Van Wyck Quotes

#1. I will keep you safe, he murmured. He meant it. As long as he was safe, she was safe. But how long would he remain safe?

Sherry Thomas

#2. How delightful is the company of generous people, who overlook trifles and keep their minds instinctively fixed on whatever is good and positive in the world around them.

Van Wyck Brooks

#3. How could such a picture be in a national newspaper The model had ridiculous breasts the size of pumpkins and lips fat and wet and all that she was wearing was a spangled G-string.

Rose Tremain

#4. Those of our writers who have possessed a vivid personal talent have been paralyzed by a want of social background.

Van Wyck Brooks

#5. Better the fragrant herb of wit and a little cream of affability than all the pretty cups in the world.

Van Wyck Brooks

#6. There is no stopping the world's tendency to throw off imposed restraints, the religious authority that is based on the ignorance of the many, the political authority that is based on the knowledge of the few.

Van Wyck Brooks

#7. It is not that the French are not profound, but they all express themselves so well that we are led to take their geese for swans.

Van Wyck Brooks

#8. The instructed man is ashamed to pronounce in an Orphic manner what everybody knows, and because he is silent people think he is making fun of them.

Van Wyck Brooks

#9. No one is fit to judge a book until he has rounded Cape Horn in a sailing vessel, until he has bumped into two or three icebergs, until he has been lost in the sands of the desert, until he has spent a few years in the House of the Dead.

Van Wyck Brooks

#10. When you say "I" and "my" too much, you lose the capacity to understand the "we" and "our".

Steve Maraboli

#11. The writer is important only by dint of the territory he colonizes.

Van Wyck Brooks

#12. People of small caliber are always carping. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or prowess or good breeding.

Van Wyck Brooks

#13. I am a speck of dust in an ocean of time, floating with the waves of change, vanishing with the infinite. I have no time to complain, condemn, or criticize because I am so busy loving, enjoying, appreciating, and being kind.

Debasish Mridha

#14. Once you have a point of view all history will back you up.

Van Wyck Brooks

#15. No one in this country has any root anywhere; we don't live in America, we board here, we are like spiders that run over the surface of the water.

Van Wyck Brooks

#16. An uniformity of weights and measures, arranged upon mathematical principles, would be a benefit to the whole commercial world, if it were wise enough to adopt such an expedient.

Jean-Baptiste Say

#17. I'll be writing until I can't write anymore. It's a compulsion with me. I love writing.

J.K. Rowling

#18. Morality and its victim, the mother - what a terrible picture! Is there indeed anything more terrible, more criminal, than our glorified sacred function of motherhood?

Emma Goldman

#19. If men were basically evil, who would bother to improve the world instead of giving it up as a bad job at the outset?

Van Wyck Brooks

#20. Never forget that it is we New Yorkers and New Englanders who have the monopoly of whatever oxygen there is in the American continent.

Van Wyck Brooks

#21. Well, if there's an infinite amount of chances for something to happen, then eventually it will happen - no matter how small the likelihood.

Alex Garland

#22. The things of Catholic life are never boring because we have such a rich tradition and so many stories to tell.

Donald Wuerl

#23. Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright.

Van Wyck Brooks

#24. Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.

Van Wyck Brooks

#25. The system is religion, the law is spirituality. Take your pick.

John Martel

#26. Magnanimous people have no vanity, they have no jealousy, and they feed on the true and the solid wherever they find it. And, what is more, they find it everywhere.

Van Wyck Brooks

#27. The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me ... by newspapers and the Bible.

Van Wyck Brooks

#28. The creative impulses of man are always at war with the possessive impulses.

Van Wyck Brooks

#29. No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.

Van Wyck Brooks

#30. Nothing is sadder than having worldly standards without worldly means.

Van Wyck Brooks

#31. I wish I had a talking book that told me how to act and look, a talking book that contained keys to past and present memories

Lou Reed

#32. The man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man.

Van Wyck Brooks

#33. I never take any notice of reviews-unless a critic has thought up some new way of describing me. That old one about my lizard eyes and anteater nose and the way I sleep my way through pictures is so hackneyed now.

Robert Mitchum

#34. I meditate. I've been a meditator since, I think I was doing it unofficially before all my life and then began to formalize it somewhere around 14.

Lorraine Toussaint

#35. Drake growled against her mouth. Ria's body felt as if it were a flame. When Drake made that sound, she melted for him. Something about that rumble that began in his chest caressed every nerve in her body, making her want more. He pushed her shirt up and began to nip at her belly.

Chudney Thomas

#36. Ask Anthony Hopkins how he makes his characters come to life and he just shrugs. I don't know. If I knew, I wouldn't be able to do it. As they say: Where ignorance is bliss it's folly to be wise.

Larry Eisenberg

#37. Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music.

Van Wyck Brooks

#38. Earnest people are often people who habitually look on the serious side of things that have no serious side.

Van Wyck Brooks

#39. As against having beautiful workshops, studies, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day.

Van Wyck Brooks