Could Quotes (page 252)
As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and after all, he thought, why not? The solid,...
George Orwell
From that day, whether I could articulate it satisfactorily or not,' Day says, holding the knee of the leg just crossed, 'I understood on an intuitive level why people killed themselves. If I had to go for any length of time with that feeling I'd surely kill myself.''Time in the shadow of the wing of the thing too big to see, rising.
David Foster Wallace
If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the multitudinous other evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg's monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had the management of one end of it.
Herman Melville
It was the first time in a half century that they had been so close and had enough time to look at each other with some serenity and they had seen each other for what they were: two old people, ambushed by death, who had nothing in common except the mercy of an ephemeral past that was no longer theirs but belonged to two young people who had vanished and who could have been their grandchildren.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Earth was green and watery. The air of the Earth was good to breathe, as fattening as cream. The purity of the rains that fell on Earth could be tasted. The taste of purity was daintily tart. Earth was warm. The surface of the Earth heaved and seethed in fecund restlessness. Earth was most fertile where the most death was.
Kurt Vonnegut
If you feel your value lies in being merely decorative, I fear that someday you might find yourself believing that’s all that you really are. Time erodes all such beauty, but what it cannot diminish is the wonderful workings of your mind: Your humor, your kindness, and your moral courage. These are the things I cherish so in you. I so wish I could give my girls a more just world. But I know you’ll make it a better place." -- Marmee, Little Women
Louisa May Alcott
He went to bed early, but could not fall asleep. He was haunted by sad and gloomy reflections about the inevitable en? death. These thoughts were familiar to him, many times had he turned them over this way and that, first shuddering at the probability of annihilation, then welcoming it, almost rejoicing in it. Suddenly a peculiarly familiar agitation took possession of hi? He mused awhile, sat down at the table, and wrote down the following lines in his sacred copy-book, without a single...
Ivan Turgenev
We believe that the death of Christ is just that point in history at which something absolutely unimaginable from outside shows through into our world... Indeed, if we found that we could fully understand it, that very fact would show it was not what it professes to be - the inconceivable, the uncreated, the thing from beyond nature, striking down into nature like lightning.
C. S. Lewis