Brander Matthews Quotes

To be clear is the first duty of a writer; to charm and to please are graces to be acquired later.

Brander Matthews

• Grace
• Duty
• Clear
• Charm

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Quotes to Explore

• I love the perspective afforded by having lived five decades, a degree of bemused and muted calm, a relief from the insistent demands of a turbulent ego and rampant ambition. I'd love to stay here forever. But something tells me that 50 is a sunny idyll, a temporary state of grace, a golden afternoon.

  

  Kate Christensen
  • Perspective
  • Ambition
  • Grace

• I love Winston Churchill; I think he had the grace of coming and the grace of leaving - when things were hard he was there, and when it was time to leave, he left.

  

  Lapo Elkann
  • Time
  • Love
  • Think

• It is the duty of every good officer to obey any orders given him by his commander in chief.

  

  Nathan Hale
  • Good
  • Duty
  • Him

• Mary and Carrie and baby Grace and Ma had all had scarlet fever. The Nelsons across the creek had had it too, so there had been no one to help Pa and Laura.

  

  Laura Ingalls Wilder
  • Help
  • Baby
  • Grace

• The Americans are very clear, and obsessed with nouns.

  

  Fiona Shaw
  • Very
  • Clear
  • Obsessed

• The 8 P.M. hour in the cable news world is currently driven by the indomitable Bill O'Reilly, Nancy Grace, and Keith Olbermann. Shedding my own journalistic skin to try to inhabit the kind of persona that might coexist in that lineup is just impossible for me.

  

  Brown Campbell
  • World
  • Impossible
  • Grace

• Bermuda is not even tropical. The charm of the tropics - the heat, the chaos - is not there.

  

  Padgett Powell
  • Chaos
  • Charm
  • Tropical

• I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.

  

  Taiye Selasi
  • Mind
  • Heart
  • Clear

• To be clear, the gap between the have gots and the have nots is widening. In this most multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic America ever, that concerns me.

  

  Tavis Smiley
  • America
  • Me
  • Clear

• May the perfect grace and eternal love of Christ our Lord be our never-failing protection and help.

  

  Saint Ignatius
  • Love
  • May
  • Perfect

• In Jenny Offill's remarkable first novel, 'Last Things,' 7-year-old Grace Davitt watches her mother, Anna, descend into madness and tries to make sense of the claustrophobic world that Anna has created for her.

  

  Nancy Willard
  • World
  • Mother
  • Grace

• The Muslims refuse our culture and try to impose their culture on us. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture-it is toward my values, my principles, my civilization.

  

  Oriana Fallaci
  • Culture
  • Values
  • Duty

• I have always done my duty. I am ready to die. My only regret is for the friends I leave behind me.

  

  Zachary Taylor
  • Friends
  • Die
  • Regret

• The true exercise of freedom is - cannily and wisely and with grace - to move inside what space confines - and not seek to know what lies beyond and cannot be touched or tasted.

  

  A. S. Byatt
  • True
  • Freedom
  • Space

• Our duty is to be patient.

  

  Hamza Yusuf
  • Duty
  • Patient
  • Be Patient

• The right to life is guaranteed to all Americans in the Declaration of Independence, and ensuring this is upheld is the Constitutional duty of all members of Congress.

  

  Rand Paul
  • Life
  • Duty
  • Independence

• Working in Hollywood, it's clear the more money you have, the more technology you can get. So you can build a whole Japanese set. Only in Hollywood!

  

  Ziyi Zhang
  • Money
  • Technology
  • Japanese

• I believe that we don't need to worry about what happens after this life, as long as we do our duty here-to love and to serve.

  

  Albert Einstein
  • Life
  • Believe
  • Worry

• Man is a god to his fellow-man, if he know his duty.

  

  Caecilius Statius
  • God
  • Man
  • Duty

• Writing about a person whose struggle you wish you could solve is an act of compassion and also, frankly, opportunism.

  

  Karen Bender
  • Writing
  • Wish
  • Struggle

• It is not an individual act, architecture. You have to consider your client. Only out of that can you produce great architecture. You cannot work in the abstract

  

  I. M. Pei
  • Work
  • Great
  • Individual

• All of us are like locks. No matter how strong the bolt, there’s always a key out there that opens it.

  

  Jonathan Kellerman
  • Key
  • Locks
  • Opens

• An air of anticipation hung over the lab. The pied crow—whose name, according to Tasha, was Pitch, and who had been raised in captivity, bouncing from wildlife center to wildlife center before winding up living in my sister’s private aviary—gripped her perch stubbornly with her talons and averted her eyes from the screen, refusing to react to the avatar that was trying to catch her attention. She’d been ignoring the screen for over an hour, shutting out four researchers and a bored linguist who was convinced that I was in the middle of some sort of creative breakdown.

  

  Elizabeth Bear
  • Attention
  • Screen
  • Anticipation

• To be clear is the first duty of a writer; to charm and to please are graces to be acquired later.

  

  Brander Matthews
  • Grace
  • Duty
  • Clear