Thomas Mallon famous quotes

Letters had always defeated distance, but with the coming of e-mail, time seemed to be vanquished as well.
-- Thomas Mallon

#Distance #Letters #Mail

My prescription for writer's block is to face the fact that there is no such thing.... Writing well is difficult, but one can always write something. And then, with a lot of work, make it better. It's a question of having enough will and ambition, not of hoping to evade this mysterious hysteria people are always talking about.
-- Thomas Mallon

#Block #Writing #Ambition

Cell phones, alas, have pretty much ruined train travel, which I used to love. I could read or even sketch notes for what I was working on.
-- Thomas Mallon

#Phones #Cells #Cell Phone

I have a picture of the Pont Neuf on a wall in my apartment, but i know that Paris is really on the closet shelf, in the box next to the sleeping bag, with the rest of my diaries.
-- Thomas Mallon

#Wall #Sleep #Paris

American Secretaries of State have typically been more buttoned up than bon vivant, but John Quincy Adams's diplomatic successes - bigger than anything Presidential or legislative that he achieved - still surprise a student of his personality.
-- Thomas Mallon

#Personality #Presidential #Students

The romantic appeal of solar sailing has ensured that its advocates consistently come from the worlds of both science fiction and science fact.
-- Thomas Mallon

#Sailing #Fiction #World

Ive always got a novel under way, but if I try to work on it every day, exclusively, I falter. So I always keep more than one thing going.
-- Thomas Mallon

#Trying #Way #Novel

I actually think that Bandbox, by far the silliest of my books, is the best constructed of them.
-- Thomas Mallon

#Book #Thinking

Sarah took a deep breath and set off along the passageway again. A clump of lichen on the gatepost opened its eyes and watched her go. The eyes, on tendrils, had an anxious look, and when she had gone some distance away the clump, swiveling its eyes toward each other, commenced to gossip among itself. Most of it disapproved of the direction she had taken. You could tell that from the way the eyes looked meaningfully into each other. Lichen knows about directions.

When dawn comes, that memory gradually distances...Tonight, I will bring it to sleep with me, so that will not be taken away by the waves of the night...

We might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having found such a powerful motive to feel sad. We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, beyond the gate let along in a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Rio. If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been able to recognise this as one of the high points in her life.

You don’t know a woman until you have had a letter from her.

I, myself, was always recognized . . . as the “slow one” in the family. It was quite true, and I knew it and accepted it. Writing and spelling were always terribly difficult for me. My letters were without originality. I was . . . an extraordinarily bad speller and have remained so until this day.

Laws are a dead letter without courts to expound and define their true meaning and operation.

Thank you, darling, for learning to play chess. It is an absolute necessity for any well organized family. (in a letter to his wife)

Unfortunately, the current generation of mail programs do not have checkers to see if the sender knows what he is talking about.

I think things are going to go right for me again. I'm not old. I'm old enough, but I photograph young, thank God, and I still have a public. I still get fan mail.

They can call or e-mail, too, but I'd rather see the bug.