Top 36 Quotes & Sayings by Robert James Waller

Remember the great adversity of art or anything else is a hurried life.

Life is never easy for those who dream.

It's kind of strange-- in fiction you get to tell lies and are applauded for it.

Once a person knows a kiss and a kind word, you can't blame him for never wanting to live without them again. - "The Bridges of Madison County"

This is why I'm here on this planet, at this time, Francesca. Not to travel or make pictures, but to love you. I know that now. I have been falling from the rim of a great, high place, somewhere back in time, for many more years than I have lived in this life. And through all of those years, I have been falling toward you.

The old dreams were good dreams; they didn't work out but I'm glad I had them.

Sometime I'm going to do an essay called 'The Virtues of Amateurism' for all of those people who wish they earned their living in the arts. The market kills more artistic people than anything else. It's a world of safety out there, for most people. They want safety, the magazines and manufacturers give them safety, give them homogeneity, give them the familiar and comfortable, don't challenge them.

The heart never forgets, never gives up, the territory marked off for those who came before.

Complex things are easy to do. Simplicity's the real challenge.

The curse of modern times is the preponderance of male hormones in places where they can do long-term damage. Even if were not talking about wars between nations or assaults on nature, there's still that aggressiveness that keeps us apart from each other and the problems we need to be working on.

When a woman makes the choice to marry, to have children; in one way her life begins but in another way it stops. You build a life of details. You become a mother, a wife and you stop and stay steady so that your children can move. And when they leave they take your life of details with them. And then you're expected move again only you don't remember what moves you because no-one has asked in so long. Not even yourself.

In a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live.

I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea

One great love in a single lifetime was enough for anyone.

And I remember most of what I know that is good and true and lasting has come not from scholars but from minstrels and gypsies.

The curse of modern times is the propensity of male hormones in places where they can do the most damage

The road is a strange place. Shuffling along, I looked up and you were there walking across the grass toward my truck on an August day. In retrospect, it seems inevitable - it could not have been any other way-- a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable

The human heart has a way of making itself large again even after it's been broken into a million pieces.

The reality is not exactly what the song started out to be, but it's not a bad song.

There are songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads. This is one of them.

The overriding problem with our country, and our world in general, is that we are, in large part, managed by incompetents. Most of these are men who have spent their lives seeking power rather than themselves.

We have both lost ourselves and created something else, something that exists only as an interlacing of the two of us.

So here I am walking around with another person inside of me. Though I think I put it better the day we parted when I said there is a third person we have created from the two of us. And I am stalked now by that other entity.

Analysis destroys wholes. Some things, magic things, are meant to stay whole. If you look at their pieces, they go away.

This kind of certainty comes but just once in a lifetime!

We're all getting lashed to the great wheel of uniformity.

if only we lost our minds and arrived at our hearts

Such physical matters were nice, yet, to him, intelligence and passion born of living, the ability to move and be moved by subtleties of the mind and spirit, were what really counted.

First you must have the images, then come the words.

An inherent kindness exists in the process of aging ... we are allowed to move along gradually.

For we have come by different ways to this place... I can tell by the natural ease with which you wear fine clothes and the way your mouth moves when you speak with waiters in good restaurants. You have come the way of castles and cathedrals, of elegance and empire.

It's clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty bumming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together. Like two solitary birds flying the great prairies by celestial reckoning, all of these years and lifetimes we have been moving toward one another.

The market kills more artistic passion than anything else.

Anyone who can feel that way about a woman is worth lovin himself.

And in that moment, everything I knew to be true about myself up until then was gone. I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before.

I sometimes have the feeling you've been here a long time, more than one lifetime, and that you've dwelt in private places none of the rest of us has even dreamed about.