Calling Quotes (page 24)
It was a destructive novel of acquired ideas. To finally wake up in a state of creative anguish, to lose oneself in order to find oneself again, to sleep in the arms of a beautiful student whose name one didn't know, to fall back to sleep over a love poem-that was called existence. The harmonics of artistic creation, of fertile sensibility, of anticipated events-history in movement-that was called a privilege.
Elie Wiesel
Lucy was frightened, frightened near to death. Her voice choked, she could not breath, her limbs went numb. "This is not happening", she said to herself as the men forced her down; "it is just a dream, a nightmare". While the men, for their part, drank up her fear, revelled in it, did all they could to hurt her, to menace her, to heighten her terror. "Call your dogs!" they said to her. "Go on, call your dogs! No dogs? Then let us show you dogs!
J. M. Coetzee
Long ago, when an early galaxy began to pour light out into the surrounding darkness, no witness could have known that billions of years later some remote clumps of rock and metal, ice and organic molecules would fall together to make place called Earth; or that life would arise and thinking beings evolve who would one day capture a little of that galactic light, and try to puzzle out what had sent it on its way. And after the earth dies, some 5 billion years from now, after it's burned to a...
Carl Sagan
I stick my finger in existence? it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a...
Soren Kierkegaard
Just as sex is a God-given instinct for the prolongation of the human race, so the desire for property as a prolongation of one's ego is a natural right sanctioned by natural law. A person is free on the inside because he can call his soul his own; he is free on the outside because he can call property his own. Internal freedom is based upon the fact that "I am"; external freedom is based on the fact that "I have." But just as the excesses of flesh produce lust, for lust is sex in the wrong...
Fulton J. Sheen
I think computers ought to have a key called I'M DRUNK, and when you push it, it prevents you from sending email for twelve hours. I've got another one: a key called FUCK OFF. You press it every time your computer does something annoying -- in turn this would somehow force your computer to experience pain. And if you pushed SHIFT/FUCK OFF, you'd end up with FUCK OFF AND DIE, the computer equivalent of a razor being raked across your nipples.
Doug Coupland
The fair-haired man was one of those people in whose character there is at first sight a certain obstinacy. Before you can open your mouth, they are already prepared to argue and, it seems, will never agree to anything that is clearly contrary to their way of thinking, will never call a stupid thing smart, and in particular will never dance to another man's tune; but it always ends up that there is a certain softness in their character, that they will agree precisely to what they had...
Nikolai Gogol
When I had laid it on the floor. I went to blow the fire a-flame, But something rustled on the floor, And someone called me by my name: It had become a glimmering girl. With apple blossoms in her hair. Who called me by my name and ran. And faded through the brightening air. . . .
William Butler Yeats