Buts Quotes (page 133)
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But I ask again, are there many like Thee? And could thou believe for one moment that men, too, could face such a temptation? Is the nature of men such, that they can reject miracles and at the great moments of their life, the moments of their deepest, most agonizing spiritual difficulties, cling only to the free verdict of their heart? ... and thou didst hope that man, following Thee, would cling to god and not ask for a miracle.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
...but I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar -- you live next to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace. My cousins were both small-towners and outsiders; they had not grown up with Own Meany, who was so strange to them that he inspired awe - yet they were no more likely to fall upon him, or to devise ways to torture him, than it was likely for a herd of cattle to attack a cat.
John Irving
But by the time Madeleine reached the age that Alwyn had been then, she realized that her sister's iconoclasm and liberationist commitments had just been part of a trend. Alwyn had done the things she had done and voiced the political opinions she'd voiced because all her friends were acting and talking the same way.
Jeffrey Eugenides
But there was a part of her that wondered what would happen if she let them all in on the secretthat
some mornings, it was hard to get out of bed and put on someone else’s smile; that she was
standing on air, a fake who laughed at all the right jokes and whispered all the right gossip and
attracted the right guy, a fake who had nearly forgotten what it felt like to be real…and who, when
you got right down to it, didn’t want to remember, because it hurt even more than this.
Jodi Picoult
But I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me." "What is that?" said Will, rather jealous of the belief."That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and can not do what we would, we are part of the divine struggle against evil--widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.
George Eliot