Down And Quotes (page 117)
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An infant is a pucker of the earth's thin skin; so are we. We arise like budding yeasts and break off: we forget our beginnings. A mammal swells and circles and lays him down. You and I have finished swelling: our circling periods are playing out, but we can still leave footprints on a trail whose end we do not know. Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think you can go it alone.
Annie Dillard
There was some women in a cafe the other week that I was sat in, and she came up and she sat down with her mate and she was talkin' loudly goin' on about "oh the baby's lovely." They said it's got, er, lovely big eyes, er, really big hands and feet. Now that doesn't sound like a nice baby to me. I felt like sayin' it sounds like a frog. But I thought I dont know her, there's only so much you can say to a stranger. I dont know what kept me from sayin' it.
Karl Pilkington
But poor old Dim kept looking up at the stars and planets and the Luna with his rot wide open like a kid who'd never viddied any such thing before, and he said: "What's on them, I wonder. What would be up there on things like that?" I nudged him hard, saying: "Come, gloopy bastard as thou art. Think thou not on them. There'll be life like down here most likely, with some getting knifed and others doing the knifing.
Anthony Burgess
I used to analyze myself down to the last thread, used to compare myself with others, recalled all the smallest glances, smiles and words of those to whom I’d tried to be frank, interpreted everything in a bad light, laughed viciously at my attempts ‘to be like the rest’ –and suddenly, in the midst of my laughing, I’d give way to sadness, fall into ludicrous despondency and once again start the whole process all over again – in short, I went round and round like a squirrel on a wheel.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Where do they get these giant flags? What happens to them when there's no campaign? Where do they go? Where do you even store flags that size? Or is there maybe just one, which Mc. Cain2000's advance team has to take down afterward and hurtle with to the next THM to get it put up before Mc. Cain and the cameras arrive? Do Gore and the Shrub and all the other candidates each have their own giant flag?)
David Foster Wallace
Presently, when the strain relaxed, Blore said: 'There are habits and habits! Mr. Lombard takes a revolver to out-of-the-way places, right enough, and a primus and a sleeping-bag and a supply of bug powder, no doubt! But habit wouldn't make him bring the whole outfit down here? It's only in books people carry revolvers around as a matter of course.' Dr. Armstrong shook his head perplexedly.
Agatha Christie
Nothing but the sight of blood upon his dark face would ease the pain in her heart. She lunged for him, swift as a cat, but with a light startled movement, he sidestepped, throwing up his arm to ward her off. She was standing on the edge of the freshly waxed top step, and as her arm with the whole weight of her body behind it, struck his out-thrust arm, she lost her balance. She made a wild clutch for the newel post and missed it. She went down the stairs backwards, feeling a sickening dart...
Margaret Mitchell
These memories are the memorials and pledges of the vital hours of a lifetime. These hours of afflatus in the human spirit, the springs of art, are, in their mystery, akin to the epochs of history, when a race which for centuries has lived content, unknown, behind its own frontiers, digging, eating, sleeping, begetting, doing what was requisite for survival and nothing else, will, for a generation or two, stupefy the world; commit all manner of crimes, perhaps; follow the wildest chimeras,...
Evelyn Waugh
as we watched seaward-moving ships pass between the cliffs of burning skyline, she said: 'years from now, years and years, one of those ships will bring me back, me and my nine Brazillian brats, because yes, they must see this, these lights, the river-- I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.' And I said: 'Do shut up,' for I felt infuriatingly left out-- a tugboat in a...
Truman Capote