Calls Quotes (page 188)
Because of the "city upon a hill" sound bite, "A Model of Christian Charity" is one of the formative documents outlining the idea of America. But dig deep into its communitarian ehos and it reads more like an America that might have been, an America fervently devoted to the quaint goals of working together and getting along. Of course, this America does exist. It's called Canada.
Sarah Vowell
Is this what is called remorse of conscience or repentance? I do not know, and I cannot tell to this day. Perhaps this remembrance even now contains something pleasurable for my passions. No--what is unbearable to me is only this image alone, and precisely on the threshold, with its raised and threatening little fist, only that look alone, only that minute alone, only that shaking head. This is what I cannot bear, because since then it appears to me almost every day. It does not appear...
Fyodor Dostoevsky
What a strange, sad man is he!" said the child, as if speaking partly to herself. "In the dark night-time, he calls us to him, and holds thy hand and mine, as when we stood with him on the scaffold yonder! And in the deep forest, where only the old trees can hear, and the strip of sky see it, he talks with thee, sitting on a heap of moss! And he kisses my forehead, too, that the little brook would hardly wash it off! But here in the sunny day, and among all the people, he knows us not; nor...
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Though frankly… Tarnapol, as he is called, is beginning to seem as imaginary as my Zuckermans anyway, or at least as detached from the memoir-ist – his revelations coming to seem like still another “useful fiction,” and not because I am telling lies. I am trying to keep to the facts. Maybe all I’m saying is that words, being words, only approximate the real thing, and so no matter how close I come, I only come close.
Philip Roth