Borne Quotes (page 8)
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I'm wondering whether I can explain," said Lee. "Where there is no likeness of experience it's very difficult. I understand you were not born in America." "No, in Ireland." "And in a few years you can almost disappear; while I, who was born in Grass Valley, went to school and several years to the University of California, have no chance of mixing." "If you cut your queue, dressed and talked like other people?" "No. I tried it. To the so-called whites I was still a Chinese, but an...
John Steinbeck
Black-and-white chickens stagger around Colonial Dunsboros, chickens with their heads flattened. Here are chickens with no wings or only one leg. There are chickens with no legs, swimming with just their ragged wings through the barnyard mud. Blind chickens without eyes. Without beaks. Born that way. Defective. Born with their little chicken brains already scrambled. There's an invisible line between science and sadism, but here it's made visible.
Chuck Palahniuk
A person of your century: Great persons are of their time. Not all were born into a period worthy of them, and many so born failed to benefit by it. Some merited a better century, for all that is good does not always triumph. Fashions have their periods and even the greatest virtues, their styles. But the philosopher, being ageless, has one advantage: Should this not prove the right century, many to follow will.
Baltasar Gracian
Even at the time—twenty years old—I said to myself: better to go hungry, to go to prison, to be a tramp, than to sit at an office desk ten hours a day. There is no particular daring in this vow, but I have not broken it and shall not do so. The wisdom of my grandfathers sat in my head: we are born for the pleasure of work, fighting, love, we are born for that and nothing else. (Guy de Maupassant)
Isaac Babel
If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one...
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn