Could Quotes (page 130)
in the nineteenth year and the eleventh monthspeak your tattered Kaddish for all suicides: Praise to life though it crumbled in like a tunnelon ones we knew and loved. Praise to life though its windows blew shuton the breathing-room of ones we knew and loved. Praise to life though ones we knew and lovedloved it badly, too well, and not enough. Praise to life though it tightened like a knoton the hearts of ones we thought we knew loved us. Praise to life giving room and reasonto ones we knew...
Adrienne Rich
Take an old man's word; there's nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. It is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror - on the things that I might have avoided. We can help one another but little. I used to think I could teach young people the whole of life, but I know better now, and all my teaching of George has come down to this: beware of muddle.
E. M. Forster
Altruism is for thosewho can't endure their desires. There's a worldas ambiguous as a moan, a pleasure moanour earnest neighborsmight think a crime. It's where we could live. I'll say I love you, Which will lead, of course, to disappointment, but those words unsaidpoison every next moment. I will try to disappoint youbetter than anyone else has.--Mon Semblable
Stephen Dunn
The most work he did on [the urinals] was to run a brush once or twice apiece, singing some song as loud as he could in time to the swishing brush; then he'd splash in some Clorox and he'd be through. ... And when the Big Nurse...came in to check McMurphy's cleaning assignment personally, she brought a little compact mirror and she held it under the rim of the bowls. She walked along shaking her head and saying, "Why, this is an outrage... an outrage..." at every bowl. McMurphy sidled right...
Ken Kesey
The fact was that, as droves of demon kings had noticed, there was a limit to what you could do to a soul with, e. g., red-hot tweezers, because even fairly evil and corrupt souls were bright enough to realize that since they didn't have the concomitant body and nerve endings attached to them there was no real reason, other than force of habit, why they should suffer excruciating agony. So they didn't. Demons went on doing it anyway, because numb and mindless stupidity is part of what being a...
Terry Prachett
I thought it very touching to see these two women, coarse and shabby and beaten, so united; to see what they could be to one another; to see how they felt for one another, how the heart of each to each was softened by the hard trials of their lives. I think the best side of such people is almost hidden from us. What the poor are to the poor is little known, excepting to themselves and God.
Charles Dickens
It had been dark at the beach for hours, he hadn't been smoking much and it wasn't headlights? but before she turned away, he could swear he saw light falling on her face, the orange light just after sunset that catches a face turned to the west, watching the ocean for someone to come in on the last wave of the day, in to shore and safety.
Thomas Pynchon
The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver - over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur. All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself.
Joseph Conrad