Explore Quotes on I Can

If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first; but when once objectified in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.

There's a thousand reasons why I shouldn't drink... but I can't think of one right now.

I am a woman who is a granddaughter of a lady who used to be beaten on the head by her husband, of a mother who went through hell because she was divorced and had to bring up these kids. And I can take 10 men out to lunch and pay the bill, and nobody even thinks twice about it. So don’t mess with me.

I can take hardship. I can sleep on the cold floor anytime. I can also sleep on a feather bed.

In the end, I find my influences or inspirations where I can.

I only write about stuff that’s happened to me.. stuff I can’t get past personally. Luckily, I'm quite self-destructive.

I don’t need help because if I can’t help myself I can’t be helped.

I'm not coming out trying to prove anything to anyone, like, 'Oh, I'm in assless chaps!' or 'I can't be tamed!' I've already been through that phase. I started at 23, you know?

I can say that even in the midst of my most cynical comic stripping: Opus shone through with a bit of heart, anchoring the ugly proceedings with a comforting pull of emotion.

My moral compass is so broken I can barely find the parking lot.

I speak because I can to anyone I trust enough to listen.

I can't give up that quick_x000D_My life is a candle and a wick_x000D_You can put it out, but you can't break it down_x000D_In the end we are waiting to be lit

I can't remember all the times I've tried to tell myself to hold on to these moments as they pass

I can remember being eight years old and having infinite possibilities. But life ends up being so much less that we thought it would be when we were kids, with relationships that are so empty and stupid and brutal. If you don't find a way to break the chain and change in some way, then you wind up, as the rhyme goes: a murder of one, for sorrow.

A lot of times, I can turn and pass without even looking.

It is indeed immensely picturesque. I can fancy sitting all a summer's day watching its shadows shorten and lengthen again, and drawing a delicious contrast between the world's duration and the feeble span of individual experience. There is something in Stonehenge almost reassuring; and if you are disposed to feel that life is rather a superficial matter, and that we soon get to the bottom of things, the immemorial gray pillars may serve to remind you of the enormous background of time.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught.

I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for long.

I do feel that evolution is being controlled by some sort of divine engineer. I can't help thinking that. And this engineer knows exactly what he or she is doing and why, and where evolution is headed. That's why we've got giraffes and hippopotami and the clap.

Jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward - and since I can start thinking and striving again that much sooner.

You have to, at least from a distance, look as if you know what you're doing, and I can manage that.