How Quotes (page 345)
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Scapegoating worked in practice while it still had religious powers behind it. You loaded the sins of the city on to the goat’s back and drove it out, and the city was cleansed. It worked because everyone knew how to read the ritual, including the gods. Then the gods died, and all of a sudden you had to cleanse the city without divine help. Real actions were demanded instead of symbolism The censor was born, in the Roman sense. Watchfulness became the watchword: the watchfulness of all over...
J. M. Coetzee
Emotions weren’t created to just lie around. You should experience things to the full. I’ve got a sense of the clock ticking. We have to feel all those things to the maximum. Like, I don’t eat a lot but I really love eating. And I like being precise and particular. There is a certain respect in that. If you can do your day depending on how you feel, and enjoy things as well.
Bjork
I don't think you ever get to relax. I mean, sure there's a couple of people who could, but I bet they don't. Because by the time they get to where they could relax, they don't. Because by the time they get to where they could relax, they've gotten completely used to not being able to. How do you just suddenly become somebody who relaxes? The kind of ambition you need to get to that place is not relaxing. It's searing. I think there's probably something about living your whole life in a...
Carrie Fisher
That people were manifold creatures didn’t come as a surprise to the Swede, even if it was a bit of a shock to realize it anew when someone let you down. What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for
Philip Roth
Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms. [...] the right of the citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government and one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.
Hubert H. Humphrey
Sometimes you read a passage by a great writer, and you know what he says and how he says it will always be, for you, the only possible way it could be. Less often a painter will describe an event in a way that fits into your interpretation of that event so perfectly that it becomes the event itself.
Vincent Price
Even in a dream, even at a posh ball, the Nac Mac Feegle knew how to behave. You charged in madly, and you screamed... politely."Lovely weather for the time o' year, is it not, ye wee scunner!"Hey, jimmy, ha' ye no got a pommes frites for an ol'pal?"The band is playin' divinely, I dinna think!"Make my caviar deep-fried, wilya?
Terry Prachett
He plunged his arms deep to embrace
One who vanished in agitated water.
Again and again he kissed
The lips that seemed to be rising to kiss his
But dissolved, as he touched them,
Into a soft splash and a shiver of ripples.
How could he clasp and caress his own reflection?
And still he could not comprehend
What the deception was, what the delusion.
He simply became more excited by it.
Poor misguided boy! Why clutch so vainly
At such a brittle figment? What you hope
To lay hold of has no...
Ovid