Fixed Quotes (page 20)
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Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life has been informed by reading. She has read not just for distraction, sustenance, to pass the time, but she has read in a state of primal innocence, reading for enlightenment, for instruction, even. ... She is as much a product of what she has read as of the way in which she has lived; she is like millions of others built by books, for whom books are an essential foodstuff, who could starve without.
Penelope Lively
In the earliest years, when you could still drive a Volvo 240 without feeling self-conscious, the collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn, like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job, and how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief, and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture, and how to encourage feral cats to shit in somebody else’s children’s sandbox,...
Jonathan Franzen
Sunday is a fixed star," he said."You shall see him a falling star," said Syme, and put on his hat. The decision of his gesture drew the Professor vaguely to his feet."Have you any idea," he asked, with a sort of benevolent bewilderment, "exactly where you are going?"Yes," replied Syme shortly, "I am going to prevent this bomb being thrown in Paris."Have you any conception how?" inquired the other."No," said Syme with equal decision.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt. Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd. His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, (135)Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden, That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature. Possess it merely. That it should come to this! But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two: (140)So excellent a king; that was, to this,
William Shakespeare
There is not steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and a the last one pause: - through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom). and then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If.
Herman Melville
My letters! all dead paper, mute and white! And yet they seem alive and quivering. Against my tremulous hands which loose the string. And let them drop down on my knee to-night. This said, -- he wished to have me in his sight. Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring. To come and touch my hand ... a simple thing, Yet I wept for it! -- this, ... the paper's light ... Said, Dear I love thee; and I sank and quailed. As if God's future thundered on my past. This said, I am thine -- and so...
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Life itself has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot, or to the amalgam of reality and fantasy. ("The New Russian Prose")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Most of us become so rigidly fixed in the ruts carved out by genetic programming and social conditioning that we ignore the options of choosing any other course of action. Living exclusively by genetic and social instructions is fine as long as everything goes well. But the moment bioloical or social goals are frustrated- which in the long run is inevitable - a person must formulate new goals, and create a new flow activity for himself, or else he will always waste his energies in inner turmoil.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The pursuit of happiness is more elusive, it is life long and not goal-centered. Whant you are pusuing is meaning - a meaningful life. The fate the draw that is yours and it isn't fixed, but changing the course of the stream thats going to take a lot of energy. There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when your realize that being barely alive , on your own terms, is better then living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms. The pursuit isn't all...
Jeanette Winterson
No matter how many times we read "King Lear," never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds...
Vladimir Nabokov