Great Throughts Treasury

"Everything's a lot tougher when it's for real. That's when you choke. When it's for real."

"Faith is a great thing, and really religious people would like us to believe that faith and knowing are the same thing, but I don't believe that myself. Because there are too many different ideas on the subject. What we know is this: When we die, one of two things happens. Either our souls and thoughts somehow survive the experience of dying or they don't. If they do, that opens up every possibility you could think of. If they don't, it's just blotto. The end."

"Fault always lies in the same place, my fine babies: with him weak enough to lay blame."

"Fantasy fiction is essentially about the concept of power; great fantasy fiction is about people who find it at great cost or lose it tragically; mediocre fantasy fiction is about people who have it and never lose it but simply wield it."

"Fantasy has a better chance of lasting than a lot of other things. The Hobbit and the Narnia books, they seem to get handed down father to son, mother to daughter. Because they're set in a fantasy world, they can remain relevant."

"Families, when a child is born Want it to be intelligent. I, through intelligence, Having wrecked my whole life, Only hope the baby will prove Ignorant and stupid. Then he will crown a tranquil life By becoming a Cabinet Minister."

"Fault always lies in the same place: with him weak enough to lay blame."

"Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free."

"Fear is the emotion that makes us blind."

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."

"Few if any seemed to have grasped the Principle of Reality; new knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries. Greater physiological knowledge of the brain makes the existence of the soul less possible yet more probable by the nature of the search."

"FEAR stands for face everything and recover ? Old AA saying"

"Fighting for peace, is like f***ing for chastity"

"Flip-flop, hippety-hop, offa your rocker and over the top, life's a fiction and the world's a lie, so put on some Creedence and let's get high."

"For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark."

"For a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying . . . but alive. Safe. Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, its comfort fatal."

"Fools are the only folk on the earth who can absolutely count on getting what they deserve."

"For a woman a man will do many things that he'd turn his back on in an instant when alone; things he'd back away from, nine times out of ten, even when drunk adn with a bunch of his friends egging him on."

"For every mother who ever cursed God for her child dead in the road, for every father who ever cursed the man who sent him away from the factory with no job, for every child who was ever born to pain and asked why, this is the answer. Our lives are like these things I build. Sometimes they fall down for a reason, sometimes they fall down for no reason at all."

"For me, that emotional payoff is what it?s all about. I want you to laugh or cry when you read a story...or do both at the same time. I want your heart, in other words. If you want to learn something, go to school."

"For me, good description usually consists of a few well-chosen details that will stand for everything else."

"For men, I think, love is a thing formed of equal parts lust and astonishment. The astonishment part women understand. The lust part they only think they understand."

"For most of us, I think it's easier to admit doing wrong than being stupid."

"For no reason at all, I thought of New Year's Eve, when all those people crowd into Times Square and scream like jackals as the lighted ball slides down the pole, ready to shed its thin party glare on three hundred and sixty-five new days in this best of all possible worlds. I have always wondered what it would be like to be caught in one of those crowds, screaming and not able to hear your own voice, your individuality momentarily wiped out and replaced with the blind empathic over-slop of the crowd's lurching, angry anticipation, hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder with no one in particular."

"For some reason California's always been where the struggle is about how much authority you can impose on people's private lives. It seems to show up there most clearly. They had a helmet law for motorcycles in California and the bikies were saying things like, "It restricts my vision. I can't hear what my bike's doing. If it was on fire I wouldn't know it until my ass caught." And at the bottom line what the bikies were saying was, "Look, it's my goddamn head and if I want to splatter my brains all over the guardrails on the Coast Highway, super for me.""

"For the first time in my life, writing was hard. The problem was the teaching...by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I'd spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain."

"For," I said, "a murdered man or woman dies not in God's time, but in Man's. He... or she... is cut short before he... or she... can atone for sin, and so all errors must be forgiven. When you think of it that way, all murderers are a gateway for heaven."

"Friends. They aren?t any such thing as good friend or bad friend. Maybe there are just friend. People who stand by you when you're hurt and who helped you feel not so lonely. Maybe there are worth being scared for and hoping for and living for. Maybe worth dying for too. If that what has to be. No bad friends. Only people you want. Need to be with. People who build their houses in your heart."

"French is the language that turns dirt into romance."

"Formula: Second Draft = First Draft minus 10%..."

"Forced to define 'irrational subconscious,' I would say that it is a small padded room inside all of us, where the only furnishing is a small card table, and the only thing on the card table is a revolver loaded with flexible bullets."

"Give a man or woman back his self-respect, and in most cases-not all, but most-you also give back that person's ability to think with at least some clarity."

"Get busy living, or get busy dying."

"Friends come in and out of our lives, like busboys in a restaurant."

"Friends don't spy; true friendship is about privacy, too."

"Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly."

"Go then, there are other worlds than these."

"Go now. Our journey is done. And may we meet again, in the clearing, at the end of the path."

"God pisses down the back of your neck every day but only drowns you once."

"God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live."

"God doesn't bribe, child. He just makes a sign and lets people take it as they will."

"God always punishes us for what we can't imagine."

"God and the afterlife and all that is certainly a subject that's interested me, and I think it interests me more the older that I get."

"God wiped snot out of his nose and that was you."

"God grant me to SERENITY to accept what I cannot change the TENACITY to change what I may and the GOOD LUCK not to f*** up too often"

"God turned out to be a bunch of bad little kids playing interstellar Xbox. Isn't that funny?"

"Good books are for consideration after, too."

"Good books don't give up all their secrets at once."

"Good days and long nights to ya, sai."

"Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It?s not just a question of how-to, you see; it?s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing."