adopted by a larger interpretive community, such responses will be regarded as being to a greater or lesser degree aberrant, and the offender will be regarded as lacking in good taste or good sense or both.


Patrick O'Neill

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To be, or not to be, that is the question.
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Do I have the courage of being a ruthless man to myself with the complete knowledge on my manner or ...
FEREIDOON YAZDI
To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being.
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To be or not to be. That's not really a question.
JEAN-LUC GODARD
Homosexuality, is regarded as shameful by barbarians and by those who live under despotic government...
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To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don't be.
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To be mad is worse than not to be if this is what it is.
JOHNNY RICH
Hamlet's Cat's Soliloquy

"To go outside, and there perchance to stay
Or to re...
HENRY N. BEARD
A coin is examined, and only after careful deliberation, given to a beggar, whereas a child is flung...
PETER WESSEL ZAPFFE
Nothing is ever as good or as bad as it appears to be.
JEFFREY FRY
Idiosyncratic belief systems which are shared by only a few adherents are likely to be regarded as d...
ANTHONY STORR
The sense of honour is of so fine and delicate a nature, that it is only to be met with in minds wh...
JOSEPH ADDISON
Idiosyncratic belief systems which are shared by only a few adherents are likely to be regarded as d...
ANTHONY STORR
Idiosyncratic belief systems which are shared by only a few adherents are likely to be regarded as d...
ANTHONY STORR
...[M]an and generally any rational being exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means to be a...
IMMANUEL KANT
When someone happens to be in a situation of rescuing or saving a hapless living being of any specie...
CHANDRABABU V.S.
By nature, every individual has the right to govern himself; and governments, whether founded on maj...
JOHN C. CALHOUN
But with regard to incomposites, what is being or not being, and truth or falsity? A thing of this s...
ARISTOTLE
To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
OSCAR WILDE
To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune... to lose both seems like carelessness.
OSCAR WILDE
Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is. A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls i...
JOSEPH CONRAD
A son or daughter in any human family is either born to or adopted by the parents. By definition, a ...
JERRY BRIDGES
I know that David Tennant's Hamlet isn't till July. And lots of people are going to be doing Dr Who ...
NEIL GAIMAN
Being offended by freedom of speech should never be regarded as a justification for violence.
ALAN DERSHOWITZ
The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surpr...
C.S. LEWIS
...it may fairly be doubted if any political tyranny ever imposed on its people such a fear, such a ...
MARK SULLIVAN
I may not be as visible as I used to be, and by that I mean being in the clubhouse or on the field. ...
BILLY BEANE
To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessne...
OSCAR WILDE
One, a robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm;...
ISAAC ASIMOV
We are not to be regarded as a potent political force to be used by politicians in the furtherance o...
LT. GEN. HERMOGENES ESPERON
The terrifying fear of a crash had triggered the fight-or-flight response in the child, making him b...
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A war regarded as inevitable or even probable, and therefore much prepared for, has a very good chan...
ANAIS NIN
Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be ...
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The Three Laws of Robotics:

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To date or not to date that is the question. It's almost as important as Shakespeare's to be...
AL GOLDSTEIN
It's time to start thinking of parents and families as community builders and not just as service re...
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Rather than being medicalized or romanticized, mental disorders, or mental dis-eases, should be unde...
NEEL BURTON
Only fools wait, and only tools bait.
CRE
There are approximately two trillion cells in the human body. You are never alone, there are always ...
DWIGHT W. HAYES
A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to hi...
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Mom and Dad are our first love by nature, our pride by law and our strength in weakness. They may no...
ETC WANYANWU
If one is interested in the relations between fields which, according to customary academic division...
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I leave to others the decision as to the good or evil tendencies of my character, but such as it is ...
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Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics"

A robot may not injure a human being or, through ...
ISAAC ASIMOV
Morality is character and conduct such as is required by the circle or community in which the man's ...
HENRY WARD BEECHER
A musician is a professional, whether he or she is successful or not. The profession itself must be ...
A. R. RAHMAN
Such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or mo...
THOMAS HOBBES
Such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more...
THOMAS HOBBES
Patents which conserve an edge in a rapidly changing market, may have uses for companies such as IBM...
EBEN MOGLEN
Being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligations but being able to l...
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Bob Dylan may be the Charlie Chaplin of rock n' roll. Both men are regarded as geniuses by their...
JON LANDAU
I don't like the idea of a book being a test or being used for a test. The way - in my opinion -...
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No matter how green or hi-fi technology that may be but if it devours employment prospects, then it ...
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A youth is to be regarded with respect. How do we know that his future will not be equal to our pres...
CONFUCIUS
Whether these matters are to be regarded as sport, or as earnest, we must not forget that this pleas...
PLATO
Being a good person does’nt guarantee that others will be good people too.You only have control ov...
DR ANIL KUMAR SINHA
As a vessel is known by the sound, whether it be cracked or not; so men are proved, by their speeche...
DEMOSTHENES
As a vessel is known by the sound, whether it be cracked or not; so men are proved, by their speeche...
DEMOSTHENES
I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction -...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
The maxims are, first, that the individual is not accountable to society for his actions, in so far ...
JOHN STUART MILL
A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individ...
MILAN KUNDERA
Two of man's basic needs are to love and to share. Both of these needs are satisfied in greater ...
MOTHER ANGELICA
Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people wh...
HANYA YANAGIHARA
As a vessel is known by its sound whether it be cracked or not, so men are proved by their speeches ...
DEMOSTHENES
Instead of there being one big cloud or datacenter being hosted by Microsoft, there will be multiple...
ADAM SOHN
Will Hong Kong people really be able to decide for themselves, as promised, how to run their domesti...
CHRIS PATTEN
Doctor James Rowland Angell has said that 'any program may be regarded as educational (and here we m...
JUDITH C. WALLER
Such as have reason, understanding, or common sense, will, and ought to make use of it in those thin...
ALGERNON SYDNEY
Such as have reason, understanding, or common sense, will, and ought to make use of it in those thin...
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I became frustrated early on as a playwright by a kind of smug smallness in modern drama. There was ...
ELLEN MCLAUGHLIN
Being good or being evil is not something that is inherent in our nature over which we have no contr...
LAURENCE OVERMIRE
People themselves makes a lots of mistakes and still loves himself, and they never forget a single m...
OM BENIWAL
You can not change what happened or bring back the past. But you can change the future by being stro...
DR ANIL KUMAR SINHA
I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them parti...
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Any lustful person and a drunkard have something in common. Both never get satisfied until they face...
RAYMOND OBENG
The greatest stunt in life is to be different by being consistent to be true to oneself as then the ...
ANUJ SOMANY
A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science...
CARL SAGAN
It's not a gift of mine, but one given to me, to be able to criticise myself and not be crushed,...
JOHN MALKOVICH
A lot of teenagers write to me and say "I want to write a book. I want to get published." And those ...
MAUREEN JOHNSON
Citizens victimized by genocide or abandoned by the international community do not make good neighbo...
SAMANTHA POWER
This is a very exciting development, and could be a huge step towards being able to build human lung...
JULIA POLAK
This is a very exciting development, and could be a huge step towards being able to build human lung...
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I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science. ...
ALAN LIGHTMAN
For us of course the shared activity and therefore the companionship on which Friendship supervenes ...
C.S. LEWIS
Miranda Writes: Anything you say or do may be used for or against you within a story by a writer
JAZZ FEYLYNN
There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permit...
AYN RAND
A child of one can be taught not to do certain things such as touch a hot stove, turn on the gas, pu...
JOAN RIVERS
This is too much reality for a Friday.
AS GOOD AS IT GETS
As a man may know about Africa either by going there personally or by reading descriptions written b...
MAX HEINDEL
If we should be blessed by some great reward, such as fame or fortune, it's the fruit of a seed ...
BODHIDHARMA
A human being who decides not to doubt or question anything in their life might as well be living in...
ALLISON RIVERA
The world gives according to their faith or according to their pleasure: if a man frets about the fo...
FRIEDRICH MAX MULLER
I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small Amer...
GORE VIDAL
The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh.
LUCIAN FREUD
It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as e...
MARGARET MEAD
It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as e...
MARGARET MEAD
In Cloud computing the difference between a dark cloud and a cloud with a silver lining, is the part...
RAJAT MOHAN
A child's (or an adult's) nervous system may detect danger or a threat to life when the child enters...
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Working as a cartel, these institutions could influence economies for good or for naught, potentiall...
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There is no present or future-only the past, happening over and over again-now.
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LARRY--(with increasing bitter intensity, more as if he were fighting with himself than with Hickey)...
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The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia!
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Suddenly I realized that I wanted everything to be as it was when I was younger. When you're young e...
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Happy roads is bunk. Weary roads is right. Get you nowhere fast. That's where I've got—nowhere. Wh...
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From the way that people have always talked about your heart being broken, it sort of seemed to be a...
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I felt shame - I see this clearly, now - at the instinctive recognition in myself of an awful enfeeb...
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Childhood is the most valuable thing that's taken away from you in life, if you think about it.
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He thinks money spent on a home is money wasted. He's lived too much in hotels. Never the best hotel...
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When you're a kid, if you watch 'The Jeffersons' with your family at seven o'clock, it seems like a ...
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When men make gods, there is no God!
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I love every bone in their heads.
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And although in many cases these unions proved happy enough, sailors being excellent husbands, often...
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We understood one another better before ever I opened my mouth
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Two weevils crept from the crumbs. 'You see those weevils, Stephen?' said Jack solemnly.

...
PATRICK O'BRIAN
When you go home
Tell them of us, and say
For your tomorrow,
We gave our today.
PATRICK O'DONNELL
...for very strangely his officers looked upon Jack Aubrey as a moral figure, in spite of all proofs...
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Compulsion is the death of friendship, joy.
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I am one and when I am one I am none, and when I am none I have won.
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The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church t...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Chris...
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We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.
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Happiness arises from getting what you want, and this comes and goes. Joy arises from being with wha...
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It's not the face, but the expressions on it. It's not the voice but the things you say. It's not th...
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They should."

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FLANNERY O'CONNOR
You never loved me, Farin. You never even said you liked me very much.
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Everybody wants to save the Earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.
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Don't stand unmoving outside the door of a crying baby whose only desire is to touch you. Go to your...
PEGGY O'MARA
Marry for love. But also choose to marry a man or woman who you love that treats you with the ultima...
JULIEANNE O'CONNOR
There will be a time when love is beautiful and passionate and nothing else will exist but you and t...
JULIEANNE O'CONNOR
Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are ...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Once the soul awakens, the search begins and you can never go back. From then on, you are inflamed w...
JOHN O'DONOHUE
[I suspect] that in the drive toward the liberal universalist notion of human rights that characteri...
DARREN O'DONNELL
All the possibilities of your human destiny are asleep in your soul. You are here to realize and hon...
JOHN O'DONOHUE
If you are different from the rest of the flock, they bite you
VINCENT O'SULLIVAN
I guess we're really brothers, aren't we? Don't know what that means, except it means that some of t...
TIM O'BRIEN
We do not need to grieve for the dead. Why should we grieve for them? They are now in a place where ...
JOHN O'DONOHUE
To love without ownership, to love with total trust and faith in that very love, to love with the sa...
JULIEANNE O'CONNOR
My feeling on the subject of sex with a man is - don't give it up unless you're willing to give him ...
JULIEANNE O'CONNOR
Life is surreal. When you step back and really take a look at it, the irony is absolute.
JULIEANNE O'CONNOR
Ladies, you have a ton of power if you just understand the fundamental differences between men and w...
JULIEANNE O'CONNOR
When it was dark, you always carried the sun in your hand for me.
SEáN O'CASEY
Well, I'm not sure where this puts me, Sire. I mean, at least with the others I know what's expected...
AMIE O'BRIEN
For Equilibrium, a Blessing:
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May the relief ...
JOHN O'DONOHUE
Sometimes, when people speak, I cease listening to their words and zoom in instead on the cadence, a...
ROSIE O'DONNELL
Moderation, we find, is an extremely difficult thing to get in this country.
FLANN O'BRIEN
In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.
EDNA O'BRIEN
It could be a meeting on the street, or a party or a lecture, or just a simple, banal introduction, ...
JOHN O'DONOHUE
The world rests in the night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of sh...
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Your noble friend will not accept pretension but will gently and very firmly confront you with your ...
JOHN O'DONOHUE
The ego is the false self-born out of fear and defensiveness.
JOHN O'DONOHUE
If you try to view yourself through the lenses that others offer you, all you will see are distortio...
JOHN O'DONOHUE
Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are ...
JOHN O'DONOHUE
We do not need to go out and find love; rather, we need to be still and let love discover us.
JOHN O'DONOHUE
Beauty is the illumination of your soul.
JOHN O'DONOHUE
Real friendship or love is not manufactured or achieved by an act of will or intention. Friendship i...
JOHN O'DONOHUE
When love awakens in your life, in the night of your heart, it is like the dawn breaking within you....
JOHN O'DONOHUE
No one else has access to the world you carry around within yourself; you are its custodian and entr...
JOHN O'DONOHUE
Your beloved and your friends were once strangers. Somehow at a particular time, they came from the ...
JOHN O'DONOHUE
Your soul knows the geography of your destiny. Your soul alone has the map of your future, therefore...
JOHN O'DONOHUE
If you send out goodness from yourself, or if you share that which is happy or good within you, it w...
JOHN O'DONOHUE
Every friendship travels at sometime through the black valley of despair. This tests every aspect of...
JOHN O'DONOHUE
All you can ever achieve is a sense of your soul. You gain little glimpses of its light, colors, and...
JOHN O'DONOHUE
You are as young as you feel. If you begin to feel the warmth of your soul, there will be a youthful...
JOHN O'DONOHUE
Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits.
JOHN O'DONOHUE
You are like nobody since I love you"
-Pablo Neruda

This art of love discloses the ...
JOHN O'DONOHUE
Real intimacy is a sacred experience. It never exposes its secret trust and belonging to the voyeuri...
JOHN O'DONOHUE
If you try to avoid or remove the awkward quality, it will pursue you. The only effective way to sti...
JOHN O'DONOHUE
The heart is the inner face of your life. The human journey strives to make this inner face beautifu...
JOHN O'DONOHUE
It is lovely to meet an old person whose face is deeply lined, a face that has been deeply inhabited...
JOHN O'DONOHUE
Inspiration is always a surprising visitor.
JOHN O'DONOHUE
you can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care...
TIM O'BRIEN
It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and dange...
TIM O'BRIEN
...his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe...
TIM O'BRIEN
But this too is true: stories can save us.
TIM O'BRIEN
They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of th...
TIM O'BRIEN
The wait is long, my dream of you does not end.
NUALA O'FAOLAIN
There is the solitude of suffering, when you go through darkness that is lonely, intense, and terrib...
JOHN O'DONOHUE
I’d begun to think of the Immortality Bus as the Entropy Bus, and of ourselves as trundling across...
MARK O'CONNELL
It's not enough to be nice in life. You've got to have nerve.
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE
Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore...
EDNA O'BRIEN
I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to t...
P.J. O'ROURKE
Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless ...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
I write to discover what I know.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I s...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
The beauty that emerges from woundedness is a beauty infused with feeling; a beauty different from t...
JOHN O'DONOHUE
Then Dad started going on about the complex geological formations in this part of the coast until Mu...
KERRIE O'CONNOR
Having a Coke with You

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biar...
FRANK O'HARA
Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay....
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
She had a vision of the two of them trapped on a tiny raft surrounded by miles of open water. It wou...
STEWART O'NAN
I would not hurt you, little man,' he said.

'I think that I got the disorder in Mullingar...
FLANN O'BRIEN
Fame stole my yellow. Yellow is the color you get when you're real and brutally honest. Yellow is wi...
ROSIE O'DONNELL
Grace changes us and change is painful".
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a ...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is t...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an arti...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
She would've been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every ...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
FRANK O'HARA
Stand up, be counted. We have the numbers.
BILL O'REILLY
Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those ...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
People spot a big black lens, and they worry about what they're doing, or how their hair looks. Nobo...
ERICA O'ROURKE
I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite...
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE
The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the r...
STEWART O'NAN
The city was a puzzle box built of symbols, a confusion of old and new, armored cars and donkeys in ...
STEWART O'NAN
That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers w...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
She hated her job the same way I hated my jobs because she knew she was worth more, but she also hat...
TAWNI O'DELL
Romance and romantic are different. Death, itself, can be romantic. Nature and a destructive snowsto...
R.B. O'BRIEN
The robot successfully dismounted the car, proceeding at a slight crouch, and with exaggerated cauti...
MARK O'CONNELL
To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage.
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE
Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the i...
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way... things I had n...
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE
I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a si...
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE
Don’t tell me my writing is misogynistic or anti-feminist just because I or my heroines like to be...
R.B. O'BRIEN
That's the trouble with you preachers," he said. "You've all got too good to believe in anything," a...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
When a man died, there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war, You co...
TIM O'BRIEN
When you steal a people's language, you leave their soul bewildered.
JOHN O'DONOHUE
Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.
TIM O'BRIEN
Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When ...
MEGHAN O'ROURKE
There was a lot about Kim and J.P. he didn't get.... he was confused by their lack of romance. As a ...
STEWART O'NAN
We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate those ...
TIM O'BRIEN
It's sad when you learn you're not much of a hero.
TIM O'BRIEN
Experience has taught me that what you love, you should love all the harder because someday it will ...
RONAN O'BRIEN
A hat should be taken off when greeting a lady, and left off the rest of your life. Nothing looks mo...
P.J. O'ROURKE
Rising up into the air, they took to the sky and flew. From west and beyond west, into the wind and ...
PAT O'SHEA
You're the fire burning inside of me.
KELVIN O'RALPH
I will not be a common man. I will stir the smooth sands of monotony. I do not crave security. I wis...
PETER O'TOOLE
I guess relationships are just funny like that. It's impossible to figure out why some work out and ...
JENNY O'CONNELL
If you work really hard, and you're kind, amazing things will happen.
CONAN O'BRIEN
Lasting healing comes from being curious rather than controlling, from mercy rather than manipulatio...
MARY O'MALLEY
I've always been a pretty good researcher," said Bronwyn modestly.
Oh, so that we sha...
DANIEL O'MALLEY
The plates of the continental shelf - the world itself - had shifted, and their first concern was pu...
STEWART O'NAN
The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When ...
P.J. O'ROURKE
Not only have we not done the good things that God really wants us to do, but in fact, we’ve done ...
ERIN O'RIORDAN
Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR