Quotes by Writers - Page 140

Why are those who knew him, when they pass from the memory of a young man, sensitive and gay, to the work – novels and writings – surprised to pass into a nocturnal world, a world of cold torment, a world not without light but in which light blinds at the same time that it illuminates; gives hope, but makes hope the shadow of anguish and despair? Why is it that he who, in his work, passes from the objectivity of the narratives to the intimacy of the Diary, descends into a still darker night in which the cries of a lost man can be heard? Why does it seem that the closer one comes to his heart, the closer one comes to an unconsoled center from which a piercing flash sometimes bursts forth, an excess of pain, excess of joy? Who has the right to speak of Kafka without making this enigma heard, an enigma that speaks with the complexity, with the simplicity, of enigma?
Maurice Blanchot
She stares at it for several moments before taking it out from underneath the plastic film that covers it. Then she holds it with the affection of a mother for her new-born child, tender and loving; Preeti’s eyes soften briefly just for that moment. The lava of hurt makes way into her throat, setting ablaze all that she has held within. As memories meet sentience, the apartment echoes with her muffled cries. The photograph, a silent spectator, drenches in her grief as the tears start their descent.
Faraaz Kazi
Remember: God's grief at the unspeakable things we do to one another is beyond measuring, but so is His mercy. It might seem a terrible thing to say to people who've lost and suffered so much at the hands of hatred and violence. But true courage is not to hate our enemy, any more than to fight and kill him. To love him, to love in the teeth of his hate—that is real bravery. That ought to earn people m-m-medals.
Tony Hendra
We had each reacted differently in a moment of terror, and yet we both still hurt. Maybe there was no right or wrong, no black or white, only a thousand shades of grey when it came to pain and what we each held ourselves responsible for.
Mia Sheridan
Every day I thank God for giving me a little kind heart which bears this life
Ahlam Salhab
Over many a race the sun's bright net was spreadAnd loosed their pearls nor left them even a thread.This dire world delights us, though all sup—All whom she mothers—from one mortal cup.Choose from two ills: which rather in the mainSuits you? —to perish or to live in pain?
Abul 'Ala' Al-Ma'arri
Tell me, what kind of functions does pain have when one is convicted to 100 whippings in Saudie Arabia? You claim pain has a function, I claim that's scientific rubbish. The only thing pain really does is cause an instant reaction that is not rational and usually quite erratic. The famous example of the hand in boiling water, for example. You say it proves pain has a function. But exactly because of the spasmic reaction lots and lots of people will drop the bowl with boiling water over their entire bodies causing serious burns. So what was the 'function' of this pain? Pain and fear cause confusion and trauma. If pain actually did have a rational function, chronic pain would not exist.
Martijn Benders
Don't hold onto things, it will only bring you pain.
Ellen DeGeneres
For it is just this question of pain that partsus. So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick; so long as your ownpains drive you; so long as pain underlies your propositions aboutsin,—so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurelywhat an animal feels.
H.G.Wells
If not towards his case to give him glimpses of what could be a happy future, it stayed back at least to warrant her happiness, stayed back with the pain that strangely didn’t hurt anymore.
Faraaz Kazi
I mean, in the last few months alone, I've been pinned in a big set of white-water rapids, been bitten by an angry snake in a jungle, had a close escapewith a big mountain rockfall, narrowly avoided being eaten by a huge croc in the Australian swamps, and had to cut away from my main parachute and come down on my reserve, some five thousand feet above the Arctic plateau.When did all this craziness become my world?It's as if - almost accidentally - this madness had become my life. And don't get me wrong - I love it all.The game, though, now, is to hang on to that life. Every day is the most wonderful of blessings, and a gift that I never, ever take for granted.Oh, and as for the scars, broken bones, aching limbs and sore back?I consider them just gentle reminders that life is precious - and that maybe, just maybe, I am more fragile than I dare to admit.
Bear Grylls
The tears of my eyes watered your heart but failed to evoke a response from the barren grounds of what beats in you. They will still come and I will welcome them because they contain you.
Faraaz Kazi
The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the painin the world had found a voice
H.G.Wells
Generosity without delicacy, like wit without judgement, generally gives as much pain as pleasure.
Fanny Burney
My head ached. I was thinking of the pain, and wondering how it was possible for physical agony to be so intense. I had never imagined that such a torture could be endured. Yet here was I, both conscious and able to think clearly. And not only to think, but to observe the process and make calculations about it. The steel circle round my skull was closing in with faint cracking noises. How much farther could it shrink? I counted the cracking sounds. Since I took the triple dose of pain-killer, there had been two more. …I took out my watch and laid it on the table.“Give me morphia,” I said in a calm, hostile, icy tone.“You mustn’t take morphia! You know perfectly well. The very idea! And what are you doing with that watch?”“You will give me morphia within three minutes.”They looked me uneasily up and down. No one moved. Three minutes went by. Then ten more. I slipped the watch calmly into my pocket and rose unsteadily to my feet.“Then take me to the Fiakker Bar. They say it’s a good show, and to-night I want to enjoy myself.”The others jumped up with a feeling of relief.I never confessed the secret to anyone, either then or afterwards. I had made up my mind at the end of those three minutes — for the first and last time in my life — that if my headache had not stopped within the next ten I should throw myself under the nearest tram.It never came out whether I should have kept to my resolve, for the pain left with the suddenness of lighting.
Frigyes Karinthy
Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.
Rohinton Mistry
George stared at the dove. What would she say if she could speak to him? What would she wish for, for her father? For she, too, had been harmed by a man who had meant to show his utmost love for her.It made George wonder why love was suppose to be such a wonderful thing. As far as he could tell, love was just another excuse for causing pain.
Mette Ivie Harrison
I never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out ofexistence by evolution sooner or later. Did you? And pain gets needless.
H.G.Wells
To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.
Herman Melville
How many memories can come through at once before they are just jumbled words and faces mixed together by years of pain?
Rebecca Maizel
It is when suffering finds a voice andsets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.
H.G.Wells
I can see his pain, see it in the way he runs his fingers through his hair, over and over, and I understand what it costs him to hide it all.
Libba Bray
We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity.
H.G.Wells
Then when I saw Pain attack Hinata, I was so mad, so full of rage, I let the Nine-Tails take over without even thinking about it.
Masashi Kishimoto
Pain was a fascinating horror
Aldous Huxley
Everyone says love hurts, but that is not true. Loneliness hurts. Rejection hurts. Losing someone hurts. Envy hurts. Everyone gets these things confused with love, but in reality love is the only thing in this world that covers up all pain and makes someone feel wonderful again. Love is the only thing in this world that does not hurt.
Meša Selimović
When a person screams in pain, the actual pain is only half the noise they make. The other half is the terror at being forced to accept that they exist.
Noah Cicero
Forgetting about our mistakes and our wounds isn't enough to make them disappear.
Ai Yazawa
Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Every war, no matter how brutal, is built on the premise that one day, when all is said and done, the ends will justify the means. But over and over again we learn that in real life, there is no ends. There’s just the means. All there is is means.
Raphael Bob-Waksberg
For so many families, here and abroad, the war is just beginning. The emotional and political fallout will crawl across generations—the casualties can never be fully counted.Every war, no matter how brutal, is built on the premise that one day, when all is said and done, the ends will justify the means. But over and over again we learn that in real life, there is no ends. There’s just the means. All there is is means.
Raphael Bob-Waksberg
The first act in the training of a warrior should be how to string his rifle and turn it into a guitar
Agona Apell
Go into the London Stock Exchange – a more respectable place than many a court – and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker. On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies some go to the Synagogue and others for a drink, this one goes to be baptized in a great bath in the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, that one has his son’s foreskin cut and has some Hebrew words he doesn’t understand mumbled over the child, others go to heir church and await the inspiration of God with their hats on, and everybody is happy.
Voltaire
Cell phones are certainly not necessary, and "but I'm from the digital age, this is what everyone in my generation is doing!" isn't a very good excuse for being hooked on a glowing screen 24/7. In the 1960's every teen of the times was tripping on acid and running off to find themselves in communes and love buses. It was a fad, there was no excuse for it and it passed, just like I think that this generation's "cell phones are necessary for socialization" fad will eventually pass. What will it bring afterwards? I don't even want to know, but I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope that it isn't anything else digital.
Rebecca McNutt
A federation of all humanity, together with a sufficient measure of social justice, to ensure health, education, and a rough equality of opportunity to most of the children born into the world, would mean such a release and increase of human energy as to open a new phase in human history.
H.G.Wells
The contention that a standing army and navy is the best security of peace is about as logical as the claim that the most peaceful citizen is he who goes about heavily armed.
Emma Goldman
The contradiction is resolved when you realize that for Jesus peace seems to have meant not the absence of struggle, but the presence of love. -p83
Frederick Buechner
Jesus of Nazareth told us to say these twelve words when we prayed: 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.' ... And for those words alone, he deserves to be called ;the Prince of Peace.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
Herman Melville
Of course, peace treaties are very attractive to those who sign them. They strengthen one's prestige with the electorate. But the time will come when the names of these public figures will be erased from history. Nobody will remember them any longer. But the Western peoples will have to pay heavily for these overtrusting agreements.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
We're all latchkey kids a threshold from peace.
S. Kelley Harrell
The brainless serenity of charwomen and janitors working late at night came over us. In a messy world we were at least making our little corner clean.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I don't just want to ban The Bomb. I want to ban all bombs, whatever, and all bombers, whoever, and all bombings, whyever. There have to be better ways of saying no and making changes.
Aidan Chambers
Since nothing is absolute There is no absolute silence, Only an appearance Of temporary peace.
Dejan Stojanovic
We are all born and someday we’ll all die. Most likely to some degree alone.What if our aloneness isn’t a tragedy? What if our aloneness is what allows us to speak the truth without being afraid? What if our aloneness is what allows us to adventure – to experience the world as a dynamic presence – as a changeable, interactive thing?If I lived in Bosnia or Rwanda or who knows where else, needless death wouldn’t be a distant symbol to me, it wouldn’t be a metaphor, it would be a reality.And I have no right to this metaphor. But I use it to console myself. To give a fraction of meaning to something enormous and needless.This realization. This realization that I will live my life in this world where I have privileges.I can’t cool boiling waters in Russia. I can’t be Picasso. I can’t be Jesus. I can’t save the planet single-handedly.I can wash dishes.
Rachel Corrie
It is a bad world, Donatus, an incredibly bad world. But I have discovered in the midst of it a quiet and good people who have learned the great secret of life. They have found a joy and wisdom which is a thousand times better than any of the pleasures of our sinful life. They are despised and persecuted, but they care not. They are masters of their souls. They have overcome the world. These people, Donatus, are Christians. . . and I am one of them.
Cyprian
Peace does not dwell in outward things but within the soul; we may preserve it in the midst of the bitterest pain, if our will remains firm and submissive. Peace in this life springs from acquiescence to, not an exemption from, suffering.
François Fénelon
There's a non-existent peace in the uncertain quietness
Fernando Pessoa
The world never leaves one in ignorance or in peace.
Ouida
There is no peace, I'm sorry to say. We find it. We lose it. We find it again. We lose it again.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Resolution, like responsibility, is a product of ownership, and kids can't resolve a conflict until they figure out how they contributed to it.
Richard Eyre
In certain situations, manifesting anger is the right attitude; in others it is not the right thing to manifest because it will only add to the violence. In the first case, anger unblocks the conflict and causes another to become more conscious. In the latter, it only adds to the unconsciousness and inflames the conflict. (73)
Jean-Yves Leloup
My Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little gate, I would not hop away—but oh how I sing in my gold cage.
A.S. Byatt
Why is it that people who are absorbed by something are seen as sad? I can't explain it, but for me it reverses the true state of affairs. To be engaged is to be a part, to be absorbed and fulfilled. To be cool, to be detached from things and to have no passionate feelings is the real sadness. At the heart of depression, that quintessentially modern malaise, is a deep sense of separation from the rest of life.
Mark Cocker
This world is your world but that doesn't mean you can always stop it from burning.
Oli Anderson
It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used, but not owned. ... We are tenants and not possessors, lovers and not masters.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
The nature of everything is, fair and based on justice. We make that unfair and unjust.
Ehsan Sehgal
Your planet's immune system is trying to get rid of you.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I think I like wildflowers best," I explain. "They just grow wherever they want. No one has to plant them. And then their seeds blow in the wind and they find a new place to grow." (Richelle)
Rebecca Donovan
Now that I have definitely begun to live I find myself more and more convinced that civilization with its trappings and artificialities is not so good as nature.
H.S. Ede