I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.

You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.

I often see through things right to the apparition itself.

Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.

I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.

The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.

I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.

I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.

All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.

Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.

'The Immigrant Story,' which took me about twenty-five years to write, was a very simple story, but I couldn't think of how to tell it. Then twenty years after I started it, I found this one page and realized it was going to be the story. That's the only way you get it sometimes.

A relationship with young people is very important to me. It's important to have a sense of what's going on in their world and not just in my own. So the opportunity teaching provides is a gift.

Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.

I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.

I see women as oppressed, but I don't see them as victims; I see them rising all the time. I see them as very strong.

I was a woman writing at the early moment when small drops of worried resentment and noble rage were secretly, slowly building into the second wave of the women's movement. I didn't know my small-drop presence or usefulness in this accumulation.

If you want to do things, do things.

In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.

Most of the Women's Libbers I knew really didn't want to have a piece of the men's pie. They thought that pie was kind of poisonous, toxic, really full of weapons, poison gases, all kinds of mean junk we didn't even want a slice of.

Poets take themselves very seriously.

Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.

That's the trouble with stories. People start out fantastic. You think they're extraordinary, but it turns out as the work goes along, they're just average with a good education.

What I generally tell a class is that if you're not interested in anybody else's work but your own, take another class.

What I'm interested in doing in a story is bringing certain different languages, people, events together and then letting the reader make what he wants of it.

Whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.

Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn't help me to understand the world I lived in.

You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.

The word career is a divisive word. Its a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.

Hindsight usually looked down upon is probably as valuable as foresight since it does include a few facts.

It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.

Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.

It will take a long time, and certainly the West will remain the dominant civilization well into the next century, but the decline is occurring.

Had the Hebrews not been disturbed in their progress a thousand and more years ago, they would have solved all the great problems of civilization which are being solved now under all the difficulties imposed by the spirit of the Middle Ages.

Today's interpretations of religion are often backward and contradict the needs of civilization.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

The only hope is that our civilization will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance.

The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

No civilization other than that which is Christian, is worth seeking or possessing.

Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.

No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion.

The high point of civilization is that you can hate me and I can hate you but we develop an etiquette that allows us to deal with each other because if we acted solely upon our impulse we'd probably go to war.

You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.

The exact measure of the progress of civilization is the degree in which the intelligence of the common mind has prevailed over wealth and brute force.

When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.

It is just because civilization is ever evolving, changing, and becoming more complicated, that experts find it so difficult to define it in explicit terms.

A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization; like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.

It has been said that the position of woman is the test of civilization, and that of our women was secure. In them was vested our standard of morals and the purity of our blood.