Cleared Quotes (page 10)
You might hide in some Freudian jungle most of your miserable life, baying at the moon and shouting curses at God, but at the end, right down there at the damned end when it counts... you would sure as anything clear up just enough to realize the moon you have spent so many years baying at is nothing but the light globe up there on the ceiling, and God is just something placed in your bureau drawer by the Gideon Society. Yes, I sighed again, in the long run insanity would be the same old...
Ken Kesey
The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life. To make this a living force and bring it to clear consciousness is perhaps the foremost task of education. The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of...
Albert Einstein
When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tup and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank into sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.
Sylvia Plath
But Moominpappa wasn't listening, because just at that moment he had got the right grip on a big round boulder, and with a great thud it rolled down the slope. It made two very clear sparks and left a faint but enchanting smell of gunpowder behind. Now it was lying at the bottom, just where it should lie. It was wonderful to roll stones, first pushing with all one's might, then feeling them beginning to move just a little at first -- then a little more -- and then giving way and rolling into...
Tove Jansson
Then, while Cinnamon straightened up the kitchen as usual, Nutmeg and I sat at a small table, drinking tea. She ate only one slice of toast, with a little butter. Outside, a cold, sleety rain was falling. Nutmeg said little, and I said little - a few remarks about the weather. She seemed to have something she wanted to say, though. That much was clear from the look on her face and the way she spoke. She tore off stamp-sized pieces of toast and transported them, one at a time, to her mouth. We...
Haruki Murakami
In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.
Norman Maclean
Religion was fading into the background. He had shovelled away all the beliefs that would hamper him, had cleared the ground, and come more or less to the bedrock of belief that one should feel inside oneself for right or wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one's God. Now life interested him more.
David Herbert Lawrence
Kneeling in the keeping room where she usually went to talk-think it was clear why Baby Suggs was so starved for color. There was’t any except for two orange squares in a quilt that made the absence shout. The walls of the room were slate-colored, the floor earth-brown, the wooden dresser the color of itself, curtains white, and the dominating feature, the quilt over an iron cot, was made up of scraps of blue serge, black, brown and gray wool–the full range of the dark and the muted that...
Toni Morrison
It's all very well for me to tell myself there are no provincial cities any more and perhaps there never were any: all places communicate instantly with all other places, a sense of isolation is felt only during the trip between one place and the other, that is, when you are in no place. I, in fact, recognize myself here without a here or an elsewhere, recognized as an outsider by the nonoutsiders at least as clearly as I recognize the nonoutsiders and envy them.
Italo Calvino