Buts Quotes (page 343)
I can lie about my name, I can lie about my school, but how am I going to lie about this fucking nose? "You seem like a very nice person Mr. Porte-Noir, but why do you go around covering the middle of your face like that?" Because suddenly it has taken off, the middle of my face! Because gone is the button of my childhood years, that pretty little thing that people used to look at in my carriage, and lo and behold, the middle of my face has begun to reach out towards God. Porte-Noir and...
Philip Roth
Men spend their lives in anticipations,—in determining to be vastly happy at some period when they have time. But the present time has one advantage over every other—it is our own. Past opportunities are gone, future have not come. We may lay in a stock of pleasures, as we would lay in a stock of wine; but if we defer the tasting of them too long, we shall find that both are soured by age.
Charles Caleb Colton
God made a beauteous garden With lovely flowers strown, But one straight, narrow pathway That was not overgrown. And to this beauteous garden He brought mankind to live, And said "To you, my children, These lovely flowers I give. Prune ye my vines and fig trees, With care my flowers tend, But keep the pathway open Your home is at the end."God's Garden
Robert Frost
It's unfair."As a rule, life is unfair," I said. Yeah, but I think I did say some awful things."To Dick?"Yeah."I pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road and turned off the ignition. "That's just stupid, that kind of thinking," I said, nailing her with my eyes. "Instead of regretting what you did, you could have treated him decently from the beginning. You could've tried to be fair. But you didn't. You don't even have the right to be sorry.
Haruki Murakami
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountaintop, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shal claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
Khalil Gibran
In my craft or sullen art. Exercised in the still night. When only the moon rages. And the lovers lie abed. With all their griefs in their arms, I labour by singing light. Not for ambition or bread. Or the strut and trade of charms. On the ivory stages. But for the common wages. Of their most secret heart. Not for the proud man apart. From the raging moon I write. On these spindrift pages. Nor for the towering dead. With their nightingales and psalms. But for the lovers, their arms. Round the...
Dylan Thomas
You should read something else."Why would he have done that to him?"I don't know," she said. Do you ever feel like Job?"She smiled, a little twinkle in her eyes. Sometimes."But you haven't lost your faith?"No," I knew she hadn't, but I think I was losing mine. Is it because you think you might get better?"No," she said,"its because its the only thing I have left.
Nicholas Sparks
The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble…. They can never be solved, but only outgrown…. This ‘outgrowing’, as I formerly called it, on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through this widening of view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger...
Carl Jung
God is in the mountains. Impassive, immovable, jagged giants, separating the celestial from the terrestrial with eternal diagonal certainty. As if silently monitoring the beating heart of the creator from the universe's perfect birth. Stood in the thin air and the awe, one inhales God, involuntarily acknowledging that we are but fragments of a whole, a higher thing. The mountains remind me of my place, as a servant to truth and wonder. Yes, God is in the mountains. Perhaps the pulpit too and...
Russell Brand
I looked at her without a word. She held an edge of the beach towel in each hand, pressing the edges against her cheeks. White smoke was rising from the cigarette between her fingers. With no wind to disturb it, the smoke rose straight up, like a miniature smoke signal. She was apparently having trouble deciding whether to cry or to laugh. At least she looked that way to me. She wavered atop the narrow line that divided one possibility from the other, but in the end she fell to neither side....
Haruki Murakami
He tries to go to life. So does every author except the very worst, but after all most of them live on predigested food. The incident or character may be from life, but the writer usually interprets it in terms of the last book he read. For instance, suppose he meets a sea captain and thinks he's an original character. The truth is that he sees the resemblance between the sea captain and the last sea captain Dana created, or who-ever creates sea captains, and therefore he knows how to set...
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Rationality is man's basic virtue, the source of all his other virtues. Man's basic vice, the source of all evils, is the act of unfocussing his mind, the suspension of his conciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know. Irrationality is the rejection of man's means of survival and therefore, a commitment to a course of blind destruction; that is anti-mind, anti-life.
Ayn Rand