And Off Quotes (page 58)
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A dad standing up near the stands' top with a Toshiba viewfinder to his eye takes a tomahawking baton directly in the groin and falls forward onto somebody eating a Funnel Cake, and they take out good bits of several rows below them, and there's an extended halt to the action, during which I decamp--steering clear of the sixteen-year-olds on the basketball court--and as I clear the last row yet another baton comes wharp-wharping cruelly over my shoulder, caroming viciously off big R.'s...
David Foster Wallace
I was fighting with Thoby on the lawn. We were pommelling each other with our fists. Just as I raised my fist to hit him, I felt: why hurt another person? I dropped my hand instantly, and stood there, and let him beat me. I remember the feeling. It was a feeling of hopeless sadness. It was as if I became aware of something terrible; and of my own powerlessness. I slunk off alone, feeling horribly depressed.
Virginia Woolf
I quite understand you. You mean that an innocent lie for the sake of a good joke is harmless, and does not offend the human heart. Some people lie, if you like to put it so, out of pure friendship, in order to amuse their fellows; but when a man makes use of extravagance in order to show his disrespect and to make clear how the intimacy bores him, it is time for a man of honour to break off the said intimacy., and to teach the offender his place.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
So the laws of good driving forbade you to go off the magic ribbon except in extreme emergencies. You were ethically entitled to several inches of margin at the right-hand edge; and the man approaching you was entitled to an equal number of inches; which left a remainder of inches between the two projectiles as they shot by. It sounds risky as one tells it, but the heavens are run on the basis of similar calculations, and while collisions do happen, they leave time enough in between for...
Upton Sinclair
The next morning-at least, I assumed it was morning, since we were all waking up- I felt like one of those twelve dancing princesses, who danced all night, wore holes in their shoes, and had to sleep it off the next day. Except, oh yeah: a)I'm not a princess; b)sleeping in a subway tunnel and having another brain attack aren't that much like dancing all night; and c) my combat boots were still in good shape. Other than that, it was exactly the same.
James Patterson
Always in the big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the Unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into.
Wendell Berry
Mr. Stock came out of the competition tent carrying his zeppelin marrow on one shoulder and demanding to know what was going on. When he saw the hordes advancing on Aidan, he charged off that way, whirling the great vegetable. The Puck, who was rushing behind the horde, yelling at them to grab Aidan and kill Rolf, was Mr. Stock's first victim. The marrow caught him THOCK! on the side of the head. It laid the Puck out cold on the grass, but the mighty vegetable remained intact, mottled and glossy
Diana Wynne Jones
Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your life. The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck. Darwi Odrade - Chapterhouse: Dune
Frank Herbert
She watched the tunnels as they flowed past: bare walls of concrete, a net of pipes and wires, a web of rails that went off into black holes where green and red lights hung as distant drops of color. There was nothing else to dilute it, so that one could admire naked purpose and the ingenuity that had achieved it.
Ayn Rand
The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance. If the boat is becalmed, one of the telescopes will be in continual use; it will seem to tell the whole, the unchanging truth. But this is an illusion; and as the boat sets off again, we return to our normal activity: scurrying from one telescope to another, seeing the sharpness fade in one, waiting for the blur...
Julian Barnes