Hard Time Quotes (page 21)
Identity. That's my elephant. The thought came with certainty, without the question mark on the end this time. Not fame, exactly, though recognition was some kind of important cement for it. But what you were was what you did. And I did more, oh yes. If a hunger for identity were translated into, say, a hunger for food, he'd be a more fantastic glutton than Mark ever dreamed of being. Is it irrational, to want to be so much, to want so hard it hurts? And how much, then, was enough?
Lois McMaster Bujold
The onward march of the human race requires that the heights around it should be ablaze with noble and enduring lessons of courage. Deeds of daring dazzle history, and form one of the guiding lights of man. The dawn dares when it rises. To strive, to brave all risks, to persist, to persevere, to be faithful to yourself, to grapple hand to hand with destiny, to surprise defeat by the little terror it inspires, at one time to confront unrighteous power, at another to defy intoxicated triumph,...
Victor Hugo
The dark was hissing and hot and hard with a jagged bone, a cold brutal bone, and hips packed tight. The dark wasn't just at night. The dark was any time, any place; you open your eyes and the dark is there, right up against you, pressing. You can't see anything and you don't know any names, not who they are or the names for what they do...
Andrea Dworkin
I was jut vamping for time to make a few self-improvements: I knew damn well I'd never be a movie star, it's too hard; and if you're intelligent, it's too embarrassing. My complexes aren't inferior enough: being a movie star and having a big fat ego are supposed to go hand-in-hand; actually, it's essential not to have any ego at all.
Truman Capote
[Y]ou weren't born with a talent for witchcraft: it didn't come easily; you worked hard at it because you wanted it. You forced the world to give it to you, no matter the price, and the price is and always will be high... People say you don't find witchcraft; witchcraft finds you. But you've found it, even if at the time you didn't know what it was you were finding, and you grabbed it by its scrawny neck and made it work for you.
Terry Prachett
Now, helpless in the hollow of. An unarmorial age, a trough. Of smoke in slow suspended skeins. Above their scrap of history, Only an attitude remains: Time has transfigured them into. Untruth. The stone finality. They hardly meant has come to be. Their final blazon, and to prove. Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.
Philip Larkin