Fullness Quotes (page 11)
in fact any good mind properly taught can think like Euclid and like Walt Whitman. The Renaissance, as we saw, was full of such minds, equally competent as poet and as engineers. The modern notion of "the two cultures," incompatible under one skull, comes solely from the proliferation of specialties in science; but these also divide scientists into groups that do not understand one another, the cause being the sheer mass of detail and the diverse terminologies. In essence the human mind...
Jacques Barzun
The woods that I loved as a child are entirely gone. The woods that I loved as a young adult are gone. The woods that most recently I walked in are not gone, but they’re full of bicycle trails. And this is happening to the world, and I think it is very very dangerous for our future generations, those of us who believe that the world is not only necessary to us in its pristine state, but it is in itself an act of some kind of spiritual thing. I said once, and I think this is true, the world...
Mary Oliver
As his lord stared at the door another figure appeared, a girl of about fifteen with long, rather wild black hair. She was gauche in movement and in a sense, ugly of face, but with how small a twist might she not suddenly have become beautiful. Her sullen mouth was full and rich? her eyes smouldered.
Mervyn Peake
<...> [Rainer Maria Rilke] speaks of absorbing Earth's phenomena with the full frenzy of human relish and insight as our destiny: "It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again... We are the bees of the invisible... [Our work is] the continual conversion of the beloved visible and tangible world into the invisible vibrations and agitation of our own nature.
Diane Ackerman
The Pig Chef was - if you thought about it - one of the more sinister icons of American roadside art. Danny's personal totem. What kind of pig is a butcher? What kind of pig cooks barbeque? A traitor pig, a killer pig, a doomed preterite pig destined for eternal damnation. Danny's Pig Chefs showed the full weight of this knowledge in their mocking eyes and snaggled snouts.
Rudy Rucker
And not without sympathy, Aidan turned the shower on full cold and shoved his beloved brother under the heartless spray. Oh, the scream but peeled the skin off his face, and the curse that followed battered his ears. But Aidan held ground, dodged a fist when he had to, and clamping Shawn in a headlock, held him mercilessly under.
Nora Roberts
For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you willnever be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be livingfor some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit backwith full contentment and say, "Now, I've arrived!" Your entireeducation has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparingyou for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.
Alan Watts
I rooted through my pocketbook and did a fast paraphernalia inventory. I was carrying defense spray, which was a big no-no in a crowded mall. And I carried a stun gun, which on close examination turned out to need a new battery. My two pairs of cuffs were in working order, and I had an almost full can of hair spray. Okay, probably I wasn't the world's best-equipped bounty hunter. But then what did I really need to bring in an old guy with a nose that looked like a penis and a loser hot dog...
Janet Evanovich
But if you are a poor creature--poisoned by a wretched up-bringing in some house full of vulgar jealousies and senseless quarrels--saddled, by no choice of your own, with some loathsome sexual perversion--nagged day in and day out by an inferiority complex that makes you snap at your best friends--do not despair. He knows all about it. You are one of the poor whom He blessed. He knows what a wretched machine you are trying to drive. Keep on. Do what you can. One day He will fling it on the...
C. S. Lewis
Consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!
Herman Melville