Infinite Time Quotes (page 2)
I've never been able to forget the infinite little smile of pure affection that danced across his livid face. Enough gaiety to fill the universe. Few people past twenty preserve any of the affection, the affection of animals. This world isn't what we expected. So our looks change! They change plenty! We made a mistake! And turned into a thorough stinker in next to no time! Past twenty it shows in our face! A mistake! Our face is just a mistake!
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
These dreams reminded me that, since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subject to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or perhaps that some malady of the brain was hindering its development.
Marcel Proust
I looked for it but I found no way out of this wild logical thicket. This was a tangle every bit as unknown and terrifying as that behind the Green Wall These were creatures just as extraordinary and incomprehensible, and they said as much with no words. I imagined that I saw through some kind of thick class the square root of minus one-infinitely huge and at the same time infinitely small, scorpion-shaped, with that hidden but always sensed sting of the minus sign... But maybe that is...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
A hand of smoke took his hand, started him downward, if it was downward, showed him a centre, if it was a centre, put it in his stomach, where the vodka was softly making crystal bubbles, some sort of infinitely beautiful and desperate illusion which some time back he had called immortality.
Julio Cortazar
When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me? Memoria hospitis...
Blaise Pascal
The relationship between the famous and the public who sustain them is governed by a striking paradox. Infinitely remote, the great stars of politics, film and entertainment move across an electric terrain of limousines, bodygurads and private helicopters. At the same time, the zoom lens and the interview camera bring them so near to us that we know their faces and their smallest gestures more intimately than those of our friends. Somewhere in this paradoxical space our imaginations are free...
J. G. Ballard
For, like almost everyone else in our country, I started out with my share of optimism. I believed in hard work and progress and action, but now, after first being 'for' society and then 'against' it, I assign myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the times. But my world has become one of infinite possibilities. What a phrase - still it's a good phrase and a good view of life, and a man shouldn't accept any other; that much I've learned...
Ralph Ellison
I saw the endless steppes, which, although they appeared to be nothing but desert, were, in fact, full of life, full of creatures hidden in the low scrub. I saw the flat horizon, the vast empty space, heard the sound of horses’ hooves, the quiet wind, and then, all around us, nothing, absolutely nothing. It was as if the world had chosen this place to display, at once, its vastness, its simplicity, and its complexity. It was as if we could—and should—become like the steppes—empty, infinite,...
Paulo Coelho
Now he realized the truth: that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power - to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to ruin - the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an island of despair...Sacrifice by its very...
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The wise man has struggled to find You in his wisdom, and he has failed. The just man has striven to grasp You in his own justice, and he has gone astray. But the sinner, suddenly struck by the lightning of mercy that ought to have been justice, falls down in adoration of Your holiness: for he had seen what kings desired to see and never saw, what prophets foretold and never gazed upon, what the men of ancient times grew weary of expecting when they died. He has seen that Your love is so...
Thomas Merton