Quotes by Writers - Page 139

...I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do.I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul, - and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because "there is no flesh in his obdurate heart."I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.
Frederick Douglass
A kiss is a course of procedure cunningly devised, for the mutual stopage of speech at a moment when words are superfluous.
Oliver Herford
There is a folk-tale about a shoemaker and his wife who were so poor that they had to send their many children out into the world to make a living. The lads went through many a perilous adventure but came home in the end, unscathed, to help their mother. They had always remembered their mother's advice and wise words; they often quoted them when they were in trouble, and in fact they recognized one another by them in foreign lands.The countless peoples of the world may be looked upon as so many children sent out into the world. They have gone through many adventures and hardships. They have drifted apart and fallen out with one another, on many occasions. They have failed to realize soon enough that they are brothers.But now it seems that they are beginning to realize this -- at least to the extent that they are able to get acquainted with each other's fundamental natures -- through their stories and songs.
Gyula Illyés
Music and comedy are so linked. The rhythm of comedy is con­nected to the rhythm of music. They’re both about creating tension and knowing when to let it go. I’m always surprised when somebody funny is not musical.
Conan O'Brien
She knew this man's smile, his gentle ways of love, but not his godlike fury in the storm. She might snare him in a fragile net of music, love and flowers, but, at each departure, he would break forth without, it seemed to her, the least regret.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
For the music to be over so soon. For the music to be over when it had just begun. That was really sad.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life.
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution.
Emma Goldman
Have you ever heard somebody sing some lyrics that you've never sung before, and you realize you've never sung the right words in that song? You hear them and all of a sudden you say to yourself, 'Life in the Fast Lane?' That's what they're saying right there? You think, 'why have I been singing 'wipe in the vaseline?' how many people have heard me sing 'wipe in the vaseline?' I am an idiot.
Ellen DeGeneres
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Aldous Huxley
Make the mental physical, and the physical mental, and things will improve.
A.M. Homes
The hobgoblin of a little mind may be the genius of a great one.
Hermester Barrington
No matter where you're from or what you've done, you're never stuck in a particular circumstance, relationship, or cycle unless you say you are.
Russell Simmons
Later, as she drove the children to school, she thought how worn the grooves were along which they moved their quarrels. She could feel herself saying all the clichéd phrases of a thousand injured women before her, but she could never stop herself. - ‘The Negotiated Settlement
Petina Gappah
Nafsha is so concerned with my virginity. I am beginning to think she would wed me herself. Alas, the only tool she might use to make me a woman is her tongue -- and it is far too sharp for me to allow it beneath my skirts.
Libbie Hawker
Only about 3 percent of animal species are monogamous. A couple of penguins, some otters and a few other oddball critters. To these select few it comes natural to mate for life and never look at another member of the opposite sex. Humans are not part of that little club. Like the other 97% of species, humans are not monogamous by nature. We just pretend that we are.
Oliver Markus
Home cooking is the true embodiment of love. It makes us show patience, kindness, humility, hope, and perseverance.
Agus Ekanurdi
put Rachel facing the door, in a faint subtle effort to make her know that if he had only had enough money and had managed to finish the thesis, he might well have asked her to be his hostess and share her life with him.
M.F.K. Fisher
Why hadn't that been part of his stupid lifelong redemption program: Do what my wife asks immediately so she doesn't feel like a nag.
Liane Moriarty
The bonds between husband and wife spring from deep laws of destiny and should not be broken lightly.
Lian Hearn
If he could just have one more chance, he'd act like the man he'd always believed himself to be.
Liane Moriarty
He knew how the audition was going to affect their lives for the next ten weeks as she slowly lost her mind from nerves and the strain of trying to scrounge precious practice time from an already jam-packed life. No matter how much time poor Sam gave her, it would never be quite enough, because what she actually needed was for him and the kids to just temporarily not exist. She needed to slip into another dimension where she was a single, childless person. Just between now and the audition. She needed to go to a mountain chalet (somewhere with good acoustics) and live and breathe nothing but music. Go for walks. Meditate. Eat well. Do all those positive-visualization exercises young musicians did these days. She had an awful suspicion that if she were to do this in reality, she might not even miss Sam and the children that much, or if she did miss them, it would be quite bearable.
Liane Moriarty
She meant that they'd never used words like "separation" and "divorce" even in their worst screaming matches. They yelled things like, "You're infuriating!" "You don't think!" "You are the most annoying woman in the history of annoying women!" "I hate you!" "I hate you more!" and they always, always used the word "always," even though Clementine's mother had said you should never use that word in an argument with your spouse, as in, for example, "You always forget to refill the water jug!" (But Sam did always forget. It was accurate.)
Liane Moriarty
This was historical revisionism at its best, and hadn't Sam always specialized in that, hadn't she always said she wished she had a permanent film rolling of their life so she could go back and prove that, yes, he did so say that thing he now denied?
Liane Moriarty
The ''good-enough marriage'' is definitely not good enough for today's singles. We're not content to marry someone who happens to live down the street and gets along okay with our parents.
Aziz Ansari
Honey, when you say we can't communicate... what exactly do you mean?
Randy Glasbergen
It's about making a choice to make your marriage a priority, to, kind of, put that at the top of the page, as your mission statement or something.
Liane Moriarty
Marriages are made in heaven. When Allah made a creature, He also made the creature's mate
Farahad Zama
...if he had married Mrs. Albert Grantham for her money I freely admit that no man marries without a reason and with her it would have been next to impossible to think up another one....
Rex Stout
All the tiny things made this mammoth union up, all the times he had picked her up from Sutherland station, made her chicken salad rolls and brought her a Lipton's iced tea, called her about Sunday and fixed Nina's shed door hinge, held her and not fucked her when she was dying with period pain, thought of what she said last night and made something of it the following afternoon, all these unspectacular deposits of love he had made and they were the currency, earning enough to have her see that he was nothing but the right one.
Brendan Cowell
Those were the best days in the life of Tancredi and Angelica, lives later to be so variegated, so erring, against the inevitable background of sorrow. But that they did not know then; and they were pursuing a future which they deemed more concrete than it turned out to be, made of nothing but smoke and wind. When they were old and uselessly wise their thoughts would go back to those days with insistent regret; they had been days when desire was always present because it was always overcome, when many beds had been offered and refused, when the sensual urge, because restrained, had for one second been sublimated in renunciation, that is into real love.
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Not all marriages are made in heaven. Some, probably most, are constructed here on earth for any number of reason.
Farahad Zama
I told him I had, perhaps, different notions of matrimony from what the received custom had given us of it; that I thought a woman was a free agent as well as a man, and was born free, and, could she manage herself suitably, might enjoy that liberty to as much purpose as the men do; that the laws of matrimony were indeed otherwise, and mankind at this time acted quite upon other principles, and those such that a woman gave herself entirely away from herself, in marriage, and capitulated, only to be, at best, but an upper servant, and from the time she took the man she was no better or worse than the servant among the Israelites, who had his ears bored—that is, nailed to the door-post—who by that act gave himself up to be a servant during life; that the very nature of the marriage contract was, in short, nothing but giving up liberty, estate, authority, and everything to the man, and the woman was indeed a mere woman ever after—that is to say, a slave.
Daniel Defoe
Meanwhile, Susan looked carefully into each of our faces. She was actually waiting for us to answer, to give reasons why people fall in love and get married. Nobody knows, I wanted to say. Nobody really knows. But that doesn't mean you're allowed to not do it.
Rebecca Lee
Tired as I was of conflict, I felt that I must not shrink from the fight, nor abandon in cowardice the attempt to prove, as no theories could ever satisfactorily prove without examples, that marriage and motherhood need never tame the mind, nor swamp and undermine ability and training, nor trammel and domesticise political perception and social judgement. Today, as never before, it was urgent for individual women to show that life was enriched, mentally and spiritually as well as physically and socially, by marriage and children; that these experiences rendered the woman who accepted them the more and not the less able to take the world's pulse, to estimate its tendencies, to play some definite, hard-headed, hard-working part in furthering the constructive ends of a political civilisation
Vera Brittain
That's the mistake people make - always searching for the perfect match, when they would be just as happy if they settled for somebody reasonably good.
Farahad Zama
There is no such thing as a perfect match. There are only somewhat good and somewhat bad matches. A couple are like two pebbles that are next to each other on a beach. They will have rough edges and rub each other the wrong way initially. But as they spend time together and the waves pound them, the edges rub off and they will seem made for each other.
Farahad Zama
...sometimes I do actually forget that the person to whom I owe that love is a real person, complete in himself, not someone who should make do with some rather diffuse emotion which gradually resigns itself to its own fatal vagueness, as if that were a fate against which there were no possible appeal...
José Saramago
It is within the bonds of marriage that I, for one, found a greater freedom to be and to become and to share myself thatn I can imaine ever having found in any other kind of relationship.
Frederick Buechner
What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The marriage institution cannot exist among slaves, and one sixth of the population of democratic America is denied it's privileges by the law of the land. What is to be thought of a nation boasting of its liberty, boasting of it's humanity, boasting of its Christianity, boasting of its love of justice and purity, and yet having within its own borders three millions of persons denied by law the right of marriage?
Frederick Douglass
I've been poked and prodded in places I'd always prided myself on keeping untouched for that one special doctor who gives me a ring and a promise someday.
Libba Bray
The conception of two people living together for twenty-five years without having a cross word suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep
A.P. Herbert
The most out-there thing I’m saying is, ‘Don’t have babies. Don’t get married and have kids. Have a larger life than that.
Roseanne Barr
To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock.
Emma Goldman
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Love is it's own protection.
Emma Goldman
A good wife always forgives her husband when she's wrong.
Milton Berle
Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.
Voltaire
They say being in love and loving someone are two different things, right? I mean, you love your best friend, but you love your husband, right? Falling in love with someone is easy. It's loving when the newness has worn off, when life gets tough, when things get in the way, when physical passion is gone, that true love remains. When love can conquer it all.
Mia Asher
Anyone could see that this woman is living a nightmare. Except that she goes through her daily life wide awake, knowing that she could make a mistake at any moment.
Núria Añó
Ahab and aguish lay stretched together in one hammock.
Herman Melville
It hurt like hell, but at least it felt true. Her mind could settle into that pain.
Faith McKay
Suffering is normal. Pain is normal, it is part of life... What is its texture, the weight of our suffering? What is its meaning? Begin by touching it, by coming close to it, accepting it: Hello, suffering, I am here with you. I am beside you, one with you, I am you. I am suffering.
A.M. Homes
She threw herself across her bed, weeping into a pillow. She knew just what she wanted -- the desire was a fierce ache inside her. But fiercer still was the knowledge that it was beyond the reach of a female.
Libbie Hawker
But if a person hasn't ever experienced true despair, she grows old never knowing how to evaluate where she is in life; never understanding what joy really is. I'm grateful for it.
Banana Yoshimoto
Sometimes there was the pure, primal pain of grief, and other times there was anger, the frantic desire to claw and hit and kill, and sometimes, like right now, ther was just ordinary, dull sadness, settling itself softly, suffocatingly over her like a heave fog.She was just so damned sad.
Liane Moriarty
You okay, Mum?" said Rob."I'm fine," said Rachel. She went to reach for her cup of coffee and found that she didn't have the energy to even lift her arm.
Liane Moriarty
Sometimes at night when the moon is almost full and my hands go numb from writing, I cleanse myself of her poisoned love. I welcome the water, the inevitability of death and embrace the long painful road out of love.
A.P. Sweet
The youth who, like a woman, loves to adorn his person, has renounced all claim to wisdom and to glory; glory is due to those only who dare to associate with pain, and have trampled pleasure under their feet.
François Fénelon