Being There Quotes (page 337)
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A melancholy air can never be the right thing; what you want is a bored air. If you are melancholy, it must be because you want something, there is something in which you have not succeeded. It is shewing your inferiority. If you are bored, on the other hand, it is the person who has tried in vain to please you who is inferior.
Stendhal
In modern physics, there is no such thing as "nothing." Even in a perfect vacuum, pairs of virtual particles are constantly being created and destroyed. The existence of these particles is no mathematical fiction. Though they cannot be directly observed, the effects they create are quite real. The assumption that they exist leads to predictions that have been confirmed by experiment to a high degree of accuracy.
Richard Morris
The only thing worth writing about is people. People. Human beings. Men and women whose individuality must be created, line by line, insight by insight. If you do not do it, the story is a failure. [...] There is no nobler chore in the universe than holding up the mirror of reality and turning it slightly, so we have a new and different perception of the commonplace, the everyday, the 'normal', the obvious. People are reflected in the glass. The fantasy situation into which you thrust them is...
Harlan Ellison
So then I thought, I'd like you to have something to remember me by, you know, if you ever meet some veela when you're off doing whatever you're doing.'I think dating opportunities are going to be pretty thin on the ground, to be honest.'There's a silver lining I've been looking for,' she whispered, and then she was kissing him as she never kissed him before, and Harry was kissing her back, and it was a blissful oblivion, better than firewhiskey; she was the only real thing in the world,...
J. K. Rowling
Fictions are necessary for the people, and the Truth becomes deadly to those who are not strong enough to contemplate it in all its brilliance. In fact, what can there be in common between the vile multitude and sublime wisdom? The Truth must be kept secret, and the masses need a teaching proportioned to their imperfect reason.
Albert Pike
Sentences are made wonderfully one at a time. Who makes them. Nobody can make them because nobody can what ever they do see. All this makes sentences so clear I know how I like them. What is a sentence mostly what is a sentence. With them a sentence is with us about us all about us we will be willing with what a sentence is. A sentence is that they cannot be carefully there is a doubt about it. The great question is can you think a sentence. What is a sentence. He thought a sentence. Who...
Gertrude Stein
In the way that scepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the sceptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest,...
Carl Sagan
We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent and in doing good to all men; indeed we may say that we follow the admonition of Paul - We believe all things, we hope all things, we have endured many things and hope to be able to endure all things. If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.
Joseph Smith, Jr.
Is it a war we are fighting, a war against health, against life and love? My condition is a torn condition. Every day, the dispensing of existence. I see the face of suffering. Its face is fierce and distant and ancient. There's probably a straightforward explanation for the impossible weariness I feel. A perfectly straightforward explanation. It is a mortal weariness. Maybe I'm tired of being human, if human is what I am. I'm tired of being human.
Martin Amis
Just — just to be clear,” he said. “You want to leave Tonks at her parents’ house and come away with us?”
“She’ll be perfectly safe there, they’ll look after her,” said Lupin. He spoke with a finality bordering on indifference. “Harry, I’m sure James would have wanted me to stick with you.”
“Well,” said Harry slowly, “I’m not. I’m pretty sure my father would have wanted to know why you aren’t sticking with your own kid, actually.
J. K. Rowling
If the truth is that after there comes a negatively spiritual life, an eternity of mystical experience, what more misleading way of communicating it could possibly be found than the appearance of a human form which eats boiled fish? Again, on such a view, the body would really be a hallucination. And any theory of hallucination breaks down on the fact (and if it is invention, it is the oldest invention that ever entered the mind of man) that on three separate occasions this hallucination was...
C. S. Lewis