Knowing Quotes (page 744)
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To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a...
Christopher Hitchens
The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues....[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.
Haruki Murakami
I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure. Without sadness, there can be no happiness. Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned. Adult. You have become adult.
Harlan Ellison
There's a Polar Bear. In our Frigidaire--He likes it 'cause it's cold in there. With his seat in the meat. And his face in the fish. And his big hairy paws. In the buttery dish, He's nibbling the noodles, And munching the rice, He's slurping the soda, He's licking the ice. And he lets out a roar. If you open the door. And it gives me a scare. To know he's in there--That Polary Bear. In our Fridgitydaire.
Shel Silverstein