Leaves Quotes (page 22)
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The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
When the immense drugged universe explodes. In a cascade of unendurable colour. And leaves us gasping naked, This is no more than the ectasy of chaos: Hold fast, with both hands, to that royal love. Which alone, as we know certainly, restores. Fragmentation into true being. Ecstasy of Chaos
Robert Graves
He wanted to write urgent love letters to her all day long and crowd the endless pages with desperate, uninhibited confessions of his humble worship and need with careful instructions for administering artificial respiration. He wanted to pour out to her in torrents of self-pity all his unbearable loneliness and despair and warn her never to leave the boric acid or the aspirin in reach of the children or to cross a street against the traffic light. He did not wish to worry her.
Joseph Heller
So far as Emma was concerned she did not ask herself whether she was in love. Love, she thought, was something that must come suddenly, with a great display of thunder and lightning, descending on one's life like a tempest from above, turning it topsy-turvy, whirling away one's resolutions like leaves and bearing one onward, heart and soul, towards the abyss. She never bethought herself how on the terrace of a house the rain forms itself into little lakes when the gutters are choked, and she...
Gustave Flaubert
I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When a woman makes the choice to marry, to have children, in one way her life begins but in another way it stops. You build a life of details. You become a mother, a wife and you stop and stay steady so that your children can move. And when they leave they take your life of details with them. And then you're expected to move again only you don't remember what moves you because no one has asked in so long. Not even yourself.
Robert James Waller
Fame stole my yellow. Yellow is the color you get when you're real and brutally honest. Yellow is with my kids[...]The bundle of bright yellow warming my core, formerly frozen and uninhabitable[...]They got yellow from me, and I felt yellow giving it to them and it was all good[...]So, why am I leaving my show? It took my yellow. I wanted it back. Without it I can't live. The gray kills me.
Rosie O'Donnell