First Quotes (page 87)
We had stretched out our arms to each other and supported something in our joined hands, but this thing we were holding was like a sort of gas that exists when you believe in its existence and disappears when you doubt. The task of supporting it seems simple at first glance, but actually requires an ultimate refinement of calculation and a consummate skill.
Yukio Mishima
we live everything as it comes, without warning , like an actor going on cold. and what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? that is why life is always like a sketch. No , "sketch" is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the ground for nothing, an outline with no picture
Milan Kundera
I love weather. I'm a connoisseur of weather. Wherever my travels take me, the first thing I do is turn on the weather channel and see what's going on, what's coming. I like to know about regional weather patterns, how storms are created in different altitudes, what kinds of clouds are forming or dissipating or blowing through, where the winds are coming from, where they've been. That's not a passion everybody shares, I know, but I don't believe there are any people on earth who, properly...
Johnny Cash
And this tenderness was not like. That which a certain poet. At the beginning of the century called true. And, for some reason, quiet. No, not at all. It rang out, like the first waterfall, It crunched like the crust of bluish ice. And it prayed with a swanlike voice, And it broke down right before our eyes.
Anna Akhmatova
But it was not only by this feeling, as Varvara thought, that he was guided. Mingling with his pride, with his need always to be first, was another motive, at which Varvara did not guess - a truly religious urge. His disillusionment in Mary (his betrothed), whom he had imagined such a saint, his feeling of outrage was so cruel that he sank into despair; and despair led him - whither? To God, to the faith of his childhood, which had never lost its hold upon him.
Leo Tolstoy
Every book is an alchemical creation, and I'm thinking back to 1857 when Herman Melville arrived in Greece and saw the Parthenon for the first time sitting there like a great beached whale, its big white bones exposed to the winds. But how can this happen? How can a whale turn into a building? Or into a book? In what way can words be alive?
Laurie Anderson