Became Quotes (page 24)
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That was when Angel Wells became a fiction writer, whether he knew it or not. That's when he learned how to make the make-believe matter to him more than real life mattered to him; that's when he learned how to paint a picture that was not real and never would be real, but in order to be believed at all- even on a sunny Indian summer day- it had to be better made and seem more real than real; it had to sound at least possible.
John Irving
Frog-faced?" Caine asked when he met Grant in the hall."Beauty's in the eye of the beholder," Grant said easily. With an appreciative grin, Caine leaned against one of the many archways. "You had Dad going. We all got one of his phone calls, telling us the Campbell was in a bad way and it was our duty-he being by way of family-to help him." The grin became wolfish. "You seem to be getting along all right on your own."Grant acknowledged this with a nod. "The last time I was here, he was trying...
Nora Roberts
This story is about Howard Beale, who was the news anchorman on UBS TV. In his time, Howard Beale had been a mandarin of television, the grand old man of news, with a HUT rating of 16 and a 28 audience share. In 1969, however, his fortunes began to decline. He fell to a 22 share. The following year, his wife died, and he was left a childless widower with an 8 rating and a 12 share. He became morose and isolated, began to drink heavily, and on September 22, 1975, he was fired, effective in two...
Paddy Chayefsky
For all the tenure of humans on Earth, the night sky had been a companion and an inspiration. The stars were comforting. They seemed to demonstrate that the heavens were created for the benefit and instruction of humans. This pathetic conceit became the conventional wisdom worldwide. No culture was free of it. Some people found in the skies an aperture to the religious sensibility. Many were awestruck and humbled by the glory and scale of the cosmos. Others were stimulated to the most...
Carl Sagan
Gradually, I began to resent Christian school and doubt everything I was told. It became clear that the suffering they were praying to be released from was a suffering they had imposed on themselves—and now us. The beast they lived in fear of was really themselves: It was man, not some mythological demon, that was going to destroy man in the end. And this beast had been created out of their fear.
Marilyn Manson
Words were no longer simply words, but a curious codes of silence, a way of speaking that continually moved around the thing that was being said. As long as we avoided the real subject, the spell would not broken. We both slipped naturally into this kind of banter, and it became all the more powerful because neither of us abandoned the character. We knew what we were doing, but at the same time we pretended not to. Thus my courtship of Sophie began - slowly, decorously, building by the...
Paul Auster
She was coming to look on men and women as fellow-survivors: well-dissemblers of their woes, who, with few signals of grief, had contained, assimilated, or put to use their own destruction. Of those who had endured the worst, not all behaved nobly or consistently. but all, involuntarily, became part of some deeper assertion of life.
Shirley Hazzard
...they ate the apple, and knew good and evil, and became 'as gods.' And they still go on eating it. But little children have not eaten anything and are not yet guilty of anything...If they, too, suffer terribly on earth, it is, of course, for their fathers; they are punished for their fathers who ate the apple--but that is reasoning from another world; for the human heart here on earth it is incomprehensible.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
I had never seen the jungle. They fed me behind bars from an iron pan till one night I felt that I was Bagheera - the Panther - and no man's plaything, and I broke the silly lock with one blow of my paw and came away; and because I had learned the ways of men, I became more terrible in the jungle than Shere Khan.
Rudyard Kipling
She became aware that she had thought the less of him because he had thought the more of her. She had worshipped this other man because he had assumed superiority and had told her that he was big enough to be her master. But now, -- now that it was all too late, -- the veil had fallen from her eyes. She could now see the difference between manliness and 'deportment.
Anthony Trollope
Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: The criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.
Milan Kundera