I'm no Ripley. I had doubts that I could play her as strongly as she had to be played, but I must say that it was fun exploring that side of myself. Women don't get to do that very often.
What is the definition of guts? Grace under pressure.
Never delay kissing a pretty girl or opening a bottle of whiskey
No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.
All cowardice comes from not truly loving, or at least, not loving well.
You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.
The world breaks everyone or nearly everyone, of their childish illusions, assumptions and wishes, often painfully and afterwards due to the personal growth in practical experience, insight and the resulting wisdom many are strong at the broken places just like mended broken bones often are, and some people even have the great insight to be grateful for the purifying fire.
Apostasy must be called what it is, spiritual adultery.
Occasionally when you’re in that zone, striving to operate at your highest levels, you get consumed. You forget to eat and shower. But that can be a good thing. No one makes money eating or showering.
No nation in the world has had greater fortune than mine in sharing a continent with the people and the nation of Canada.
Soon enough his head would be swimming with tales of derring-do and high adventure, tales of beautiful maidens kissed, of evildoers shot with pistols or fought with swords, of bags of gold, of diamonds as big as the tip of your thumb, of lost cities and of vast mountains, of steam-trains and clipper ships, of pampas, oceans, deserts, tundra.