Any Quotes (page 134)
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I found myself earnestly explaining to the young minister that I did not believe in God, 'but I've discovered that I can't live as though I didn't believe in him. As long as I don't need to say any more than that I try to live as though I believe in God, I would very much like to come to church--if you'll let me.
Madeleine L'Engle
Whether you look at no men at all, or look at every single one - itcomes to the same thing. You can throw yourself at their hearts, because you've gone mad from being always a stranger; from not beingable to understand how you can even bear to hold their hands in yourown any longer than you have to.
Robert Musil
Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s...
Richard Powers
The roar of the traffic, the passage of undifferentiatedfaces, this way and that way, drugs me into dreams; rubs the features from faces. People might walk through me. And what is this moment of time, this particular day in which I have foundmyself caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar - forest trees or the roar of wild beasts. Time has whizzed back an inch or two on its reel; our short progress has been cancelled. I think also that our bodies are in truth naked. We are only...
Virginia Woolf
I had been to school most all the time, and could spell, and read, and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don't take no stock in mathematics, anyway.
Mark Twain
Margaret had always dreaded lest her courage should fail her in any emergency, and she should be proved to be, what she dreaded lest she was--a coward. But now, in this real great time of reasonable fear and nearness of terror, she forgot herself, and felt only an intense sympathy--intense to painfulness--in the interests of the moment.
Elizabeth Gaskell
...an author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in. His over-powering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow men, flapping his wings and emitting defiant yells. This being forbidden by the police of all civilized nations, he takes it out by putting his yells on paper. Such is the thing called self-expression.
H. L. Mencken
And that was fine, except that she didn't have any old friends anymore. Kids back home who'd been friendly were now...respectful, because of the hat. There was a kind of wall, as if she'd grown up and they hadn't. What could they talk about? She'd been to places they couldn't even imagine. Most of them hadn't even been to Twoshirts, which was only half a day away. And this didn't worry them at all. They were going to do the jobs their fathers did, or raise children like their mothers did. And...
Terry Prachett
An armchair is always an armchair, to the modern child, never a ship, never a desert island. The pattern on the wall are patterns; not characters whose faces change at dusk... The trouble is, the children have no imagination. They are sweet, and have carefree, honest eyes; but they have not any magic in their day. The magic has all gone...
Daphne du Maurier
As soon as a man and woman of almost any age are alone together within four walls it is assumed that anything may happen. Spontaneous combustion, instant fornication, triumph of the senses. What possibilities men and women must see in each other to infer such dangers. Or, believing in the dangers, how often they must think about the possibilities.
Alice Munro
Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against one's dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction. However, in those days, choice between dignity and unsatisfied curiosity was less clear to me as a cruel decision that had to be made.
Anthony Powell