Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In time, we will have to recognise that it is not 'nature' that we need to protect, but ourselves, and we can only do this by abandoning the old, grandiose, profit-seeking schemes so beloved of our masters and learning to till the soil, live to scale, and live within our means.
The whole purpose of screenwriting is to convey everything through action and dialogue and not explanation and exposition. To me, there are movies where voiceover works really well because it does something more than exposition; it actually becomes a tonal element of the movie.
I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.
A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.
The flowers never waste their sweetness on the desert air or, for that matter, on the jungle air. In fact, they waste it only when nobody except a human being is there to smell it. It is for the bugs and a few birds, not for men, that they dye their petals or waft their scents.
We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn't it? But if we can't understand time, can't grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history--even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?
When I moved to Brighton from London in 1995, I was struck by what I thought of as its townliness. A town, it seemed to me, was that perfect place to live, neither city nor country, both of which like to think they are light years apart but actually have a great deal in common.
One day during filming, George Clooney was wearing his surf shirt and board shorts, and my six-year-old daughter was in the background as an extra, playing in the sand - playing herself. She and Clooney suddenly looked equally Hawaiian, equally related to the place I call home.
You want to keep looking?" I asked. "Yeah, maybe." "I'll leave you to it, then." I started for the door. "No." He said it quickly, and reached for my arm, but stopped before he touched me. "I mean, if you're tired, sure, but you don't have to." Derek doesn't want her to leave ♥
Saving the biosphere depends first and foremost on human beings reaching mutual understanding and unforced agreement as to common ends. And that intersubjective accord occurs only in the noosphere. Anything short of that noospheric accord will continue to destroy the biosphere.
Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before.
That was what they did with themselves, those two Gracelings, along with a small band of friends: They stirred up trouble on a serious scale—bribery, coercion, sabotage, organized rebellion—all directed at stopping the worst behavior of the world’s most seriously corrupt kings.
You have never seen greatness in a Presidency; I have. It was a rich kid who you would think had every reason to be a horse's ass - Franklin Roosevelt. He was humane and wise and resourceful. He was called a traitor to his class. With George Bush, that charge would never stick.
His mind reeled. Now, empowered to ask questions of utmost rudeness-and promised answers-he could, conceivably (though it was almost unimaginable), ask someone, some adult, his father perhaps: "Do you lie?" But he would have no way of knowing if the answer he received was true.
I have a very hyper-sensitive sister, and when she saw in the papers the next day that I had proclaimed myself the daughter of an immigrant, she didn't like it at all, and was with difficulty deterred from writing to the press that my father might be an immigrant, but not hers.
A recent analysis of election coverage by the Tindall report which tracks network nicely news programs found that Bernie Sanders received just ten minutes out of 857 minutes of campaign coverage in 2015. Compare that to 234 minutes for Donald Trump, and 113 for Hillary Clinton.
..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.
I'm constantly listening to music and thinking about it and compiling my own cassettes and CDs in obsessively specific order. I have quite lunatic agendas for what I want to achieve. They won't make sense to anyone other than me, but it is what I've spent most of my life doing.
You pronounced your words as if you don’t acknowledge the shadows, or the evil either. Would you be so kind as to give a little thought to the question of what your good would be doing if evil did not exist, and how the earth would look if the shadows were to disappear from it?
I think we should be prepared, given environmental and political change for large-scale migration. If sea levels rise and 200 million people in Bangladesh and 300 million people in Indonesia need to move, and the entire Chinese seaboard, New York City - that's going to be huge.
I work. And I think about work, and I freak out about work, and I think about how much I think about work, and I freak out about how much I think about how much I think about work, and I think about how freaked out I get about how much I think about how much I think about work.
You'd think New York people was all wise; but no, they can't get a chance to learn. Every thing's too compressed. Even the hayseeds are bailed hayseeds. But what else can you expect from a town that's shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?
though some men did not make war as others did, if they sold their goods for profit to the war-makers, did it make them better because the weapon was not in their own hands, if they had made the weapon and sold it and so put it into the hands of those used it upon the innocent?
Pierre Trudeau was too much of a professional politician to be described as a good man, nor, it can be argued despite much pubilicity to the contrary, was he a particularly clever or even wise one. But he was a great man, perhaps the gratest Canada has produced in this century.
Same with anyone who's been flying for years and loves it still... we're part of a world we deeply love. Just as musicians feel about scores and melodies, dancers about the steps and flow of music, so we're one with the principle of flight, the magic of being aloft in the wind!
Who knows what Yale thought it was getting when it hired Richard Rodriguez? The people who offered me the job thought there was nothing wrong with that. I thought there was something very wrong. I still do. I think race-based affirmative action is crude and absolutely mistaken.
When I'm by myself, I'm not threatening at all. I get many more invitations than I would if I were traveling with anyone else, especially with a man. But I'm rarely alone. I sit on a park bench and I'm not alone because I pick a park bench where somebody interesting is sitting.
Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral and social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution, in its struggle to become free of the social level, has ignored the social level's role in keeping the biological level under control.
Substance is a subspecies of value. When you reverse the containment process and define substance in terms of value the mystery disappears: substance is a "stable pattern of inorganic values." The problem then disappears. The world of objects and the world of values is unified.
W. B. Yeats has created, if not a new world, a new star. He is not a reporter of life as it is, to the extent that Shakespeare or Browning is. One is not quite certain that his kingdom is of the green earth. He is like a man who has seen the earth not directly but in a crystal.
I have never seen a river that I could not love. Moving water... has a fascinating vitality. It has power and grace and associations. It has a thousand colors and a thousand shapes, yet it follows laws so definite that the tiniest streamlet is an exact replica of a great river.
Light is undiminishable, eternal and omni-present. In every religion that existed these qualities have been recognized as divine. So that we are forced to the conclusion that light, actual sensible light, is indeed the direct vehicle of divinity: it is the consciousness of God.
We know that genes shape human cultures and human societies: The DNA we inherited from our ancestors makes certain foods taste better, affects the way we care for children, influences what colors we find vibrant, and contributes to our love of socializing, among other examples.
Despite the disreputable company it keeps, bismuth is harmless. In fact, it's medicinal: Doctors prescribe it to soothe ulcers, and it's the 'bis' in hot-pink Pepto-Bismol. Overall, it seems like the most out-of-place element on the periodic table, a gentleman among scoundrels.
I am a hardened and shameless tea drinker, who has, for twenty years, diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and, with tea, welcomes the morning.
The truth is I don't really like the world of plastic money: the great chip-and-pin double act of modern payment. I prefer cash. I don't like the idea of some distant clerk nodding each time I make a card purchase and quietly adding to my 'consumer profile.' I'm anti all cards.
How do you deal with it?" Kami asked Jared. "The laughing at nothing and occasionally stopping dead in your tracks." "I have a system where when I stop, I lean casually against something," Jared told her. "It makes people think I'm a bad boy. Or possibly that I have a bad back.
We are the puzzle pieces who seldom fit with other puzzle pieces. Romantics, idealists, eccentrics, we inhabit single-dom as our natural resting state. In a world where proms and marriage define the social order, we are, by force of our personalities and inner strength, rebels.
I am something of a crank about sleep, for if I get seven and a quarter hours instead of eight I feel afflicted and drag myself around, although there's nothing really wrong with me. It's just another idea. That's how it is with my ideas; they seem to get strong while I weaken.
You like rock? Little boy, I’m not your friend. I’m not your Dark-Hunter and I’m not your friggin’ date. You only speak to me when I ask you a question. Otherwise you keep your mouth shut, your eyes off me, and you might live long enough to get me to the French Quarter. (Zarek)
Hey, T-Rex? Remind me next time I want to get smartass with you that it’s a really stupid move on my part? (Talon) Oh, no, you don’t, you wuss. You told me the next time you saw Ash you were going to ask him if he’d seen the movie 10,000 BC and if it’d made him homesick. (Wulf)
(Zarek slammed his combined fists down across Thanatos’s back.) If anyone has any suggestions on how to kill this guy, I’m open to it. (Zarek) I’m out of dynamite. You got any grenades? (Jess) Not on me. (Zarek) Say die, Dark-Hunter. (Thanatos) Fine. Die, why don’t you? (Zarek)
Hey. (She took his chin in her hand so that she could move his head back and forth while she examined him.) You’re hurting in there. That would make akri very sad. He doesn’t like for his Dark-Hunters to hurt and the Simi don’t like it when akri is sad. Why are you hurt? (Simi)
It’s broke again, akri. The man downstairs done said that the Simi can’t charge nothing else until I’m not over my limit no more. I don’t know what that means, but I don’t like it. Fix it, akri, or else I might eat him. The Simi gots needs and I needs my plastic to work. (Simi)
The pleasures and the cares of the luckiest ambition, even of limitless power, are nothing next to the intimate happiness that tenderness and love give. I am man before being a prince, and when I have the good fortune to be in love, my mistress addresses a man and not a prince.
I've jokingly said that everything I'm doing now is filling up the hours before I die, but I do feel that slightly. I have no religious beliefs so this is the ride. This is it. So I'm just like anyone, I suppose, trying to fill out the days in the most interesting way possible.
Why are people so fascinated by how to eat Valomilks?’ She said, ‘Well, Dad, they’re round and they’re messy. But that’s what makes them fun. Once we get older we’re not supposed to be messy anymore. But for one moment when you’re eating a Valomilk, it’s okay to be messy again.
Finally, we might decide that civilisation itself is worth preserving. In that case we have to work out what to save and which people would be needed in a drastically reduced population - weighing the value of scientists and musicians against that of politicians, for example...
The two words, in the American lexicon, are never good. Pink slip. The first time I ever heard it when I was young was when Kaiser Steel handed out pink slips to many of my neighbors and relatives. Layoffs were about efficiency, sales figures for raw materials or refrigerators.
I remember the first time I saw you. Your hair was in two braids instead of one. And I remember when you... you sang in the music assembly and the teacher said... "Who knows The Valley Song?" and your hand shot straight up. After that, I... I watched you going home every day...