Always Quotes (page 367)
I am glad that the country world…retains a power to use our English tongue. It is a part of its sense of reality, of its vocabulary of definite terms, and of its habit of earthly common sense. I find this country writing an excellent corrective of the urban vocabulary of abstractions and of the emotion disguised as thinking which abstractions and humbug have loosed upon the world. May there always be such things as a door, a milk pail, and a loaf of bread, and words to do them honor.
Henry Beston
I believed in a good home, in sane and sound living, in good food, good times, work, faith and hope. I have always believed in these things. It was with some amazement that I realized I was one of the few people in the world who really believed in these things without going around making a dull middle class philosophy out of it. I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.
Jack Kerouac
Science manipulates things and gives up living in them. It makes its own limited models of things; operating upon these indices or variables to effect whatever transformations are permitted by their definition, it comes face to face with the real world only at rare intervals. Science is and always will be that admirably active, ingenious, and bold way of thinking whose fundamental bias is to treat everything as though it were an object-in-general - as though it meant nothing to us and yet was...
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
will you remember this day Gogol?'his father asked , turning back to look at him, his hands pressed like earmuffs to either side of his head . 'How long do I have to remember it' . Over the rise and fall of the wind , he could hear his father's laughter.He was standing there , waiting for Gogol to catch up , putting out a hand as Gogol drew near. 'Try to remember it always' he once Gogol had reached him , leading him slowly back towards the breakwater , to where his mother and Sonia stood...
Jhumpa Lahiri
Do I want to, can I face my own pain alone now? Shock keeps horror at bay. Hands off. Distanced by mist and pride and drink and friends and necessities like food, babies, fires... So the pain sits still, crouching, heavy, occupying all my inside, always, all the time, whatever my outside does.
Elizabeth Smart