Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Strength is the capacity to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands - and then eat just one of the pieces. "

Related Quotes:

" My mother was a huge, huge reader. I think I picked up very early how precious it was to write things in books and have people like my mother glued to the page. "

" It's very hard when I've seen a couple of people very beloved in my life with terrible degenerative diseases. "

" I actually sat down and started three Alexanders at the same time. Two of them went in the trash and got stomped on because I hated the idea so much. And the one I came up with, I got very excited by. And that's 'Alexander, Who's Trying His Best to Be the Best Boy Ever'. "

" One advantage of marriage is that, when you fall out of love with him or he falls out of love with you, it keeps you together until you fall in again. "

" My first published writings were trying to take scientific concepts and make them clear for a general audience. "

" Close friends contribute to our personal growth. They also contribute to our personal pleasure, making the music sound sweeter, the wine taste richer, the laughter ring louder because they are there. "

" A rebel. That was me when I was younger. What was a rebel from New Jersey? A rebel was moving to the Village, not sleeping with top sheets, not eating a hot breakfast in the morning, not having 20 rolls of toilet paper and 10 boxes of Kleenex. "

" Superstition is foolish, childish, primitive and irrational - but how much does it cost you to knock on wood? "

" I had lived with my mother in anger and love - I suppose most daughters do - but my children only knew her in one way: As the lady who thought they were smarter than Albert Einstein. As the lady who thought they wrote better than William Shakespeare. As the lady who thought every picture they drew was a Rembrandt. "

" Most of the characters I have in my children's books are grouchy or annoyed about something or are calling each other unfriendly names. Like my own kids, they're not honeys and sweetie pies and little angels. They're kids. Sloppy, dirty, stinky. "

" Nobody who knows me and loves me dearly would ever call me adaptable or flexible. I'm not. "

" Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident, a tight girdle, a higher tax bracket or a holding pattern over Philadelphia. "

" Probably above all other things, I am interested as a writer in making a connection, interested in the parts of all of us that connect. "

" I like to take all my feelings and thoughts and put them down in different ways on paper. "

" Don't let anything sneak past you. Don't say, 'Well, oh, I'll take a picture and put it in my photograph album.' I notice it now. I love it now. And I am grateful for it now. "

" Because we believe ourselves to be better parents than our parents, we expect to produce better children than they produced. "

" Everyone has bad days, and when you're having a bad day, you think, 'Here I am being singled out by a hostile, malicious universe that is picking exclusively on me.' And then you read a book about bad days and realize they happen to everyone, not just tormented, persecuted you. "

" My Girl Scout leader. She told me if I listened more and talked less, I could grow up to be a good writer. I thought that was interesting advice at age 12. "

" Starting after 60, I thought, 'I'm not going to be able to write a book of poems on the 70s. It's going to be all moans and groans and complaints, and what is there to laugh about?' But I found plenty to laugh about. "

" The years that remain are clearly limited. When you're 80, you attend a lot more funerals. A lot more people are having a hard time and are ill. "

" I didn't get one word published until I was well into my 30s. But I always tried. "

" I not only wanted to write when I was 7 and 8, but I sent stuff out when I was 7 and 8. I sent it out... and I couldn't believe that they would turn down my poems about faithful dogs. "

" Everything I have ever written about has been about what's going on inside of us. "

" Lust is what keeps you wanting to do it even when you have no desire to be with each other. Love is what makes you want to be with each other even when you have no desire to do it. "

" The best I can do is, it's like a 'ding!' You're writing, and then something starts falling into place, and you hear or feel a ding. And it just feels - it's going to be okay. "

" I thought that the 40s was a tough decade, because it's when you finally figure out that you're not immortal, when you really start seeing that certain options are closed to you forever: You're not going to be a brain surgeon; you're not going to be a ballerina. "

" I always credited my mother with inspiring me to be a writer because she was such a passionate reader. She read poetry to me as a child. But rather late in life, I've come to appreciate my father, the accountant. He was a solid, organized, get-the-job-done kind of person-and you need that piece of it to be a writer, too. "

" When he is late for dinner and I know he must be either having an affair or lying dead in the street, I always hope he's dead. "

" In history class, I wrote a poem, 'The Royalists and the Roundheads.' I would write poems about driftwood in art class and little stories about the sun, moon, and stars in science class. Since not many kids were writing in class, I got away with it. "

" 'Alexander, Who's Trying His Best to Be the Best Boy Ever' was inspired by a combination of my grandson, my son, and myself - all those times when each of us has decided that we're just not going to get into trouble anymore. But it's so hard to be good all of the time! "