Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words.
P.D James
People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?
people death violence sex act
It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
forgiveness human-nature
I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.
protection solitude happiness responsibility self-sufficiency
The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.
happiness contentment rationalism
Our parents' generation carried the past memorialized in paint, porcelain, and wood; we cast it off. Even our national history is remembered in terms of the worst we did, not the best.
history past remembrance
The city which lay below was a charnel house built on multi-layered bones centuries older than those which lay beneath the cities of Hamburg or Dresden. Was this knowledge part of the mystery it held for her, a mystery felt most strongly on a bell-chimed Sunday on her solitary exploration of its hidden alleys and squares? Time had fascinated her from childhood, its apparent power to move at different speeds, the dissolution it wrought on minds and bodies, her sense that each moment, all moments past and those to come, were fused into an illusory present which with every breath became the unalterable, indestructible past. In the City of London these moments were caught and solidified in stone and brick, in churches and monuments and in bridges which spanned the grey-brown ever-flowing Thames. She would walk out in spring or summer as early as six o'clock, double-locking the front door behind her, stepping into a silence more profound and mysterious than the absence of noise. Sometimes in this solitary perambulation it seenmed that her own footsteps were muted, as if some part of her were afraid to waken the dead who had walked thse streets and had known the same silence.
time history past london
Charm is often despised but I can never see why. No one has it who isn't capable of genuinely liking others, at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false.
funny humor charm false humour
I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.
funny humor humour
Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.
identity naked
Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did; it was hardly possible to live without one.
mystery life psychology secret mask
What do you mean by sound government?'Good public order, no corruption in high places, freedom from fear and war and crime, a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth and resources, concern for the individual life.'Then we haven't got sound government.
politics dissent
With the death of what Sydney Smith described as rational religon and the proponents of what remains sending out such confusing and uncertain messages, all civilised people have to be ethicists. We must work out our own salvation with diligence based on what we believe.
belief religion salvation ethics
Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports.
romance
The television image sanctified, conferred identity. The more familiar the face, the more to be trusted.
trust television
writing creative-process
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