Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Oh no, I never do much ironing, except the outside clothes. We must not iron out the fresh air and sunshine, you know. It is much more healthful not to, the doctors say.” Seriously, there is something very refreshing about sheets and pillow slips just fresh from the line, after being washed and dried in the sun and air. Just try them that way and see if your sleep is not sweeter.
Fading, with the Night, the memory of a dead love, and the withered leaves of a blighted hope, and the sickly repinings and moody regrets that numb the best energies of the soul: and rising, broadening, rolling upward like a living flood, the manly resolve, and the dauntless will, and the heavenward gaze of faith-the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen!
In each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice. We’re each of us our own chiaroscuro, our own bit of illusion fighting to emerge into something solid, something real. We’ve got to forgive ourselves that. I must remember to forgive myself. Because there is a lot of grey to work with. No one can live in the light all the time.
Getting faculties to come to a consensus about something that they've never really thought about or had to worry about in their careers before can be a rather slow process and a long process, it certainly was the case at Harvard, and it's the case with most of the general education curricula that I know of, it takes four or five years just to get everybody on board with one idea.
No long-term marriage is made easily, and there have been times when I've been so angry or so hurt that I thought my love would never recover. And then, in the midst of near despair, something has happened beneath the surface. A bright little flashing fish of hope has flicked silver fins and the water is bright and suddenly I am returned to a state of love again - till next time.
This summer-sweet night is only one minute upon one minute upon another Beautiful cacophony, sugar upon lips, dancing to exhaustion I thought of you, before this minute upon another minute upon another Until, numb, my lips fell onto the mouth of another, and I was undone. ~from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter which is a fictional book in Ballad: A gathering of faerie
Ronan merely invested a look with as much contempt as he could muster. A lady reached over the top of Noah to pat Matthew's head fondly before continuing down the aisle. She didn't seem to care that he was fifteen, which was all right, because he didn't, either. Both Ronan and Declan observed this interaction with the pleased expressions of parents watching their prodigy at work.
Cole grasped a handful of vials and syringes with one hand and dumped them on the island in front of me. They rolled and whirled in misshapen circles on the counter surface. "Here are our options." My ears rang. "We have more than one?" "Three, precisely," Cole said. He pointed to each in turn. "That one makes you a wolf. That one makes me a wolf. That one gives us both seizures.
I believe I am becoming pathetic. I'll go further, I believe that I am in love with a flower-growing, wood-carving quarryman/carpenter/pig farmer. In fact, I know I am. Perhaps tomorrow I will become entirely miserable at the thought that he doesn't love me back - may, even, care for Remy- but at this precise moment I am succumbing to euphoria. My head and stomach feel quite odd.
Like the morning you walked out of that old house, when you were eighteen and I was, well, I had just turned nineteen, hadn't I? I was a nineteen-year-old and I was in love with Louis and I was in love with you, and I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful as the sight of you walking out a glass door in the early morning, still sleepy, in your underwear. Isn't it strange?
If you're creating a slave situation, you would almost never bring women. And if we look at Slavery for example, we look at the Greeks and the Romans, right? It was always men. They never brought any women. Because women carry the seeds of the revolution, right? And if you have the men by themselves, then you can do what the French did with the Blackfeet, which is breed them out.
My parents danced together, her head on his chest. Both had their eyes closed. They seemed so perfectly content. If you can find someone like that, someone who you can hold and close your eyes to the world with, then you're lucky. Even if it only lasts for a minute or a day. The image of them gently swaying to the music is how I picture love in my mind even after all these years.
I could buy myself paper, a pen, a pencil and a brush and could create pictures whenever and wherever I wanted. ... That evening, in the spring of 1947, on the embankment of the Seine in Paris, at the age of thirty, I saw that it was possible to live and work in the world, and that I could participate in the exchange of ideas that was taking place all around, bound to no country.
The genius of American culture and its integrity comes from fidelity to the light. Plain as day, we say. Happy as the day is long. Early to bed, early to rise. American virtues are daylight virtues: honesty, integrity, plain speech. We say yes when we mean yes and no when we mean no, and all else comes from the evil one. America presumes innocence and even the right to happiness.
Many of our miseries are merely comparative: we are often made unhappy, not by the presence of any real evil, but by the absence of some fictitious good; of something which is not required by any real want of nature, which has not in itself any power of gratification, and which neither reason nor fancy would have prompted us to wish, did we not see it in the possession of others.
Organized religion has too often followed the road of other people's institutions. It has made adjustments, compromises, and surrenders to a materialistic civilization for the benefit of material security in spite of occasional twinges of conscience and moral protests. The result has been that today much of organized religion is materialistically solvent but spiritually bankrupt.
But even as she told herself that, she remembered the way Cal had looked today with his shirt off while he’d stood on the ladder and scraped the side of Annie’s house. Watching those muscles bunch and flex every time he moved had made her crazy and she’d finally grabbed his shirt, thrown it at him, and delivered a stern lecture on the depletion of the ozone layer and skin cancer.
And now you're off to Port Caynn. Watch them sailor lads. They'll have your skirts up and a babe in your belly afore you know what you're about." "Everyone keep warning me about sailors," I complained. "Why can't someone tell the sailors to stay clear of me?" Granny snorted. "Oh, you're the fierce one now! Just take care no one else catches you unawares and knocks you on the nob!
We need to claim lunch back. It is our natural right. It has been stolen from us by our rulers. The fear that keeps you chained to your desk, staring at your screen, does not serve your spirit. Lunch is a time to forget about being sensible, practical, efficient. A proper lunch should be spiritually as well as physically nourishing. Cosy, convivial, a treat; lunch is for loafers.
If I do manage to come up with a scheme [to naming], however, I stick to it, which is why my cats are named after gods-Loki and Athena, who are, respectively, absolutely straightforward and affectionate, and dumber than dirt. I learned my lesson. I will name my next cat 'Satan' or 'Marduk' or something, thereby ensuring a kind, gentle beast who treats my upholstery like a shrine.
Let me take up your metaphor. Friendship is a vase, which, when it is flawed by heat or violence or accident, may as well be broken at once; it can never be trusted after. The more graceful and ornamental it was, the more clearly do we discern the hopelessness of restoring it to its former state. Coarse stones, if they are fractured, may be cemented again; precious stones, never.
a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he's already got. He'll cling to trouble he's used to before he'll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.
Some time in the night I got up, tiptoed to my window, and looked out at my doghouse. It looked so lonely and empty sitting there in the moonlight. I could see that the door was slightly ajar. I thought of the many times I had lain in my bed and listened to the squeaking of the door as my dogs went in and out. I didn't know I was crying until I felt the tears roll down my cheeks.
When you get out of the driver's seat, you find that life can drive itself, that actually life has always been driving itself. When you get out of the driver's seat, it can drive itself so much easier-it can flow in ways you never imagined. Life becomes almost magical. The illusion of the “me” is no longer in the way. Life begins to flow, and you never know where it will take you.
I had long ago discovered that when a word or formula refused to come to mind the best thing for it was to think of something else: tigers for instance or oatmeal. Then when the fugitive word was least expecting it I would suddenly turn the full blaze of my attention back onto it catching the culprit in the beam of my mental torch before it could sneak off again into the darkness.
When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.
If you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow
The thing no one tells you about surviving, about the mere act of holding out, is how many hours are nothing because nothing happens. They also don’t tell you about how you can share your deepest secrets with someone, kiss them, and the next hour it’s like there’s nothing between you because not everything can mean something all the time or you’d be crushed under the weight of it.
Obviously, Jews gain certain advantages by promoting the Holocaust idea. It inspires tremendous financial aid for Israel. It makes organized Jewry almost immune from criticism. Whether the Holocaust is real or not, the Jews clearly have a motive for fostering the idea that it occurred. Not only do they have a motive, but they have the means with the media domination they now hold.
To live (as I understand it) is to exist within a conception of time. But to remember is to vacate the very notion of time. Every memory, no matter how remote its subject, takes place 'Now,' at the moment it's called to the mind. The more something is recalled, the more the brain has a chance to refine the original experience. Because every memory is a re-creation, not a playback.
When you're cruising down the road in the fast lane and you lazily sail past a few hard-driving cars and are feeling pretty pleased with yourself and then accidently change down from fourth to first instead of third thus making your engine leap out of your hood in a rather ugly mess, it tends to throw you off stride in much the same way that this remark threw Ford Prefect off his.
The Anarchists' uncompromising rejection of the State, the subject of Marxian sneers for its "absolutist" and "Utopian" character, makes much better sense in the present era than the Marxist relativist and historical approach. The pacifists also seem to be more realistic than the Marxist both in their understanding of modern war and also in their attempts to do something about it.
The natural world around us shows the way to relief. All of life is maintained by the sun, by the air, by water, by the earth and its resources. And to whom was the sun given? To everyone. If there is any one thing that people do have in common, it is the gift of sunlight. But as the early Christians said, "If the sun were not hung so high, someone would have claimed it long ago."
I pray that I may never meddle, interfere, dictate, give advice that is not wanted, or assist when my services are not needed. If I can help people, I'll do it by giving them a chance to help themselves; and if I can uplift or inspire, let it be by example, inference and suggestion, rather than by injunction and dictation. That is to say, I desire to be Radiant -- to Radiate Life!
Do you believe in luck, Ludlow?" I had thought about this more than once in my life. "I believe some poeple are luckier than others."..."Which do you believe in, luck or Destiny?" Joe considered a moment befoe replying, "We make our own luck, Ludlow, by our actions and our state of mind. As such you control your own fate. Oney one thing is certain: None of us can escape the grave.
When people go to a new country, whether as refugees or immigrants, kids usually assimilate easily, but it's much harder for the grownups. Especially, oftentimes, for the mothers, because they are usually confined to the house. They're not going to school, and they're not necessarily holding down a job. It's tough. It's not easy to assimilate to a new culture when you're an adult.
Opinions are not to be learned by rote, like the letters of an alphabet, or the words of a dictionary. They are conclusions to be formed, and formed by each individual in the sacred and free citadel of the mind, and there enshrined beyond the arm of law to reach, or force to shake; ay! and beyond the right of impertinent curiosity to violate, or presumptuous arrogance to threaten.
It's one thing to be sitting at a drawing board, alone in your home and coming up with a fantasy character, and drawing her whichever way you feel like drawing, then dealing with a real performer. All of a sudden, things change. It's amazing, in working with actors, how much I learn from them and how many new lines will come to mind because of their personality or their strengths.
Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern. The country is grey and brown and white in trees, snows and skies of laughter always diminishing, less funny not just darker, not just grey. It may be the coldest day of the year, what does he think of that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, perhaps I am myself again.
I'm not sure I would call it agony but there is a kind of cyclic frustration. You get one story right and then here comes another one. When does that end? What I'm trying to do is get it to end right now, by recognizing that that cycle is writing. That is: trying to understand the frustrations and setbacks (and agony) as part of a bigger chess game you are playing with art itself.
[There is] one distinctly human thing - the story. There can be as good science about a turnip as about a man. ... [Or philosophy, or theology] ...There can be, without any question at all, as good higher mathematics about a turnip as about a man. But I do not think, though I speak in a manner somewhat tentative, that there could be as good a novel written about a turnip as a man.
In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,'" she repeats, making sure of it. If she had paper and pencil, it wouldn't surprise me if she wrote it down. "So what does that really mean? In simple terms." I think it over. It takes me a while to gather my thoughts, but she waits patiently. "I think it means," I say, "that chance encounters are what keep us going. In simple terms.
Time is not measured by the years that you live But by the deeds that you do and the joy that you give- And each day as it comes brings a chance to each one To love to the fullest, leaving nothing undone That would brighten the life or lighten the load Of some weary traveler lost on Life's Road- So what does it matter how long we may live If as long as we live we unselfishly give.
An Albanian’s house is the dwelling of God and the guest.’ Of God and the guest, you see. So before it is the house of its master, it is the house of one’s guest. The guest, in an Albanian’s life, represents the supreme ethical category, more important than blood relations. One may pardon the man who spills the blood of one’s father or of one’s son, but never the blood of a guest.
The shed of leaves became a cascade of red and gold and after a time the trees stood skeletal against a sky of weathered tin. The land lay bled of its colors. The nights lengthened, went darker, brightened in their clustered stars. The chilled air smelled of wood smoke, of distances and passing time. Frost glimmered on the morning fields. Crows called across the pewter afternoons.
Companies that actually survive and flourish are going to change their business model from production to aggregating the networks and the network services and solutions. If you're a construction company or an IT company or a logistics company or an information data operation, to the extent that you can find ways to help build the commons, you can get some commercial value in that.
Pain and pleasure, good and evil, come to us from unexpected sources. It is not there where we have gathered up our brightest hopes, that the dawn of happiness breaks. It is not there where we have glanced our eye with affright, that we find the deadliest gloom. What should this teach us? To bow to the great and only Source of light, and live humbly and with confiding resignation.
Misha's importance and distinctiveness are beginning to be noticed, there's beginning to be some kind of rip-tide here that will soon become a wave of recognition for a book that the world is beginning to catch up to... We weren't ready before. We'd better be ready now. Because it's the 21st century, any minute now, and that means that Misha's time has come. In more ways than one.
[Donald] Trump is explained with the intersection of a number of things: our economic crisis, the way it's easier to blame immigrants, with the happenstance that he discovered that by bashing Latino immigrants and characterizing them as "rapists" and "murderers" and "scumbags," suddenly he's got this groundswell of support from a group of people who were raised on this vocabulary.
You can read minds, and you didn't tell me?” Link stared at me like he just found out I was the Silver Surfer. He rubbed his head nervously. “Hey, man, all that stuff about Lena? I was yankin’ your chain.” He looked away. “Are you doin’ it now? You're doin’ it, aren't you? Dude, get out of my head.” He backed away from me and into the bookshelf. “I can't read your mind, you idiot.