Backing Up Quotes (page 10)
Now we cannot...discover our failure to keep God's law except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try, whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds the idea that if we try harder next time we shall succeed in being completely good. Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying harder and harder. But in another sense it is not trying that is ever going tobring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment at...
C. S. Lewis
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At teh end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before...
Stephen Hawking
I never did anything according to what anyone else wanted. That's why I think I am happy. I do everything 100%--even my stupidest missteps. I know when I'm getting ready to mess up, I'm going to do it full-on. That's the way I was as a kid. Even into adulthood, I look back at some things and go, 'I can't believe I did that.' But I can also go back and say, 'I did that, I know I'm responsible for that, and I can make amends,' and we can all laugh at it, because it's my mistake. I try not to...
Sandra Bullock
A long time back, she thought, I dreamed a dream, and was enjoying it so much when someone wakened me, and that day I was born. And now? Now, let me see...She cast her mind back. Where was I? she thought. Ninety years...how to take up the thread and the pattern of that lost dream again? She put out a small hand. There...yes, that was it. She smiled. Deeper in the warm snow hill she turned her head upon her pillow. That was better. Now, yes, now she saw it shaping in her mind quietly, and with...
Ray Bradbury
In the beginning I remember when I would spend three hours a day on MySpace just trying to comment everyone back, and now, I spend a half hour a night on MySpace just putting up new stuff and answering people back and monitoring all the fan sites, and saying hi and thank you. I'm still way on top of it. I haven't grown out of it because it'll always be something that helped launch my career, and I'm going to keep maintaining it.
Taylor Swift
What are you reading?" Polonius asked."Words, words, words," said Hamlet."And what's the subject?"Lesser than the king, but still not nothing."It took polonius a moment to realize he had answered another meaning of 'subject.' "I mean what do you read about?"All in a line, back and forth." said Hamlet. "I go from left to right with my mind full, and then must drop it there and head back empty-headed to the left side again, and take up another load to carry forward. It's a most tedious job, and...
Orson Scott Card
Evidently, evildoing also has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life. He slips, falls back, clambers up, repents, things begin to darken again. But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of our hope. But when, through the density of evil actions, the result either of their own extreme danger or of the absoluteness of his...
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Sex does not enrich or deepen a relationship, it permanently cheapens and destabilises one. Everyone I know who is unfortunate enough to have a sex-mate, joy-partner, bed-friend, love-chum, call them what you will finds that--after a week or two of long blissful afternoons of making the beast with two backs, or the beast with one back and a funny shaped middle or the beast with legs splayed in the air and arms gripping the sides of the mattress--the day dawns when Partner A is keen for more...
Stephen Fry
The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. We go back and back to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing could be more familiar than love. Nothing else eludes us so completely.
Jeanette Winterson
Ah, hi. It’s Carter. I wonder if you might want to go out to dinner, or maybe the movies. Maybe you like plays better than movies. I should’ve looked up what might be available before I called. I didn’t think of it. Or we could just have coffee again if you want to do that. Or… I’m not articulate on these things. I can’t use a tape recorder either. And why would you care? If you’re at all interested in any of the above, please feel free to call me. Thanks. Um. Good-bye.”
“Damn you, Carter...
Nora Roberts
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
For God's sake, if I learned anything during this damn trial it's that the only way someone can leave you is if you let them. And I'm not doing that, Dee. It may look like that today, or tomorrow, or even a month from now, but one day you're going to wake up and see that this whole time you've been gone, you've only been headed back to where you started. And I'll be there, waiting." He leans forward and kisses me once, feather-light, on the lips. "It's not like I'm not letting you go," he...
Jodi Picoult
They program you to have no emotion – like if somebody sitting next to you gets killed you just have to carry on doing your job and shut up,‘ Steve Annabell, a British veteran of the Falkan War … ‘When you leave the service, when you come back from a situation like that, there’s no button they can press to switch your emotions back on. So you walk around like a zombie. They don’t deprogram you. If you become a problem they just sweep you under the carpet.
Chris Hedges
…the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea…. It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and thus compelling words to a shape….
You have not finished with it because you have read it, any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up and alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered. So we look back...
Virginia Woolf