Listener Quotes (page 74)
lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in play?
Stephen Fry
There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported,...
Flannery O'Connor
When someone tells you they’ve just bought a house, they might as well tell you they no longer have a personality. You can immediately assume so many things: that they’re locked into jobs they hate; that they’re broke; that they spend every night watching videos; that they’re fifteen pounds overweight; that they no longer listen to new ideas. It’s profoundly depressing.
Doug Coupland
What do you say to em?
Say to them?
Yeah. Say.
Hell, say anything. It doesnt matter, they dont listen. Well you gotta say somethin. What do you say?
Try the direct approach.
What's that?
Well, like this friend of mine. Went up to this girl and said I sure would like to have a little pussy.
No shit? What'd she say?
She said I would too. Mine's as big as your hat.
Cormac McCarthy
And I saw just the other day, in Mentor, Ohio, where a father told the story of his 8-year-old daughter, whose long battle with leukemia nearly cost their family everything had it not been for the health care reform passing just a few months before the insurance company was about to stop paying for her care. I had an opportunity to not just talk to the father, but meet this incredible daughter of his. And when he spoke to the crowd listening to that father's story, every parent in that room...
Barack Obama
He halted amazed, thinking that he had strayed into a dream, or else that he had received the gift of the Elf-minstrels, who can make the things of which they sing appear before the eyes of those that listen.'For Aragorn had been singing a part of the The Lay of Lthien which tells of the meeting of Lthien and Beren in the forest of Neldoreth. And behold! there Lthien walked before his eyes in Rivendell, clad in a mantle of silver and blue, fair as the twilight in Elven-home; her dark hair...
J. R. R. Tolkien