Being Played Quotes (page 43)
The gunslinger turned his eyes up to the faces in the leaves. A play was being enacted there for his amusement Worlds rose and fell before him. Empires were built across shining sands where forever machines toiled in abstract electronic frenzies. Empires declined and fell. Wheels that had spun like silent liquid moved more slowly, began to squeak, began to scream, stopped. Sand choked the stainless steel gutters of concentric streets below dark skies full of stars like beds of cold jewels....
Stephen King
After they had gone another mile, Pinocchio heard the same little low voice saying to him:'Bear it in mind, simpleton! Boys who refuse to study, and turn their backs upon books, schools, and masters, to pass their time in play and amusements, sooner or later come to a bad end... I know it by experience... and I can tell you. A day will come when you will weep as I am weeping now... but then it will be too late!...'On hearing these words whispered very softly, the puppet, more frightened than...
Carlo Collodi
That’s what she was, Joanna felt suddenly. That’s what they all were, all the Stepford wives: actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleansers, shampoos, and deodorants. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.
Ira Levin
It is the form that allows a writer the greatest opportunity to explore human experience...For that reason, reading a novel is potentially a significant act. Because there are so many varieties of human experience, so many kinds of interaction between humans, and so many ways of creating patterns in the novel that can’t be created in a short story, a play, a poem or a movie. The novel, simply, offers more opportunities for a reader to understand the world better, including the world of...
Don DeLillo
Just as she was unaware of the hidden currents of politics running below the surface of College affairs, so the Scholars, for their part, would have been unable to see the rich seething stew of alliances and enmities and feuds and treaties which was a child’s life in Oxford. Children playing together: how pleasant to see! What could be more innocent and charming?
Philip Pullman
To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.
George Eliot
Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly; In my own way, and with my full consent. Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely. Went to their deaths more proud than this one went. Some nights of apprehension and hot weeping. I will confess; but that's permitted me; Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keeping. Rubbed in a cage a wing that would be free. If I had loved you less or played you slyly. I might have held you for a summer more, But at the cost of words I value highly, And no...
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I just can't help thinking what a real shake up it would give people if, all of a sudden, there were no new books, new plays, new histories, new poems..." And how proud would you be when people started dying like flies?" I demanded. They'd die more like mad dogs, I think--snarling & snapping at each other & biting their own tails." I turned to Castle the elder. "Sir, how does a man die when he's deprived of the consolation of literature?" In one of two ways," he said, "petrescence of the...
Kurt Vonnegut
No justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.
C. S. Lewis
She stared at Peter, and she realized that in that one moment, when she hadn't been thinking, she knew exactly what he'd felt as he moved through the school with his backpack and his guns. Every kid in this school played a role: jock, brain, beauty, freak. All Peter had done was what they all secretly dreamed of: be someone, even for just nineteen minutes, who nobody else was allowed to judge.
Jodi Picoult