Lining Quotes (page 40)
It's the first line in your book. I always thought there was a lot of truth in that. Or maybe that's what my English teacher said. I can't really remember. I read it last semester."- Your parents must be so proud you can read."- They are. They bought me a pony and everything when I did a book report on Cat in the Hat.
Nicholas Sparks
They were all intensely excited, and all overflowing with noisy expressions of their loyalty to the Law. Yet I felt an absolute assurance in my own mind that the Hyena-Swine was implicated in the rabbit-killing. A strange persuasion came upon me that, save for the grossness of the line, save for the grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its simplest form.
H. G. Wells
Grass: I’ve invested heavily in blood futures. I have a direct line to the trading floor for polyester blood. There’s a heaving mass of men crying out their bids. The blood arrives at the warehouse in the form of double-knit suits. It’s the only kind of suit I wear. When I collapse in the street, paramedics rush me to the hospital, liquefy the suit and inject it in my veins.
Don DeLillo
He believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music. True life was kept safe in the lines of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin while you went out in the world and met the obligations required of you. Certainly he knew (though did not completely understand) that opera wasn't for everyone, but for everyone he hoped there was something. The records he cherished, the rare opportunities to see a live performance, those were the marks by which he gauged his ability to love.
Ann Patchett
There are transitional forms between the metals and non-metals; between chemical combinations and simple mixtures, between animals and plants, between phanerogams and cryptogams, and between mammals and birds [...]. The improbability may henceforth be taken for granted of finding in Nature a sharp cleavage between all that is masculine on the one side and all that is feminine on the other; or that any living being is so simple in this respect that it can be put wholly on one side, or wholly...
Otto Weininger
Once he gets to the fort the colonel turns to John Wayne and says, "I did see a few Indians on the way over here." And John Wayne, with this really cool look on his face, replies, 'Don't worry. If you were able to spot some Indians, that means there weren't any there.' I don't remember the actual lines, but it went something like that. Do you get what he means?
Haruki Murakami
By now it was too late to call St. Jude. He chose an out-of-the-way patch of airport carpeting and lay it down to sleep. He didn't understand what had happened to him. He felt like a piece of paper that had once had coherent writing on it but had been through the wash. He felt roughened, bleached and worn out along the fold lines. He semi-dreamed of disembodied eyes and isolated mouths in ski masks. He'd lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was was what a person wanted, you...
Jonathan Franzen
We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit - a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a...
Wendell Berry
Even such is Time *Even such is Time, that takes in trust. Our youth, our joys, our all we have, And pays us but with earth and dust; Who in the dark and silent grave, When we have wandered all our ways, Shuts up the story of our days: But from this earth, this grave, this dust, My God shall raise me up, I trust. Sir Walter Raleigh (1554-1618)*These lines are said to have been composed by Sir Walter Raleigh on the night before his execution.
Walter Raleigh
I believe our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey. I believe that whenever a human being, of even the highest intelligence and culture, delivers an opinion upon a matter apart from his particular and especial line of interest, training and experience, it will always be an opinion of so foolish and so valueless a sort that it can be depended upon to suggest our Heavenly Father that the human being is another disappointment and that he is no considerable...
Mark Twain