Blackbirds quotes

The power of applying attention, steady and undissipated, to a single object, is the sure mark of superior genius.

You need a team that speaks your language.

The workman still is greater than his work.

I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.

It's hard to describe to people how terrible it was when you could only watch cartoons at a certain time in your life. But no, I would watch all of them - the Warner Bros. cartoons and the Bugs Bunnys and then the Tex Avery stuff. Looking back on it, they were so incredibly subversive for their time. You'd think, "Oh, they're just making jokes and this or that." But when you watch them as an adult, you think, "Oh no, they were talking about some pretty deep stuff."

Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique.

Young Americans are dropping out of religion at an alarming rate of five to six times the historic rate.

Self-love, the spring of motion, acts the soul; Reason's comparing balance rules the whole. Man, but for that no action could attend, And, but for this, were active to no end: Fix'd like a plant on his peculiar spot, To draw nutrition, propagate, and rot; Or, meteor-like, flame lawless thro' the void, Destroying others, by himself destroy'd.

If I ever think you are even considering leaving me again, no matter how good you reasons, I'll have you locked in your rooms and the doors barricaded, so help me God." He lifted her foot and began to dry it. Her voice shaking, Whitney asked, "Will you stay locked in there with me?" He raised her dainty foot to his jaw and tenderly laid his cheek against it, then turned his head and kissed it. "Yes," he whispered. -Clayton Westmoreland

Sickness is the natural state in which we humans reside. We occasionally fall into brief brackets of health, only to return to our fevers, our infections, our rapid, minute mutations, which take us toward death even as they evolve us, as a species, into some ill-defined future.