Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I feel like somebody who just got out of prison after 40 years for something she didn't do, like I got pardoned by the governor. When dear friends deal with me with mixed emotions, it is a little like being told, 'Well, Jenny, we're glad you got sprung, really, but quite honestly we did kind of like you better when you were in jail.
I had written two or three books before my husband noticed that in every one of them a family member was missing. He suggested that it was because my father's death, when I was five, utterly changed my world. I can only suppose he is right and that this is the reason I am drawn to a narrative where someone's life is changed by loss.
We were not having any fun, he had recently begun pointing out. I would take exception (didn't we do this, didn't we do that) but I had also known what he meant. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living.
I know better than most people that a criminal isn't always a thug in a black leather jacket with a big brand on his forehead to warn us away. Criminals sit next to us on the bus. They pack our groceries and cash our paychecks for us and teach our children. They look no different from you or me. And that's why they get away with it.
I'm quite laid-back but some people say I'm unemotional. I don't get carried away with success and similarly I don't get depressed when something bad happens. I didn't take it personally when rival fans threw banana skins at me when I was playing for Liverpool. I can't control 50,000 idiots shouting at me, so why would it bother me?
I've known people who thought that reaching their potential would come from shoring up their weaknesses. But do you know what happens when you spend all your time working on your weaknesses and never developing your strengths? If you work really hard, you might claw your way all the way to mediocrity! But you'll never get beyond it.
We abandon the most important journey of our lives when we abandon desire. We leave our hearts by the side of the road and head off in the direction of fitting in, getting by, being productive, what have you. Whatever we might gain – money, position, the approval of others, or just absence of the discontent self – it’s not worth it.
The prospect of a world that contains neither humans nor Z's is not so terrifying. Nature will take its world back. Animals will frolic and fight. There will be no lord of the manor, which is not such a bad thing, because it seems to me that people have done a pretty poor job of guiding the biosphere for the last few thousand years.
Augustus Waters," I said, looking up at him, thinking that you cannot kiss anyone in the Anne Frank House, and then thinking that Anne Frank, after all, kissed someone in the Anne Frank House, and that she would probably like nothing more than for her home to have become a place where the young and irreparably broken sink into love.
Never underestimate your players; they can do it with enough game-like practice. Coaches must put more emphasis in practice and in life on making student-athletes aware of what they could or can do, rather than what they couldn't or presently can't do. The focus must be on solutions, not problems; what is wanted, not what is feared.
The inner essence of worship is cherishing Christ as gain - indeed as more gain than all that life can offer - family, career, retirement, fame, food, friends. The essence of worship is experiencing Christ as gain. Or to use words that we love to use around here: it is savoring Christ, treasuring Christ, being satisfied with Christ.
The infinite reservoir of future grace is flowing back through the present into the ever-growing pool of past grace. The inexhaustible reservoir is invisible except through the promises. But the ever-enlarging pool of past grace is visible; and God means for the certainty and beauty and depth to strengthen our faith in future grace.
Obviously we don't have 300 million people. We haven't got a big army. We don't have Hollywood. We're a medium small-sized country. We have to do what medium small-sized countries do, which-even though we're not smarter than other people-is to make ourselves seem to be smarter. We have to work harder and know more than other people.
Strength and success - they are above morality, above criticism. It seems, then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it. Is there a check in men, deep in them, that stops or punishes? There doesn't seem to be. The only punishment is for failure. In effect no crime is committed unless a criminal is caught.
Life always gives us exactly the teacher we need at every moment. This includes every mosquito, every misfortune, every red light, every traffic jam, every obnoxious supervisor (or employee), every illness, every loss, every moment of joy or depression, every addiction, every piece of garbage, every breath. Every moment is the guru.
My love has eyes blue as the sky. Her warm, bright smile makes me want to try To give her the world, And when she's curled Up in my arms where I can feel her touch, I realize again that I love her so much. My world has turned from black to white. Kissing in starlight, basking in sunlight, dancing at midnight.' ~John's poem for Belle
She smelled like England, of soft rain and sun-kissed meadows. And she felt like the best kind of heaven. He wanted to wrap himself around, bury himself within her, and stay there for all of his days. He hadn’t had a drop to drink in three years, but he was intoxicated now, bubbling with a lightness he’d never thought to feel again.
When you try to translate any kind of real-life problem into a neat logical form, you're almost always simplifying it. We need a kind of blend - we need to use not just tools of logic, which are important and valuable - I'm not denying that, but also tools of judgement, and of inductive and abductive reasoning which can also inform.
The censors have always had a field day with James Joyce, specifically with 'Ulysses,' but also with his other writings. The conventional wisdom is that this is because of sexually explicit passages (and there certainly are those). I have always thought that what the critics hated and feared about Joyce is his cry for human freedom.
Tuatha De do not walk the human realm alone. Actually, they don't walk alone much anywhere. Only the occasional rogue Fae will do so." "Like yourself?" "Yes Most of my kind have no fondness for solitude. Those who walk alone are not to be trusted." "Really," she said dryly. "Except for me," he amended, with a faint, insouciant grin.
Observations,” he says. “Four imperial Unseelie guards were the only commonality I was able to isolate endemic to both scenes.” They’d been standing, armed, at the dock doors, overseeing the delivery. He gives me a sidewise look. “Wow. That was, like, a whole sentence. With nouns and verbs and connective tissue. Endemic. Fancy word.
The way we deny death says something about how we live our lives, doesn't it? At least in Sweden or Scandinavia, you don't have to search further back in time than maybe three generations to find another way to relate to death. People then had a different, closer relationship with death; at least it was like that in the countryside.
You have been a very foolish boy, wasting your time dreaming of impossible things when you speak of Mr. Pontellier setting me free! I am no longer one of Mr. Pontelliere's possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose. If he were to say, 'Here Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours,' I should laugh at you both.
Everything in his life had come down to the sensation of her fingers against his. The person he was, the history he carried within himself, every joy and grief he had ever experienced, slipped way like an irrelevant garment. He was nothing but skin, speaking to another skin, and between the skins there was no need to find any words.
Because of his sinless life, Jesus walked in perfect dominion. God did whatever he asked, NOT because he was God's son, but because he held the position of a righteous man. But that was Jesus, you say. But the Bible says that through our believing on Him, we have been given the same position of righteousness with God that Jesus has.
That is certainly the point: when the human species was born, on the African savanna, life was pretty good; we could live in harmony with the rest of nature, and that's what I've been calling Eden. The only technologies that humans devised for some 2 million years were fire and the hand ax. That's all. Eden didn't need anything more
To politicians, solved problems represent a dire threat - of unemployment and poverty. That's why no problem ever tackled by the government has ever been solved. What they want is lots of problems they can promise to solve, so that we'll keep electing them - or letting them keep their jobs in a bureaucracy metastasizing like cancer.
So far I've seen the life studies packet used as (1) an umbrella, (2) a makeshift towel, (3) a pillow, and now this. I have never actually seen anyone study with it, which either means that everyone who graduates from Thomas Jefferson will be totally unprepared for life or that certain things can't be learned in bullet-point format.
So much of the world's suffering results from the sinful action or inaction of ourselves and others. For example, people look at a famine and wonder where God is, but the world produces enough food for each person to have 3,000 calories a day. It's our own irresponsibility and self-centeredness that prevents people from getting fed.
Forgiving is love's toughest work, and love's biggest risk. If you twist it into something it was never meant to be, it can make you a doormat or an insufferable manipulator. Forgiving seems almost unnatural. Our sense of fairness tells us people should pay for the wrong they do. But forgiving is love's power to break nature's rule.
Those blue eyes glinted with uncivilized suggestion. A faint smile was tucked in the corner of his wide mouth. Definitely wouldn't want to be alone in a room with that guy, I thought. His gaze moved downward in lazy inspection, returned to my face, and he gave me one of those respectful nods that Texan men had raised to an art form.
To centralize power in the name of freedom is akin to putting a crime syndicate in charge of rooting out corruption. It is the normal state of politics that the more centralized it is, the more damage it does. Fast-track authority [for government-to-government trade agreements] centralizes power and is therefore part of the problem.
Our Lord Christ Himself strikes down our enemies through us, or in company with us. For he who eats Christ's flesh and drinks His blood abides with Christ and He in him. Therefore, when we overcome the enemies, it is the blood of Christ which overcomes, as it is written in Revelation: 'and they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb'
What does one save for, anyhow? For a few tired hours at the end of life when one sits and counts dollars? Or do we save so that those last years will not be mentally barren or esthetically shabby? I try to save a few things to furnish my mind decently, on the theory that no auctioneer can get in there to sell off all the furniture.
I have a passionate desire for personal privacy. I want to stand before the world, for good or bad, on the book I wrote, not on what I say in letters to friends, not on my husband and my home life, the way I dress, my likes and dislikes, et cetera. My book belongs to anyone who has the price, but nothing of me belongs to the public.
There is no such thing as a faithless person; we either have faith in the power of love, or faith in the power of fear. For faith is an aspect of consciousness. Have faith in love, and fear will lose its power over you. Have faith in forgiveness, and your self-hatred will fall away. Have faith in miracles, and they will come to you.
If you invent two or three people and turn them loose in your manuscript, something is bound to happen to them -- you can't help it; and then it will take you the rest of the book to get them out of the natural consequences of that occurrence, and so first thing you know, there's your book all finished up and never cost you an idea.
If we can choose where to cry, at home or with a few people who will be fully understanding, perhaps we will feel easier. But if we can't - if we are in church and a hymn catches us off guard, or at a football game and we remember being there with a son or daughter now gone - well, the earth is our home and we can cry where we want.
Young people are going to go to someone, somewhere. And we had better see that that 'someone' is us when the opportunity is ours, for there will come a time when we will wish they would come, and do we know but that the interruption we now impatiently put off may be the most important thing we could be doing at this particular time?
I don't have an opinion about whether or not politics should appear more in fiction or not, generally. I think politics are a part of life, but a part of life that most people don't think about very much, most of the time. Or, people think about it superficially and they talk about it superficially because they don't know very much.
In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will 'take our country back' from everyone they disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change.
We live in such a service-based, globalised economy where very few people actually make anything and the people who do make stuff... it's all part of a massive global supply chain. So what if all those chains were suddenly cut, how would you make something? How would you keep people alive? And that was something I wanted to explore.
When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talk-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves. We could be heroines, swordswomen. Even if she had to rage across all China, a swordswoman got even with anybody who hurt her family. Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound.
I am more than happy to invite my five favorite fictional characters. Let's see. First on my list is Sam Gamgee from The Lord of The Rings. Sam is a beautiful character; in him, we find the profound heroism of an ordinary person. He epitomizes the saying that courage isn't not being afraid, courage is going anyway. I just love that.
This is my new hobby. I watch my life depart minute by minute. I anticipate the end of everything and anything -- a conversation, a class, track practice, darkness -- only to be left with more clock-watching to take its place. I'm continually waiting for something better that never comes. Maybe it would help if I knew what I wanted.
It can be much harder to be on the receiving end of a transaction than to be the one who gets to give. In fact, being given to can mean being taken from. There is a very strong connection between pride and giving, and those who do the giving get to feel that they are worthy, while those who are given to often feel that they are not.
Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina's delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat -- was, literally, talked into life.
I'm a big fan of Tarantino's work, and I think I'm fascinated by his evident sense of entitlement to use black characters and black material that he feels not simply comfortable with, but that it's his right and privilege - the apparent ease with which he handles black characters, fully aware that he's been criticized for that, too.
Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.
You have to imagine a world in which there's this abundance of data, with all of these connected devices generating tons and tons of data. And you're able to reason over the data with new computer science and make your product and service better. What does your business look like then? That's the question every CEO should be asking.