Far Quotes (page 88)
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If every life is a river, then it's little wonder that we do not even notice the changes that occur until we are far out in the darkest sea. One day you look around and nothing is familiar, not even your own face. My name once meant daughter, grandaughter, friend, sister, beloved. Now those words mean only what their letters spell out; Star in the night sky. Truth in the darkness. I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I'd be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A...
Alice Hoffman
Do you know this feeling? When you're in an aero speeding up through a blue spiral, the window open, the wind whistling, and there's no earth, you've forgotten the earth, the earth is just as far from you as Saturn or Jupiter or Venus? That's how I'm living now. The wind is in my face and I've forgotten the earth, I've forgotten about dear rosy O. But earth exists all the same, and sooner or later I've got to glide down and land on it and I'm just shutting my eyes to the day on my Sexual...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Man understood in the end what man is. He renounces the analysis of God, penetrating the impalpable, in which he has not seen, to give laws to the phantasms of his brain. Man understands that his inheritance is the greater world whose dominion is within his grasp. Tired of useless and presumptuous labor he bows his head and looks about him, and now he sees how our poets are born. Little by little nature's muses open their treasures and start to smile upon us, and lead us far from such labors.
Jose Rizal
How far the gentlemen of dark complexion will get with their independence, now that they have declared it, I don’t know. There are serious difficulties in their way. The vast majority of people of their race are but two or three inches removed from gorillas: it will be a sheer impossibility, for a long, long while, to interest them in anything above pork-chops and bootleg gin.
H. L. Mencken
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like...
Franz Kafka
She had to reach. She had to want it more than she’d ever wanted anything. She had to grab like a drowning girl for every good thing that came her way and she had to swim like fuck away from every bad thing. She had to count the years and let them roll by, to grow up and then run as far as she could in the direction of her best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by her own desire to heal.
Cheryl Strayed
The woman is perfected. Her dead. Body wears the smile of accomplishment, The illusion of a Greek necessity. Flows in the scrolls of her toga, Her bare. Feet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over. Each dead child coiled, a white serpent, One at each little. Pitcher of milk, now empty. She has folded. Them back into her body as petals. Of a rose close when the garden. Stiffens and odors bleed. From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower. The moon has nothing to be sad about,...
Sylvia Plath
It is something great and greatening to cherish an ideal; to act in the light of truth that is far-away and far above; to set aside the near advantage, the momentary pleasure; the snatching of seeming good to self; and to act for remoter ends, for higher good, and for interests other than our own.
Joshua Chamberlain
You ask me whether the Orient is up to what I imagined it to be. Yes, it is; and more than that, it extends far beyond the narrow idea I had of it. I have found, clearly delineated, everything that was hazy in my mind. Facts have taken the place of suppositions - so excellently so that it is often as though I were suddenly coming upon old forgotten dreams.
Gustave Flaubert