Been Quotes (page 147)
When I look back on that time, it’s with the strangest stew of emotions: love, longing, terror, horror, regret, and the deep sweetness only those who’ve been near death can know. I think it’s how Adam and Eve must have felt. Surely they looked back at Eden, don’t you think, as they started barefoot down the path to where we are now, in our glum political world of bullets and bombs and satellite TV? Looked past the angel guarding the shut gate with his fiery sword? Sure. I think they must have...
Stephen King
Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not quite, the not yet, and the not at all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists. It is real. It is possible. It is yours.
Ayn Rand
The whole human earth was bleeding. Time, buildings, routes, rain, erase the constellation of the crime, the fact is, this small planethas been covered a thousand times by blood, war or vengeance, ambush or battle, people fell, they were devoured, and later oblivion wiped cleaneach square meter: sometimesa vague, dishonest monument, other times a clause in bronze, and still later, conversations, births, townships, and then oblivion. What arts we have for exterminationand what science to...
Pablo Neruda
It has often been remarked of the Scottish character, that the stubbornness with which it is moulded shows most to advantage in adversity, when it seems akin to the native sycamore of their hills, which scorns to be biassed in its mode of growth even by the influence of the prevailing wind, but, shooting its branches with equal boldness in every direction, shows no weather-side to the storm, and may be broken, but can never be bended.
Walter Scott
I have been reading Plotinus all evening. He has the power to sooth me; and I find his sadness curiously comforting. Even when he writes: “Life here with the things of earth is a sinking, a defeat, a failure of the wing.” The wing has indeed failed. One sinks. Defeat is certain. Even as I write these lines, the lamp wick sputters to an end, and the pool of light in which I sit contracts. Soon the room will be dark. One has always feared that death would be like this. But what else is...
Gore Vidal
Humbert Humbert: You know, I've missed you terribly. Lolita Haze: I haven't missed you. In fact, I've been revoltingly unfaithful to you. Humbert Humbert: Oh? Lolita Haze: But it doesn't matter a bit, because you've stopped caring anyway. Humbert Humbert: What makes you say I've stopped caring for you? Lolita Haze: Well, you haven't even kissed me yet, have you?
Vladimir Nabokov
Charles loved her voice. It was so soft and blurred, like pastels. It made his neck tingle just to listen to her. It gave him the same delicious feeling he had as he hovered on the brink of sleep and this feeling - until now - had been the single most pleasant feeling in his life. It was the voice that coloured everything he now thought about her. It was shy and tentative and musical. Sometimes he did not manage to hear the words she said, but he did not let on about his deafness.
Peter Carey
Alan had still stopped her in her tracks with one of those slow, devastating kisses at her side door. He hadn't insisted on coming in. Shelby might have been grateful for that if she hadn't suspected it was just part of his planned siege. Confuse the enemy, assail her with doubts, leave her with her nerve ends tingling. Very clever strategy.
Nora Roberts