Backing Quotes (page 221)
One aim of my field is to relativize the images possessed by individuals, discover in these images the factors universal to all human beings, and feed these universal truths back to those same individuals. As a result of this process, people might be able to belong to something even as they maintain their autonomy.
Haruki Murakami
The free intellect copies human life, but it considers this life to be something good and seems to be quite satisfied with it. That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things...
Friedrich Nietzsche
Were I to go down into the market-place, armed with the powers of witchcraft, and take a peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, 'In your lifetime, have you known peace?' wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in his turn to his father, I would never hear the word 'Yes,' if I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years. I would always hear, 'No, there was fear, there were our enemies...
Rebecca West
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man-There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:-That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire; And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins"From "The Gods of the Copybook Headings
Rudyard Kipling
You've got no right to hate the Major. He didn't force you."Force me? FORCE me? He's KILLING me, that's all!"It's still not-"Shut up," Baker said curtly, and Garraty shut. He rubbed the back of his neck briefly and stared up into the whitish-blue sky. His shadow was deformed huddle almost beneath his feet. He turned up his third canteen of the day and drained it. Baker said, "I'm sorry. I surely didn't mean to shout. My feet-"Sure," Garraty said."We're all getting this way," Baker said. "I...
Stephen King
(..)-Dr. G. would later say that the whole "my whole life flashed before me" phenomenon at the end is more like being a whitecap on the suface of the ocean, meaning that it's only at the moment you subside and start sliding back in that you're really even aware there's an ocean at all. When you're up and out there as a whitecap you might talk and act as if you know you're just a whitecap on the ocean, but deep down you don't think there's really an ocean at all. It's almost impossible to. Or...
David Foster Wallace
I have to give her what you did, don't I?" she said. "Enough of my personal information for Aurilelde to link to her own... so that the congruency between us is complete, and all this works out the way it should..."Kit didn't say anything.... But why wouldn't I? Nita thought. To make all this come out all right. She nodded to Irina. Irina nodded back, turned away. And only then did it occur to Nita, with a shock, that this would mean it hadn't been Aurilelde who Kit had been so attracted to....
Diane Duane