Avoiding Quotes (page 23)
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I learned to make things not matter, to put a seal on my hopes and place them on a high shelf, out of reach. And by telling myself that there was nothing inside those hopes anyway, I avoided the wounds of deep disappointment. The pain was no worse than the quick sting of a booster shot. And yet thinking about this makes me ache again. How is it that as a child I knew I should have been loved more? Is everyone born with a bottomless emotional resevoir?
Amy Tan
Jill... had explained homosexuality, after Mike had read about it and failed to grok--and had given him rules for avoiding passes; she knew that Mike, pretty as he was, would attract such. He had followed her advice and had made his face more masculine, instead of the androgynous beauty he had had. But Jill was not sure that Mike would refuse a pass, say, from Duke--fortunately Mike's male water brothers were decidedly masculine, just as his others were very female women. Jill suspected...
Robert A. Heinlein
Thanks pal, but I tend to avoid any substance that makes me feel smarter, stronger, or better looking than I know I actually am." There were, in his opinion, drugs that diminished ego and drugs that engorged ego, which is to say, revelatory drugs and delusory drugs, and on a psychic level, at least, he favored awe over swagger. Should he ever aspire to become voluntarily delusional, then good old-fashioned alcohol would do the job effectively and inexpensively, thank you, and without the...
Tom Robbins
There is a danger there - a very real danger to humanity. Consider, Watson, that the material, the sensual, the worldly would all prolong their worthless lives. The spiritual would not avoid the call to something higher. It would be the survival of the least fit. What sort of cesspool may not our poor world become?
Arthur Conan Doyle
one must verge on the unknown, write toward the truth hitherto unrecognizable of one’s own sincerity, including the avoidable beauty of doom, shame, and embarrassment, that very area of personal self-recognition,(detailed individual is universal remember) which formal conventions, internalized, keep us from discovering in ourselves and others
Allen Ginsberg
What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him. Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels? One whose self-rebukes never really inflicted pain?
Julian Barnes
The silence lasted precisely five seconds, during which time eyes roamed other eyes, several throats were cleared, and no one moved in his chair. It was as if a decision were being reached without discussion: evasion was to be avoided. Congressman Efrem Walters, out of the hills of Tennessee by way of the Yale Law Review, was not to be dismissed with facile circumlocution that dealt with the esoterica of clandestine manipulations. Bullshit was out.
Robert Ludlum
There doesn't have to be any of that business with one third of the seas turning to blood or anything," said Aziraphale happily. When it came, the voice sounded slightly annoyed. "Why not?" it said. Aziraphale felt an icy pit opening under hisenthusiasm, and tried to pretend it wasn't happening. He plunged on: "Well, you can simply make sure that-" "We will win, Aziraphale." "Yes, but-" "The forces of darkness must be beaten. You seem to be under a misapprehension. The point is not to avoid...
Neil Gaiman
Perhaps it's my destiny to remain a bookkeeper forever, and for poetry and literature to remain simply butterflies that alight on my head and underline my own ridiculousness by their very beauty. In the future I'll be living quietly in a little house somewhere, enjoying a peaceful existence not writing the book I'm not writing now and, so as to continue not doing so, I will use different excuses to the ones I use now to avoid actually confronting myself.
Fernando Pessoa
But you can’t get to any of these truths by sitting in a field smiling beatifically, avoiding your anger and damage and grief. Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth. We don’t have much truth to express unless we have gone into those rooms and closets and woods and abysses that we were told not go in to. When we have gone in and looked around for a long while, just breathing and finally taking it in – then we will be able to speak in our own voice and to stay in the present...
Anne Lamott