Except Quotes (page 2)
Nodding, Parker ate. “He’s an exceptional kisser.”
“He really is. He . . . How do you know?” When Parker just smiled, Emma’s jaw dropped. “You? You and Jack? When? How?”
“I think it’s disgusting,” Mac muttered. “Yet another best pal moving on my imaginary ex.”
“Two kisses, my first year at Yale, after we ran into each other at a party and he walked me back to the dorm. It was nice. Very nice. But as exceptional a kisser as he is, it was too much like kissing my brother. And as exceptional a...
Nora Roberts
Batter my heart, three-person'd God ; for you. As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ; That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend. Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurp'd town, to another due, Labour to admit you, but O, to no end. Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captived, and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain, But am betroth'd unto your enemy ; Divorce me, untie, or break that knot...
John Donne
The woman at the desk was a university graduate, young, colourless, spectacled, and intensely disagreeable. She had a fixed suspicion that no one — at least, no male person — ever consulted works of reference except in search of pornography. As soon as you approached she pierced you through and through with a flash of her pince-nez and let you know that your dirty secret was no secret from HER. After all, all works of reference are pornographical, except perhaps Whitaker’s Almanack. You can...
George Orwell
Every select man strives instinctively for a citadel and a privacy, where he is FREE from the crowd, the many, the majority-- where he may forget "men who are the rule," as their exception;-- exclusive only of the case in which he is pushed straight to such men by a still stronger instinct, as a discerner in the great and exceptional sense.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If the great paradox of Christianity means anything it means this- that we must take the crown in our hands, and go hunting in dry places and dark corners of the earth until we find the one man who feels himself unfit to wear it. Carlyle was quite wrong; we have not got to crown the exceptional man who knows he can rule. Rather we must crown the much more exceptional man who knows he can't.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
He had never loved anything except what was inevitable. The people fate had imposed on him, the world as it appeared to him, everything in his life he had not been able to avoid...For the rest, for everything he had to choose, he made himself love, which is not the same thing. No doubt he had known the feeling of wonderment, passion, and even moments of tenderness. But each moment had sent him on to other moments, each person to others, and he had loved nothing he had chosen, except what was...
Albert Camus
Nothing endures except change; nothing is constant except death. Every heartbeat wounds us, and life would be an eternal bleeding to death, were it not for literature. It grants us what nature does not: a golden time that doesn't rust, a springtime that never wilts, cloudless happiness and eternal youth. [my translation]
Ludwig Borne