William Saroyan quotes - page 3

All things lie dark in possibility. (William Saroyan)
What is a street? It is where the living weep, where the dead go off in silence to their peace. View quote
William Saroyan
The child race is fresh, eager, interested, innocent, imaginative, healthy and full of faith, where the adult race, more often than not, is stale, spiritually debauched, unimaginative, unhealthy, and without faith. View quote
William Saroyan
Indians are born with an instinct for riding, rowing, hunting, fishing, and swimming. Americans are born with an instinct for fooling around with machines. View quote
William Saroyan
The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness. View quote
William Saroyan
Armenag Saroyan was the failed poet, the failed Presbyterian preacher, the failed American, the failed theological student. View quote
William Saroyan
Every man in the world is better than someone else and not as good as someone else. View quote
William Saroyan
One of us is obviously mistaken. View quote
William Saroyan
One day in the afternoon of the world, glum death will come and sit in you, and when you get up to walk, you will be as glum as death, but if you're lucky, this will only make the fun better and the love greater. View quote
William Saroyan
A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography. View quote
William Saroyan
The whole world and every human being in it is everybody's business. (William Saroyan)
The idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better. View quote
William Saroyan
The order I found was the order of disorder. View quote
William Saroyan
I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. View quote
William Saroyan
People are people. Don't be afraid of them. View quote
William Saroyan
How did money ever happen? What's it mean? What's it for? View quote
William Saroyan
She cried a little, but only inside, because long ago she had decided she didn't like crying because if you ever started to cry it seemed as if there was so much to cry about you almost couldn't stop, and she didn't like that at all. View quote
William Saroyan
You must not be unkind, especially when it happens that you're right. View quote
William Saroyan
I did my best, and let me urge you to do your best, too. Isn't it the least we can do for one another? View quote
William Saroyan
I liked Charentz straight off, but more important than this was the feeling that I had that he was a truly great man. Human greatness is a rather difficult thing to account for, and more often than not one is mistaken in one's hunches about somebody one has met. Charentz seemed great to me, I think, because he was made of a mixture of proud virtues and amusing flaws. On the one hand, his independence of spirit was balanced by a humorous worldliness, his acute intelligence by a curiosity that frequently made him seem naive, his profoundly gentle manners by a kind of mocking mischievousness which might easily be mistaken for rudeness. But he was never rude, he was witty, and the purpose of his wit was to keep himself from the terrible condition of pomposity. View quote
William Saroyan
I couldn't understand the language, I couldn't understand a word in the whole book, but it was somehow too eloquent to use for a fire. (William Saroyan)
Their singing wasn't particularly good, but the feeling with which they sang was not bad at all. View quote
William Saroyan
In those days, there was something more to the world than there is now. Well, my kids were little, let's put it that way, and of course if you like your kids, if you love them from the moment they begin, you yourself begin all over again, in them, with them, and so there is something more to the world again. View quote
William Saroyan
I had in my soul the greatest truths to tell, but when I came to the work of telling them I couldn't do it. View quote
William Saroyan
It takes a lot of rehearsing for a man to be himself. View quote
William Saroyan