Fixing Quotes (page 22)
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and...
Allen Ginsberg
The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination, which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks. She spent half her time in thinking of beauty, bravery, magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible action, she thought it would be detestable to be afraid or ashamed. She had an infinite hope that she would never do anything wrong. She had resented so strongly, after discovering them, her...
Henry James
He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have led to something; and found consolation in trifles so slight compared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.
Virginia Woolf
... and she turned for the stairs as the sound of rain came, finally, scattered across the roof, a fall that now gave substance to the stilled beams of headlamps in the drive where those of flashlights rose and fell to the cadenced steps come back and round the range of yew and up the terrace and through the door to fall on broken glass and flee across the inkstained carpet, darting, climbing, caught fixed in niches, they scaled the walls and leaped the beams to skirt the hayloft.
William Gaddis
That's why your lot in life isn't fate. I don't have any say in much of my life, but I make whatever choices I can make in my own rational best interest. It's my choice to fix those stairs and make the place I live a little better instead of whining and waiting and hoping for someone else to do something for me. I have pride that I know how to do that for myself.
Terry Goodkind
If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him; and it will then be but poor consolation to believe the world equally in the dark. There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost any attachment, that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all begin ‘freely’- as light preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have a heart enough to be really in love without encouragement.
Jane Austen
There's nothing to be gained from passive observance, the simple documenting of conditions, because, at its core, it sets a bad example. Every time something is observed and not fixed, or when one has a chance to give in some way and does not, there is a lie being told, the same lie we all know by heart but which needn't be reiterated.
Dave Eggers