Likes Quotes (page 978)
Now obviously, in peacetime a one-legged catcher, like a one-armed outfielder (such as the Mundys had roaming right), would have been at the most a curiosity somewhere down in the dingiest town in the minors - precisely where Hot had played during the many years that the nations of the world lived in harmony. But it is one of life's grisly ironies that what is catastrophe for most of mankind, invariably works to the advantage of a few who live on the fringes of the human community. On the...
Philip Roth
he asked if i wouldn't like to live completely without problems, say in greece maybe, nice climate, everything provided? i say: "when we find out what we are actually doing and who we actually are, that is the point of living...it may be only a few seconds...a few seconds of significant actions, out of a lifetime...
William S. Burroughs
On the Gulf side of these islands you may observe that the trees—where there are any trees—all bend away from the sea; and, even of bright, hot days when the wind sleeps, there is something grotesquely pathetic in their look of agonized terror. A group of oaks . . . I remember as especially suggestive: five stooping silhouettes in line against the horizon, like fleeing women with streaming garments and wind-blown hair,—bowing grievously and thrusting out arms desperately northward as to save...
Lafcadio Hearn
Vonnegut's war was necessary. And yet it was massacre and screaming and confusion and blood and death. It was the mammoth projection outward of the confused inner life of men. In war, the sad tidy constructs we make to help us believe life is orderly and controllable are roughly thrown aside like the delusions they are. In war, love is outed as an insane, insupportable emotion, a kind of luxury emotion, because everywhere you look, someone beloved to someone is being slaughtered, by someone...
George Saunders
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Who would condescend to strike down the mere things that he does notfear? Who would debase himself to be merely brave, like any commonprizefighter? Who would stoop to be fearless--like a tree? Fight thething that you fear. You remember the old tale of the English clergymanwho gave the last rites to the brigand of Sicily, and how on hisdeath-bed the great robber said, 'I can give you no money, but I cangive you advice for a lifetime: your thumb on the blade, and strikeupwards.' So I say to...
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There's a man who's been out sailing. In a decade full of dreams. And he takes her to a schooner. And he treats her like a queen. Bearing beads from California. With their amber stones and green. He has called her from the harbor. He has kissed her with his freedom. He has heard her off to starboard. In the breaking and the breathing. Of the water weeds. While she was busy being free
Joni Mitchell