Grounds Quotes (page 19)
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The story of the Utah prairie dog is the story of the range of our compassion. If we can extend our idea of community to include the lowliest of creatures, call them 'the untouchables', then we will indeed be closer to a path of peace and tolerance. if we cannot accommodate 'the other', the shadow we will see on our own home ground will be the forecast of our own species' extended winter of the soul.
Terry Tempest Williams
Beetee is still messing round the tree, doing I don't know what. At one point he snaps off a sliver of bark, joins us, and throws it against the force field. It bounces back and lands on the ground, glowing. In a few moments it returns to its original color. "Well, that explains a lot," says Beetee. I look at Peeta and can't help biting my lip to keep from laughing since it explains absolutely nothing to anyone but Beetee.
Suzanne Collins
Language is evidently one of the principle instruments or helps of thought; and any imperfection in the instrument, or in the mode of employing it, is confessedly liable, still more than in almost any other art, to confuse and impede the process, and destroy all ground of confidence in the result.
John Stuart Mill
Man disavows, and Deity disowns me; Hell might afford my miseries a shelter; Therefore Hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all. Bolted against me. Hard lot! encompassed with a thousand dangers, Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors, I'm called, if vanquished, to receive a sentence. Worse than Abiram's. Him the vindictive rod of angry Justice. Sent quick and howling to the centre headlong; I, fed with judgement, in a fleshy tomb, am. Buried above ground.
William Cowper
The world' is man's experience as it appears to, and is moulded by, his ego. It is that less abundant life, which is lived according to the dictates of the insulated self. It is nature denatured by the distorting spectacles of our appetites and revulsions. It is the finite divorced from the Eternal. It is multiplicity in isolation from its non-dual Ground. It is time apprehended as one damned thing after another. It is a system of verbal categories taking the place of the fathomlessly...
Aldous Huxley
Wonderboy flashed in the sun. It caught the sphere it was biggest. A noise like a twenty-one gun salute cracked the sky. There was a straining, ripping sound and a few drops of rain spattered to the ground somebody then shouted it was raining cats and dogs. By the time of Roy got in from second he was wading in water ankle deep.
Bernard Malamud
Finally, Peeta turns to Pollux. "Well, then you just became our most valuable asset." Castor laughs and Pullox Manages a smile. We're halfway down the first tunnel when I realize what was so remarkable about that exchange. Peeta sounded like his old self, the one who could always think of the right thing to say when nobody else could....I glance back at him as he trudges along under his gaurds, Gale and Jackson, his eyes fixed on the ground, his shoulders hunched forward. So dispirited. But...
Suzanne Collins
Because that’s really something I can’t stand — when people refer to themselves as crazy. The truly crazy are labeled so on the grounds that they see nothing wrong with their behavior. They forge ahead, lighting fires in public buildings and defecating in frying pans without the slightest notion that they are out of step with the rest of society. That, to me, is crazy.
David Sedaris
Ogbuef Ezedudu, who was the oldest man in the village, was telling two other men when they came to visit him that the punishment for breaking the Peace of Ani had become very mild in their clan. "It has not always been so," he said. "My father told me that he had been told that in the past a man who broke the peace was dragged on the ground through the village until he died. but after a while this custom was stopped because it spoiled the peace which it was meant to preserve.
Chinua Achebe
One can see now how the idea of heaven takes hold of men's consciousness, how it gains ground even when all the props have been knocked from under it. There must be another world beside this swamp in which everything is dumped pell-mell. It's hard to imagine what it can be like, this heaven that men dream about.
Henry Miller