Alan Paton Quotes

Knowing the Truth is Fairly Useless. Feeling it is Profound. Living it Makes All the Difference.

I am not interested in anything that doesn't have a genuine heart to it. You've got to have soul in the hole. If that isn't there, I don't see the point.

A work will only have deep resonance if the kind of darkness I can generate is something that is resident in me already.

That powers my desire to write: the sense of how quickly everything on the surface of life can be cut away and you can suddenly be inside the most inner part of the most inner life of a person. What does it feel like there, and what are the regrets and sensations and longings, and what is the music of it?

I always felt and still feel that fairy tales have an emotional truth that is so deep that there are few things that really rival them.

I cringe at backstory. Because it never quite explains or gets into some psychological thing that is never quite right and never quite the truth and who knows why someone is some way.

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

I'm always surprised when an actor goes so deeply into the truth that they shake you to your core.

Acting is not just impersonating your character.

I look to find the heart and soul of people, of my characters. I look for the truth of them and the truths about life that are presented through them.

She saw through the shell of me into the center of me

We are trying to communicate that which lies in our deepest heart, which has no words, which can only be hinted at through the means of a story.

In portrait photography there is something more profound that we seek inside a person, while being painfully aware that a limitation of our medium is that the inside is recordable only insofar as it is apparent on the outside...Very often what lies behind the facade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe.

..this indiscriminate love feels entirely serious to her, as if everything in the world is part of a vast, inscrutable intention and everything in the world has its own secret name, a name that cannot be conveyed in language but is simply the sight and feel of the thing itself.

It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.

The Highest Thought is always that thought which contains joy. The Clearest Words are those words which contain truth. The Grandest Feeling is that feeling which you call love.

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.

The summit sings what is being spoken in the depths.

What comes from the heart goes to the heart

There is no end of things in the heart. ...she understood it to mean that if you took something to heart, really brought it inside those red velvet folds, then it would always be there for you. No matter what happened, it would be there waiting. She said this could mean a person, a place, a dream. A mission. Anything sacred. She told me that it is all connected in those secret folds. Always. It is all part of the same and will always be there, carrying the same beat as your heart.

A good man, through obscurest aspirations Has still an instinct of the one true way.

Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality.

Those are facts. Are they the truth? No, for they do not tell you of the heart, and that is where truth lives.

Friendship is a mysterious and ocean-bottom thing. Who can know the outer ranges of it? Perhaps no human being has ever explored its limits.

In that realm you will know at last the good news: that your "devil" does not exist, that you are who you always thought you were-goodness and love. Your idea that you might be something else has come from an insane outer world, causing you to act insanely. An outer world of judgment and condemnation. Others have judged you, and from their judgments you have judged yourself. Now you want God to judge you, and I will not do it.