Quotes by Writers - Page 77

It seemed to her everyone had too much self-protective pride to truly strip off down to their souls in front of their long-term partners. It was easier to pretend there was nothing more to know, to fall into an easygoing companionship. It was almost embarrassing to be truly intimate with your spouse; because how could you watch someone floss one minute, and the next minute share your deepest passion or tritest of fears? It was almost easier to talk about that sort of thing before you’d shared a bathroom and a bank account and argued over the packing of the dishwasher.
Liane Moriarty
To be content in utter darkness and ignorance is indeed unmanly, and therefore we think that to love light and find knowledge must always be right. Yet wherever pride has any share in the work, even knowledge and light may be ill pursued. Knowledge is good, and light is good: yet man perished in seeking knowledge, and moths perish in seeking light; and if we, who are crushed before the moth, will not accept such mystery as is needful to us, we shall perish in like manner.
John Ruskin
A splinter of pride got in under my breast-bone and lodged there.
Lia Mills
Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.
Herman Melville
And this man, who had sailed round Europe and navigated the Great Northern Route, leaned happily over half a ladleful of thin oatmeal kasha, cooked entirely without fat - just oats and water.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
In the first place , I was removed from all the wickedness of the world here. I had neither the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, or the pride of life. I had nothing to covet; for I had all that I was now capable of enjoying.
Daniel Defoe
The President was in seventh heaven when he heard himself being teased like this; he strutted about and thrust his chest out; never did a man of the robe stick out his neck so far, not even one who has just hanged a man.
Marquis de Sade
Needing attention is a p-p-powerful force in the world, isn't it?""Absolutely. Most people would think of it as a very natural need. Almost a right.""By 'natural' you mean 'm-m-morally neutral'?""Touché.""Without God, people find it very hard to know who they are or why they exist. But if others pay attention to them, praise them, write about them, discuss them, they think they've found the answers to both questions.""If they don't believe in God, you can't blame them.""True, dear. But it still makes for an empty, unhappy person."..."Are you saying, Father Joe, that in the matter of motives, or even morally, there's not ultimately much difference between me and my targets?""I'm afraid not, dear. If the result is that you only have a personality other people shape. If you really exist only in other people's minds.""I think you've just described celebrity.""I've just described pride, dear.
Tony Hendra
She was like a queen who beholds the virgin soil of her kingdom invaded and wasted by a traitor.Any other thing she would have pardoned: infidelity, indifference, cruelty, any sins of manhood's caprice or passion, but who should pardon this? The sin was not alone against herself; it was against every law of decency and truth that ever she had been taught to hold sacred; it was against all those great dead, who lay with the cross on their breasts and their swords by their side, from whom she had received and treasured the traditions of honor and purity of race.It was those dead knights whom he had smote upon the mouth and mocked, crying to them: 'Lo! your place is mine; my sons will reign in your stead. I have tainted your race forever; for every my blood flows with yours!'The greatness of a race is a thing far higher than mere pride. Its instincts are noble and supreme. Its obligations are no less than its privileges; it is a great light which streams backward through the darkness of the ages, and if by that light you guide not your footsteps, then are you thrice accursed, holding as you do that lamp of honor in your hands.So she had always thought, and now he had dashed the lamp in the dust.--"Wanda
Ouida
Fits of anger, vexation,and bitterness against ourselves tend to pride and they spring from no other source than self-love, which is disturbed and upset at seeing that it is imperfect.
Francis de Sales
We are rarely proud when we are alone.
Voltaire
Stories should be natural as apples, brief as lust, long as a thought.
Leonard Michaels
I love books where I can't wait to turn every page, songs that grab me the first time I hear them, and films that make me totally forget about the craft because I am totally engaged in the story.
John Grooters
Tell the fucking story.
Aleksandar Hemon
The more mistakes, the better the story afterwards. Especially if there's a happy ending.
Felicia Day
Am not great, but being the story of every whisper is just the greatest.
Ahmed Farrag
A law of life: at the precise instant when someone tells a truth, that truth is transformed into a story
Enrique de Hériz
He clung to the story as to a vow whose abandonment might bring down on his head all kinds of grief and misfortune. He felt very alone, on an interminable day full of evil omens, and the story, though resistant to some of his intentions, was at least a testimony to reality and coherence
José María Merino
My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours… it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us more powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually.
Frederick Buechner
In a culture that is becoming ever more story-stupid, in which a representative of the Coca-Cola company can, with a straight face, pronounce, as he donates a collection of archival Coca-Cola commercials to the Library of Congress, that 'Coca-Cola has become an integral part of people's lives by helping to tell these stories,' it is perhaps not surprising that people have trouble teaching and receiving a novel as complex and flawed as Huck Finn, but it is even more urgent that we learn to look passionately and technically at stories, if only to protect ourselves from the false and manipulative ones being circulated among us.
George Saunders
When I say ‘practice’ I don’t meanrepeating an act until you get it right. In this use, it means to instill regular discipline to accomplish a specific task, ritual without which we feel incomplete, or that our experience of each day is less.
S. Kelley Harrell
It is good to stop by the track for a space, put aside the knapsack, wipe the brows, and talk a little of the upper slopes of the mountain we think we are climbing, would but the trees let us see it.
H.G.Wells
Every moment is utterly unique and will not be continued in eternity. This fact gives life its poignancy and should concentrate your attention on what you are experiencing now.
Joseph Campbell
Working rightly, the brain is the highest form of "instinctual wisdom." Thus it should work like the homing instinct of pigeons and the formation of the foetus in the womb - without verbalizing the process of knowing "how" it does it. The self-conscious brain, like the self-conscious heart, is a disorder, and manifests itself in the acute feeling of separation between "I" and my experience.
Alan W. Watts
In the strictest sense, we cannot actually think about life and reality at all, because this would have to include thinking about thinking, thinking about thinking about thinking, and so ad infinitum. One can only attempt a rational, descriptive philosophy of the universe on the assumption that one is totally separate from it. But if you and your thoughts are part of this universe, you cannot stand outside them to describe them.
Alan W. Watts
To "know" reality you cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be it, and feel it.
Alan W. Watts
Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them.
Alan W. Watts
Josiah became King of Judah at the age of eight. Joan of Arc led the French Army at nineteen. King Tut led all of Egypt at age nine. Age isn't everything you think it is. Your heart and your spirit speak more than a simple candle count on your birthday cake. ~Tony (Exposing ELE)
Rebecca Gober
That’s the thing about the collapse of civilization, Blake. It never happens according to plan – there’s no slavering horde of zombies. No actinic flash of thermonuclear war. No Earth-shuddering asteroid. The end comes in unforeseen ways; the stock market collapses, and then the banks, and then there is no food in the supermarkets, or the communications system goes down completely and inevitably, and previously amiable co-workers find themselves wrestling over the last remaining cookie that someone brought in before all the madness began.
Mark A. Rayner
If a philosophical writer cannot be followed, the difficulty of his subject can be placed only in mitigation of his offense, not in condonation of it. There are too many expert witnesses on the other side.
William Zinsser
If you can't communicate, then you don't have a relationship!
B. Dave Walters
If her mother had been observing this interaction, she'd tell Clementine she was wrong, that she needed to keep talking, to say everything that was on her mind, to communicate, to leave no possibility for misinterpretation.If her father were here, he'd put his finger to his lips and say, "Shh."Clementine settled for two words."I'm sorry," she said.
Liane Moriarty
Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move.
Clay Shirky
Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
Clay Shirky
[T]he category of 'consumer' is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity.
Clay Shirky
Man's first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void.
Barnett Newman
[T]he ways in which the information we give off about our selves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinized in public.
Clay Shirky
Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.
Clay Shirky
Words are the source of misunderstandings.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.
Marquis de Sade
Death, in its certainty, is exacting its due respect and repose before it takes my hand.
Susan Abulhawa
I'm always trying to gain and keep the audience's respect. I always want them to know that the show doesn't think they're stupid for watching.
Dan Harmon
One can show no greater respect than to weep for a stranger.
José Saramago
Marriage is like a three-speed gearbox affection, friendship, love. It is not advisable to crash your gears and go right through to love straightaway. You need to ease your way through. The basis of love is respect, and that needs to be learned from affection and friendship.
Peter Ustinov
The human heart is like the reflection on the water's surface. The mouth says things opposite to what the heart really feels.
Masashi Kishimoto Naruto Shippuden
A prince need take little account of conspiracies if the people are disposed in his favor.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Putting his head down on the dog's neck, he vowed to himself fervently that he would always have some money on hand, no matter what became of him, so that he would be able to protect all that was truly valuable from the practical people in the world.
Morley Callaghan
Oh! my friend, never seek to corrupt the person whom you love, it can go further than you think...
Marquis de Sade
Respect yourself is you would have others respect you.
Baltasar Gracián
A man could love only what he respected, not pitied.
Ninotchka Rosca
One day Wallace was fishing in the Irvine when Earl Percy, the governor of Ayr, rode past with a numerous train. Five of them remained behind and asked Wallace for the fish he had taken. He replied that they were welcome to half of them. Not satisfied with this, they seized the basket and prepared to carry it off. Wallace resisted, and one of them drew his sword. Wallace seized the staff of his net and struck his opponent's sword from his hand; this he snatched up and stood on guard, while the other four rushed upon him. Wallace smote the first so terrible a blow that his head was cloven from skull to collar-bone; with the next blow he severed the right arm of another, and then disabled a third. The other two fled, and overtaking the earl, called on him for help; "for," they said, "three of our number who stayed behind with us to take some fish from the Scot who was fishing are killed or disabled."How many were your assailants?" asked the earl.But the man himself," they answered; "a desperate fellow whom we could not withstand."I have a brave company of followers!" the earl said with scorn. "You allow one Scot to overmatch five of you! I shall not return to seek for your adversary; for were I to find him I should respect him too much to do him harm.
G.A. Henty
I respect you as my king, and I respect you as my father, but I do not respect you as a man!
Rebecca McKinsey
I had done all that I could, and no Man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little.
Samuel Johnson
If I die on my way to the dance, it will be better than to survive having never lifted my feet.
Agnostic Zetetic
Don't apologize. You don't have to explain yourself. I choose you. I want you.
Lex Martin
In this world one is seldom reduced to make a selection between two alternatives. There are as many varieties of conduct and opinion as there are turns of feature between an aquiline nose and a flat one.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Need is choice come to fruition.
S. Kelley Harrell
Given the choice, whether to rule a corrupt and failing empire; or to challenge the fates for another throw - a better throw - against one's destiny... what was a king to do? But does one even truly have a choice? One can only match, move by move, the machinations of fate... and thus defy the tyrannous stars.
Amy Hennig
She looked out at the other trees, and she realised that her life was one of thousands, any one of which could have been her, she had grown wherever her life had taken her, she had drifted wherever the wind had blown her.
Dave McKean
Choose well. Your choice is brief, and yet endless.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe