Being Mean Quotes (page 22)
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But the life of a Willa Cather, a Lillian Helman, and Virginia Woolf - - - would it not be a series of rapid ascents and probing descents into shades and meanings? into more people, ideas and conceptions? Would it not be in color, rather than black-and-white, or more gray? I think it would. And thus, I not being them, could try to be more like them: to listen, observe, and feel, and try to live more fully.
Sylvia Plath
Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct.
Robert Frost
It's certainly not too late to change to the winning side. But you know, you also have the freedom to stay just where you are. That's what it means to be an American. That's the miracle of America. Freedom to believe means the freedom to believe the wrong thing, after all. Just as freedom of speech gives you the right to stay silent.
Neil Gaiman
I must say that "Right" has no meaning to me whatsoever! Truth has meaning - as a direction. But one of the peculiar imbecilities of our time is the grid of morality we have placed on human behavior: so that every act of man must be measured against an arbitrary latitude of right and longitude of wrong - in exact minutes, seconds, and degrees!...-Henry Drummond, a character in Inherit The Wind
Jerome Lawrence
Chaos can be one means of arriving at a definable possibility, but if we look back at the works of Blake's youth chaos must be understood as something impossible, as a poetic violence and not as a calculated order. The chaos of the mind cannot constitute a reply to the providence of the universe. All it can be is an awakening in the night, where all that can be heard is anguished poetry let loose.
Georges Bataille
Mizzy has wandered into the garden. Carole looks contemplatively at him, says, "Lovely boy."My wife's insanely younger brother. He's one of those kids with too much potential, if you know what I mean."I know exactly what you mean."Further details would be redundant. Peter knows the Potters' story: the pretty, unstoppable daughter who's tearing through her Harvard doctorate versus the older child, the son, who has, it seems, been undone by his good fortune; who at thirty-eight is still surfing...
Michael Cunningham
Someone asked the other day, "Why do we go to school?" Pat, with vigorunusual in her, said, "So when we grow up we won't be stupid." Thesechildren equate stupidity with ignorance. Is this what they mean when theycall themselves stupid? Is this one of the reasons why they are so ashamed ofnot knowing something? If so, have we, perhaps un-knowingly, taught themto feel this way? We should clear up this distinction, show them that it ispossible to know very few facts, but make very good use of...
John Holt
Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?
Wendell Berry
Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have...
Eleanor Roosevelt