Best-Written Lines

An ongoing collection of some of my favorite lines written by some of my favorite writers.

THE ART OF WRITING IS THE HIGHEST OF THOSE PERMITTED TO MAN.
[Ralph Waldo Emerson]

"There is properly no history, only biography."
[RWE]

"Politics is brutal because it engages the most fundamental human impulses for affection, honor, power, and fame. Great principles and grand visions are ennobling, but at its best politics is an imperfect means to an altruistic end."
[Jon Meacham]

"About the only person up there I find myself happy to look at is the former Republican senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole. I've developed a soft spot for Bob Dole because he symbolizes a simpler, more innocent time in America when you could lose the presidential election and, like, not actually become president."
[Sarah Vowel]

“I didn’t say I was happy with my life. I said I was fine, as in no colds, no recent traffic accidents, no suspended prison sentences, but never mind.”
[Nick Hornby]

“…the army of wrongness rampant in the world might as well march over me.”
[Holly Golightly/ Truman Capote]

“I don’t know, but they did it. They’ve done it before and they did it tonight and they’ll do it again and when they do it – seems that only children weep.”
[Harper Lee]

“Surely the coroner’s report should read, ‘He took his own life after sober and careful contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become.”
[Nick Hornby]

“The trouble with my generation is that we all think we’re fucking geniuses. Making something isn’t good enough for us, and neither is selling something, or teaching something, or even just doing something: we have to be something. It’s our inalienable right, as citizens of the twenty-first century. If Christian Aguilera or Britney or some American Idol jerk can be something, then why can’t I? Where’s mine, huh?”
[Nick Hornby]

“The outward manifestations of an inner combustion are never very directed.”
[Nick Hornby]

“She’s right, of course. It’s not fair. Love, it turns out, is as undemocratic as money, so it accumulates around people who have plenty of it already: the sane, the healthy, the loveable.”
[Nick Hornby]

“And with these words – I don’t think you’re supposed to be aware of your own heartbeat – this unknown woman in a burnt orange poncho doomed me to a life of pathological overawareness of my own cardiac activity.”
[Augusten Burroughs]

“Now maybe I’m just ultrajudgmental, but I really feel that only two groups of people have any business collecting dolls: little girls and grown women who lost all their children in fiery car accidents.”
[Augusten Burroughs]

“I remained quiet for a moment because I could not risk opening my mouth and having, ‘Now, listen here you stupid motherfucker’ come out.”
[Augusten Burroughs]

"I don't know that war is wrong. I just know that I'm a peace queer, and I'm totally into it when people aren't fighting: in my home, at the bar where I hang out or in a field a million miles away."
[Todd Snider]

"This is the way he had often wished his marriage could always be — unexcited, companionable, a mutual tenderness touched with romance."
[Richard Yates]

"You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don't like."
[Richard Yates]