Doe Quotes (page 203)
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How many of the ragged workingmen who pass him in the street are secret authors of works that will outlast them: roads, walls, pylons? Immortality of a kind, a limited immortality, is not so hard to achieve after all. Why then does he persist in inscribing marks on paper, in the faint hope that people not yet born will take the trouble to decipher them?
J. M. Coetzee
Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known. A man will say: I am cold. Or else he will say nothing, and we will see him shivering. Either way, we will know that he is cold. But what of the man who says nothing and does not shiver? Where all is intractable, here all is hermetic and evasive, one can do no more than observe. But...
Paul Auster
Who are you in love with?" I said then. For a minute Marco didn't say anything, he simply opened his mouth and breathed out a blue, vaporous ring."Perfect!" he laughed. The ring widened and blurred, ghost-pale on the dark air. Then he said, "I am in love with my cousin."I felt no surprise."Why don't you marry her?"Impossible."Why?"Marco shrugged. "She's my first cousin. She's going to be a nun."Is she beautiful?"There's no one to touch her."Does she know you love her?"Of course."I paused. The...
Sylvia Plath
A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Jamie: Please don't pretend like you know me, ok?
Landon: But I do, I do. We've had all the same classes in the same school since kindergarten. Why you're Jamie Sullivan. You sit at lunch table 7. Which isn't exactly the reject table, but is definitely in self exile territory. You have exactly one sweater. You like to look at your feet when you walk. Oh, oh, and yeah, for fun, you like to tutor on weekends and hang out with the cool kids from "Stars and Planets." Now how does that...
Nicholas Sparks
Like the waterof a deep stream, love is always too much. We did not make it. Though we drink till we burst, we cannot have it all, or want it all. In its abundanceit survives our thirst. In the evening we come down to the shoreto drink our fill, and sleep, while it flowsthrough the regions of the dark. It does not hold us, except we keep returning to its rich watersthirsty. We enter, willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.
Wendell Berry
That God lets himself be born and becomes a human being, is no idle whim, something that occurs to him so as to have something to do, perhaps to put a stop to the boredom that has brashly been said to be bound up with being God-it is not to have an adventure. No, the fact that God does this is the seriousness of existence. And the seriousness in this seriousness is, in turn, that each shall have an opinion about it.
Soren Kierkegaard
I marvel again at the nakedness of men's lives: the showers right out in the open, the body exposed for inspection and comparison, the public display of privates. What is it for? What purposes of reassurance does it serve? The flashing of a badge, look, everyone, all is in order, I belong here. Why don't women have to prove to one another that they are women? Some form of unbuttoning, some split-crotch routine, just as casual. A doglike sniffing.
Margaret Atwood
All who have actually attained any real religious experience never wrangle over the form in which the different religions are expressed. They know that the soul of all religions is the same and so they have no quarrel with anybody just because he or she does not speak in the same tongue.
Swami Vivekananda
I begged her, 'Please don't leave me stranded in the middle of some primitive zarking forest with no medical help and a head injury. I could be in serious trouble and so could she.'"What did she say?"She hit me on the head with the rock again," Ford responded curtly."I think i can confirm that was my daughter."Sweet kid."You have to get to know her," said Arthur."She eases up, does she?"No, but you get a better sense of when to duck.
Douglas Adams
Renouncing false beliefs will not usher in the millennium. Few things about the strategy of contemporary apologists are more repellent than their frequent recourse to spurious alternatives. The lesser lights inform us that the alternative to Christianity is materialism, thus showing how little they have read, while the greater lights talk as if the alternative were bound to be a shallow and inane optimism. I don't believe that man will turn this earth into a bed of roses either with the...
Walter Kaufmann