Quotes by Authors - Page 15

The late 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. They were an age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Seas or the West Indies, or better still for Paris, from which they could scatter to Majorca, Corsica, Capri or the isles of Greece. Paris itself was a modern city that seemed islanded in the past, and there were island countries, like Mexico, where Americans could feel that they had escaped from everything that oppressed them in a business civilization. Or without leaving home they could build themselves private islands of art or philosophy; or else - and this was a frequent solution - they could create social islands in the shadow of the skyscrapers, groups of close friends among whom they could live as unconstrainedly as in a Polynesian valley, live without moral scruples or modern conveniences, live in the pure moment, live gaily on gin and love and two lamb chops broiled over a coal fire in the grate. That was part of the Greenwich Village idea, and soon it was being copied in Boston, San Francisco, everywhere.
Malcolm Cowley
You're mad, you missionaries,' ejaculated Tai Haruru angrily. 'What good do you think you do, crawling out to the extremities of all the different world's ends and dying there like lizards spiked on sticks?'Brother Balaam jabbed his thumb over his shoulder at the church behind him. 'Ye'll get no civilization worth havin' in a new country unless ye lay down a few martyrs' bones for a foundation,' he said. 'They generate. Slow but sure.
Elizabeth Goudge
The civilizations barter in coldness; they peddles it, reinforces it, market it, entices with it, reward it, and then flees from it when it's unchecked force is too much to marvel at. Soon absolute zero will be on sale, and people will warm up to that notion as well.
Justin K. McFarlane Beau
According to an ancient Chinese legend, one day in the year 240 B.C., Princess Si Ling-chi was sitting under a mulberry tree when a silkworm cocoon fell into her teacup. When she tried to remove it, she noticed that the cocoon had begun to unravel in the hot liquid. She handed the loose end to her maidservant and told her to walk. The servant went out of the princess's chamber, and into the palace courtyard, and through the palace gates, and out of the Forbidden City, and into the countryside a half mile away before the cocoon ran out. (In the West, this legend would slowly mutate over three millennia, until it became the story of a physicist and an apple. Either way, the meanings are the same: great discoveries, whether of silk or of gravity, are always windfalls. They happen to people loafing under trees.)
Jeffrey Eugenides
The characters who go to make up my stories and novels are not portraits. Characters I invent along with the story that carries them. Attached to them are what I've borrowed, perhaps unconsciously, bit by bit, of persons I have seen or noticed or remembered in the flesh - a cast of countenance here, a manner of walking there, that jumps to the visualizing mind when a story is under way. I don't write by invasion into the life of a real person: my own sense of privacy is too strong for that; and I also know instinctively that living people to whom you are close - those known to you in ways too deep, too overflowing, ever to be plumbed outside love - do not yield to, could never fit into, the demands of a story. Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write most entirely out of yourself, that a character becomes in its own right another human being on the page.
Eudora Welty
Each spice has a special day to it. For turmeric it is Sunday, when light drips fat and butter-colored into the bins to be soaked up glowing, when you pray to the nine planets for love and luck.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Stop crying to the ocean, stop crying over me. Stop worrying over nothing, stop worrying over me. So it's been so long since you said, well I know what I want and what I want's right here with you.
Tegan Quin
Planning is worrying based on facts
Bangambiki Habyarimana
You worry too much." "Because you worry not enough.
A.E. Kirk
I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction," said Mathilde. "It is the only thing which cannot be bought.
Stendhal
The more it (vaccination) is supported by public authorities, the more will its dangers and disadvantages be concealed or denied.
M. Beddow Bayly
Since when has corruption everywhere, homes, streets, offices, become a Nigerian factor
Sunday Adelaja
protectionI requested the figures on OSHA whistle-blower complaints made and the number actually upheld. OSHA refused to supply them. They also refused to uphold my OSHA complaints and provide whistle-blower protection to me. My independent research leads me to understand that they uphold almost no OSHA whistle-blower complaints. It is very concerning that it seems like the same thing is happening with complaints made to Police Internal Affairs.
Steven Magee
If corruption had already taken root, then good seeds must be preserved.
Toba Beta
Inevitably came the time when he angrily repudiated his former paladin Yasser Arafat. In fact, he described him to me as 'the Palestinian blend of Marshal Petaín and Papa Doc.' But the main problem, alas, remained the same. In Edward's moral universe, Arafat could at last be named as a thug and a practitioner of corruption and extortion. But he could only be identified as such to the extent that he was now and at last aligned with an American design. Thus the only truly unpardonable thing about 'The Chairman' was his readiness to appear on the White House lawn with Yitzhak Rabin and Bill Clinton in 1993. I have real knowledge and memory of this, because George Stephanopoulos—whose father's Orthodox church in Ohio and New York had kept him in touch with what was still a predominantly Christian Arab-American opinion—called me more than once from the White House to help beseech Edward to show up at the event. 'The feedback we get from Arab-American voters is this: If it's such a great idea, why isn't Said signing off on it?' When I called him, Edward was grudging and crabby. 'The old man [Arafat] has no right to sign away land.' Really? Then what had the Algiers deal been all about? How could two states come into being without mutual concessions on territory?
Christopher Hitchens
Death and burial were a public spectacle. Shakespeare may have seen for himself the gravediggers at St Ann's, Soho, playing skittles with skulls and bones.
Catharine Arnold
Prospero, you are the master of illusion.Lying is your trademark.And you have lied so much to me(Lied about the world, lied about me)That you have ended by imposing on meAn image of myself.Underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior,That s the way you have forced me to see myselfI detest that image! What’s more, it’s a lie!But now I know you, you old cancer,And I know myself as well.
Aimé Césaire
Did you know, that one night; one moonless, clear, shining night; with the shadowy silhouettes of trees crisp against the star-filled sky – I, on the high, level terrace of my flat, stretched out my hand! Against all odds and possibilities of unbelief and grief – a life of searchings, discontent, and a nagging sense of unreality… A spider-web intuition of a spread-out, intricate illusion that wilfully withheld the truth from me.
Radhika Mukherjee
Oh, if only I could hurt with such misery once again, to feel the powers of love here inside my heart, the joys of heaven and the pains of hell!
Victor Villaseñor
If only they could listen with their hearts & not their minds, maybe then they would understand that often times it's the emotions not spoken that are longing to be heard.
Christine Upton
A chaotic mix of emotions churned inside him. Relief. Anger. Longing. She was the last person in the world he wanted to see. She was the only person in the world he wanted to see.
Laura Oliva
You know someone is special to you when you're literally captivated by them in even the little moments. The slightest thing they say or do, is like watching the universe unfold. And nothing else matters in those moments.Where you go about your day, & the most capricious of things send you into a whirlwind of thoughts connected to them. And a plethora of thoughts flood into your mind, for no apparent reason other than its them.Or perhaps, you randomly see a picture of them in your news feed & you just pause & look, & the world melts away & all time seems to stop, & there's a radiance that illuminates your life. And you focus on the little details, & wish you could just capture every single detail vividly. And you see their eyes, & though they're merely a moment in time, their eyes are so beautiful, that they transcend the medium & are as if they're there looking back. And all you can do it look into them. Knowing those eyes are what you could look into endlessly. And you know that it's all you could ever want, if for just a single moment in time.Or they share their thoughts, & you rack your brain around how they think. An you just want to understand & know more of their thoughts, simply because they're theirs.They, to you, are a more elegant work of art than even the finest painting, songs or poems of the great artists. And you know that even the most renowned artist couldn't conceive of a more perfect image of beauty. Leonardo, Van Gough, Rembrandt, Picasso, the most renowned artist of time would go mad in attempts to capture even a fraction of such a beautiful sight. That even Shakespeare couldn't put such a person into words. Though there's no doubt they're worthy of being the subject of a Shakespearean sonnet. But it could do no justice to their reality, that because there are no words that truly could ever describe them, even such an attempt would be like trying to describe the complex, wondrous & marvelous nature of the universe in but a single word.That no words, paintings, pictures, or thought could describe them & encapsulate the essence of their grace. And that though no one is truly perfect, they as a person through your eyes, reach a state as near perfect as you could imagine. And even dreams couldn't conceive of a greater wonder of life. It's as if the sum of all the beauty in the world can be found within this one person.It's wonderful, inspiring, breathtaking. Or rather, it's a whirlwind of emotions. Where the wonder & awe bleed into & merge with the disheartening longing, utter belief that you could not for a second touch that with you so desperately struggle & grasp for & an inability to even breath in the moments you're interacting with them.But it's all the more maddening because with all the wanting of your heart, you know it's wanting for something it could never have. That for all your wanting, you know such things are simply & purely unobtainable. And all you can do is hold to adoration & hopes. Hopes that you in your heart know fully are hopeless, but which you can't help but maintain. I think few things are more maddening than that feelings.Most people, when face with such a situation, might despair & grow cynical. But so seldom do we ever meet someone who so maddeningly captivates us, so seldom someone who's very existence throws your world upside down.In a time in which genuine emotion is a scarcity. And pseudo-emotions, frivolous & quick to fade, are rampant. The genuine article is something I cherish. When something makes you feel anything, it's something amazing. Regardless if it's a fervent concoction of the greatest good & the saddest sad. The experience of meeting such a person, who can spark such thoughts & feeling, is a genuine rarity. One in which a given person could go a lifetime without experiencing, but which is worth experiencing. And something that, though ultimately heartbreaking, I wouldn't give up experiencing.
Trevor Driggers
Sometimes I wish I could describe how wonderful I feel in those few seconds from the time he spreads his arms above his head, as if trying to grab hold of something, to the instant he vanishes into the water. But I can never find the right words. Perhaps it’s because he’s falling through time, to a place where words can never reach.
Yōko Ogawa
Operating in the interstices of communist China society was at once exhilarating and uncertain. There were no rules. Or rather, there was only one rule: that nothing is allowed. But the corollary, which reveals the true genius of China’s love of the grey – in contrast to the black and white of the West – is that everything is possible. Nothing is allowed but everything is possible. It’s just a matter of finding the right way to explain what you’re doing.
Graham Earnshaw
Out of the fog that shrouded the countryside, softening the outlines of people and things, demonstrators emerged, flags waved and speakers rose spontaneously to address spontaneous gatherings. Mostly they were people who had not been allowed to speak for years. They clambered on to piles of rock, balanced on the rims of fountains and on pedestals of statues whose removal they demanded, just as they demanded the removal of those who had bowed down before these statues. They spun visions of how everyone's life, including Pavel's own, would quickly be transformed and rise above the poverty in which it had for so long been mired. Others, who preferred actions to words, climbed onto rooftops to remove the snow-covered symbols of yesterday's power. They pulled down street signs and fastened in their place new plaques scrawled with names that until recently had been unmentionable, and they sometimes gathered threateningly under the windows of abandoned Party secretariats, ready to break in and begin, or rather complete, the purging. In every face he saw a kind of ecstasy that looked almost sexual.
Ivan Klíma
Why is it that we who have enjoyed the human free­doms which our forefathers fought so hard to win and to bequeath to us, do not, with the example of Russia before us, realize the horrors of life without freedom? Why is it that we cannot understand that there is no such thing as embracing Communism as an experiment? It is a one-way street, ending in a cul de sac of secret police terror, firing squads for the intellectuals and leaders and concentration camps and slave labor for the masses. There is no turning back; there is no escape.
Freda Utley
What had been a region of model farming became almost a desert, for more than half the population was exiled or sent to concentration camps. The young people left the villages, the boys to go to the factories if they could get jobs, or to become vagabonds if they couldn’t.***An echo of the tragic fate of Russia’s German Protestant population reached the world when the Mennonites flocked to Moscow and sought permission to leave the country. Some of these Germans had tried to obey the government and had formed collective farms, only to have them liquidated as Kulak collectives. Being first-class farmers, they had committed the crime of making even a Kolkhoz productive and prosperous.Others had quite simply been expropriated from their individual holdings. All were in despair. Few were allowed to leave Russia. They were sent to Siberia to die, or herded into slave labor concentration camps. The crime of being good farmers was unforgivable, and they must suffer for this sin.***Cheat or be cheated, bully or be bullied, was the law of life. Only the German minority with their strong religious and moral sense—the individual morality of the Protestant as opposed to the mass subservience demanded by the Greek Orthodox Church and the Soviet Government—retained their culture and even some courage under Stalin’s Terror.
Freda Utley
Now we will live!” This is what the hungry little boy liked to say, as he toddled along the quiet roadside, or through the empty fields. But the food that he saw was only in his imagination. The wheat had all been taken away, in a heartless campaign of requisitions that began Europe’s era of mass killing. It was 1933, and Joseph Stalin was deliberately starving Soviet Ukraine. The little boy died, as did more than three million other people. “I will meet her,” said a young Soviet man of his wife, “under the ground.” He was right; he was shot after she was, and they were buried among the seven hundred thousand victims of Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. “They asked for my wedding ring, which I….” The Polish officer broke off his diary just before he was executed by the Soviet secret police in 1940. He was one of about two hundred thousand Polish citizens shot by the Soviets or the Germans at the beginning of the Second World War, while Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union jointly occupied his country. Late in 1941, an eleven-year-old Russian girl in Leningrad finished her own humble diary: “Only Tania is left.” Adolf Hitler had betrayed Stalin, her city was under siege by the Germans, and her family were among the four million Soviet citizens the Germans starved to death. The following summer, a twelve-year-old Jewish girl in Belarus wrote a last letter to her father: “I am saying good-bye to you before I die. I am so afraid of this death because they throw small children into the mass graves alive.” She was among the more than five million Jews gassed or shot by the Germans.
Timothy Snyder
Instead of sniping at her like Mrs. Mi, Mrs. Ting let my mother do all sorts of things she wanted, like reading novels: before, reading a book without a Marxist cover would bring down a rain of criticism about being a bourgeois intellectual.
Jung Chang
It [the proletariat] should and must at once undertake socialist measures in the most energetic, unyielding and unhesitant fashion, in other words, exercise a dictatorship, but a dictatorship of the class, not of a party or of a clique – dictatorship of the class, that means in the broadest possible form on the basis of the most active, unlimited participation of the mass of the people, of unlimited democracy.
Rosa Luxemburg
American Progressives have declared war on the sanctity and autonomy of the individual.
A.E. Samaan
Having lived in a mythical country, a place neither here nor there, these intellectuals from Vilna and Gomel helped create another and called it the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Such a name! It was hardly a union. The Soviets - workers’ councils - ruled it for about six weeks; socialism impoverished everybody, and only machine guns kept the republics from turning into nations. But to Szarza and the rest it didn’t matter. He’d put his life on the line, preferring simply to die at the wrong end of a gun rather than the wrong end of a club, and for twelve years - until 1929, when Stalin finally took over - he lived in a kind of dream world, a mythical country where idealistic, intellectual Jews actually ran things, quite literally a country of the mind. Theories failed, peasants died, the land itself dried up in despair. Still they worked twenty hours a day and swore they had the answer.
Alan Furst
You might think that the Left could have a regime-change perspective of its own, based on solidarity with its comrades abroad. After all, Saddam's ruling Ba'ath Party consolidated its power by first destroying the Iraqi communist and labor movements, and then turning on the Kurds (whose cause, historically, has been one of the main priorities of the Left in the Middle East). When I first became a socialist, the imperative of international solidarity was the essential if not the defining thing, whether the cause was popular or risky or not. I haven't seen an anti-war meeting all this year at which you could even guess at the existence of the Iraqi and Kurdish opposition to Saddam, an opposition that was fighting for 'regime change' when both Republicans and Democrats were fawning over Baghdad as a profitable client and geopolitical ally. Not only does the 'peace' movement ignore the anti-Saddam civilian opposition, it sends missions to console the Ba'athists in their isolation, and speaks of the invader of Kuwait and Iran and the butcher of Kurdistan as if he were the victim and George W. Bush the aggressor.
Christopher Hitchens
He was a commander in the Russian army at a time when the Russians were our enemies and still part of the Soviet Union . This wasn't very long ago, Alex.The collapse of communism. It was only in 1989 that the Berlin Wall came down." She stopped. "I suppose none of this means very much to you.""Well, it wouldn't," Alex said. "I was only two years old.
Anthony Horowitz
A heart anchored in money will only drift away.
Anthony Liccione
Fulfilled desires, like pleasures (even of the intrinsic kind), are states of achievement rather than default states. For instance, one has to work at satiating oneself, while hunger comes naturally. After one has eaten or taken liquid, bowel and bladder discomfort ensues quite naturally and we have to seek relief. One has to seek out pleasurable sensations, in the absence of which blandness comes naturally. The upshot of this is that we must continually work at keeping suffering (including tedium) at bay, and we can do so only imperfectly. Dissatisfaction does and must pervade life. There are moments, perhaps even periods, of satisfaction, but they occur against a background of dissatisfied striving. Pollyannaism may cause most people to blur out this background, but it remains there.
David Benatar
Take notice of those intuitive whispers from the heart, they represent your true desires.
Steven Redhead
God desires that through us the ones who do not know him will be convinced
Sunday Adelaja
The real distinction between being great and being less great seems to be the extent to which we are willing to be pushed along by our own desires.
Melanie Brown
I recognized the handwriting, and my heart gave a skip; when I opened it I got a turn, for it began, 'To my beloved Hector,' and I thought, by God she's cheating on me, and has sent me the wrong letter by mistake. But in the second line was a reference to Achilles, and another to Ajax, so I understood she was just addressing me in terms which she accounted fitting for a martial paladin; she knew no better. It was a common custom at that time, in the more romantic females, to see their soldier husbands and sweethearts as Greek heroes, instead of the whore-mongering, drunken clowns most of them were. However, the Greek heroes were probably no better, so it was not far off the mark.
George MacDonald Fraser
A cynic by experience, a romantic by inclination and now a hero by necessity.
David Gemmell
People hide the truth to protect those they love!
Craig Mercier
I'll show Dunky he's not the only one in the family who can rush foolishly into danger!
Christopher Healy
Accidents happen. I will, um . . . I will pay to have your house rebuilt." "And my barn?" a woman called out. Liam sighed. "Yes, and your barn, too." "And my golden carousel?" shouted another man. "Will you pay for that?" Liam raised an eyebrow. "The giant smashed your golden carousel?" "No," said the man. "I'd just like to have a golden carousel.
Christopher Healy
Ha! Good luck, lady!" Gustav laughed and tapped his thick index finger against his temple. "No one knows what goes on inside this head. Not even me.
Christopher Healy
The medals of the dead heroes are the coins for the future. (Les médailles des héros morts - Sont les pièces pour l'avenir.)
Charles de Leusse
He was a man. Just a man. Yet, you always knew he'd succeed. He made you be what he wanted you to be.
Brandon Sanderson
Edilio is in hiding,” Astrid snapped. “Edilio has to worry about being kicked out of the country. Our Edilio.”“He’s got a volunteer lawyer—”But Astrid wasn’t done. “They should be putting up statues to Edilio. They should be naming schools after that boy—no, no, I’m not going to call him a boy. If he’s not a man, then I’ll never meet one.”Lana nodded approvingly, obviously enjoying and sharing in Astrid’s outrage.
Michael Grant
The life of hero is the tale of a person overcoming personal hardship and obstacles while striving to achieve an exultant victory that voices repressed citizens’ ecstatic thoughts and dreams.
Kilroy J. Oldster
We can't let the next generation grow up without heroes. Some of us have to fight on!
Avijeet Das
From there, a more difficult period began. Even the villains, the world's worst people, the one percent, what have you, imagine themselves to be the heroes of their own stories, and I saw myself this way. I, too, could be a hero or protagonist, and not some mere bystander in the greater drama of someone else's life. It was awkward to see a murderer as a hero, so I had to constantly remind myself of how Auggie's stepfather had been selfish and evil.
Alex Kudera
He had you in his room?" A dark cloud crosses Jeb’s face. “Do you swear he didn’t try anything?”“Scout’s honor.”He squeezes my waist, tickling me. “Too bad you were never a Scout.”I squirm and smile. “Nothing happened.”That’s a lie. Morpheus got to me in a big way, showing me a side of myself I can hardly believe exists—one I’m not sure Jeb will be able to accept.
A.G. Howard
Now, it’s time for me to lock up and go. Listen to me. Lock up an empty building that’s gonna be torn down. Makes no sense. Like an old man tellin’ a lie to his son from his death bed. What’s the point? Who besides yourself are you fooling?
Dan Groat
To come here and lie about your life you must have very big confidence and courage to do it.
Deyth Banger
In 5 minutes, 1 minute and many other phrases most of them are a lie..., but why do we say them?
Deyth Banger
So agressive, so much screaming, so cruel picture... But that's the truth, better the truth than the lie after a lie and a lie...
Deyth Banger
IF" - I lie I am going to add the best features... the peoplea around = features will be taken to build the best character, then I am going to stick on the lie. This is the thingy which helps us to get out of...
Deyth Banger
When you take pictures of nature with passion, nature poses for you more passionately!
Mehmet Murat ildan
So many books to read, will I ever finish reading?
Lailah Gifty Akita
God will bring into judgment both the righteous and the wicked, for there will be a time for every activity, a time to judge every deed.~Ecclesiastes 3:17
Jessica Fortunato