Firsts Quotes (page 169)
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Political organizations are formed to keep the powerful in power. Their first rule is “don’t rock the boat.” If someone makes trouble and you can get him, do it. If you can’t get him, bring him in. Give him some of the action, let him have a taste of power. Power is all anyone wants, and if he has a promise of it as a reward for being good, he’ll be good. Anyone who does not play by those rules is incomprehensible to most politicians.
Shirley Chisholm
The greatest missile in the world is useless...unless it's targeted. A torpedo is adrift unless it has someplace to go. An arrow is pointless unless it hits something. So it's important for kids—for everyone, even if you fail at first—to target something and head in that direction. With all your might.
Tim Allen
Balance. It was all about balance. That had been one of the first things that she had learned: the centre of the seesaw has neither up nor down, but upness and downness flow through it while it remains unmoved. You had to be the centre of the seesaw so the pain flowed through you, not into you. It was very hard. But she could do it!
Terry Prachett
When I am working on a book or story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day next you hit it again.
Ernest Hemingway
Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about. ... It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause—to look at them and make something of them.
Harry Crews
...full of God's thoughts, a place of peace and safety amid the most exalted grandeur and enthusiastic action, a new song, a place of beginnings abounding in first lessons of life, mountain building, eternal, invincible, unbreakable order; with sermons in stone, storms, trees, flowers, and animals brimful with humanity.
John Muir