#kill

Empty-page staring again tonight. It's maddening. I suppose people who don't write (like the Connollies) imagine anything that can be though can be expressed. Well, I don't know. I can't do it. It's this sort of thing that makes me belittle the whole business: what's the good of a 'talent' if you can't do it when you want to? What should we think of a woodcarver who couldn't woodcarver? or a pianist who couldn't play the piano? Bah, likewise grrr. ↗

— Philip Larkin

#skill #business

I let her go. She didn't step back. “I need to either get you out of my system so I can go back to my life, or fall in love with you so much it changes my life completely. Ever since I saw you, I wanted you.” My jaw clenched. Did she know how hard that was to admit? “You break all my rules and scare me half to death. ↗

— Jade Hart

#change

What careful planning, what painstaking attention to detail, goes into extinguishing a man's life! Far more than the hit-or-miss, haphazard circumstances of igniting it. ("New York Blues") ↗

— Cornell Woolrich

#execution #killing #murder #death

His voice was oily and slick as it poured from his mouth like liquid acid, threatening to hook onto the woman's hair like a fishing hook and drag her back to death. ↗

— Stephen Craig

#death #disturbing #horror #killer #death

Bravery isn't when you go looking for trouble; bravery is when trouble comes looking for you. ↗

— P.I. Barrington

#cult #future-imperfect-trilogy #futuristic #las-vegas #romantic-suspense

I thought I was going to be killed. The casualties were so heavy, it was just a given. I learned to take each day, each mission, as it came. That's an attitude I've carried into my professional life. I take each case, each job, as it comes. ↗

— Elliot Richardson

#came #carried #case #casualties #comes

Liberty medals...Are they trying to bribe me with coloured ribbons? I wouldn't kill a man for one of those things. Or go and be killed. Any shooting I do is to save my own life, and not for a ribbon and a hunk of bronze. [says Mäkelä] ↗

— Väinö Linna

#killing #morality #war #life

Once during a taping there was an actor who kept blowing his lines. It happened again and again. Finally Norman Fell came out-he wasn't even in that scene. But Norman came out and you know what he did? He killed the guy with a hammer. ↗

— John Ritter

#again #blowing #came #did #during

The justifications of men who kill should always be heard with skepticism, said the monster. ↗

— Patrick Ness

#murder #skepticism #men

Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis’s comments on them, and burned them. ↗

— A.S. Byatt

#craft #literature #poetry #self-confidence #skill