Little Quotes (page 115)
In a community coursed through by energies every road leads to a worthwhile goal, provided one doesn't hesitate or reflect too long. Targets are short-term, but since life is short too, results are maximized, which is all people need to be happy, because the soul is formed by what you accomplish, whereas what you desire without achieving it merely warps the soul. Happiness depends very little on what we want, but only on achieving whatever it is.
Robert Musil
I’d think there are degrees of greatness,” Adam said.
“I don’t think so,” said Samuel. “That would be like saying there is a little bigness. No. I believe when you come to that responsibility - that hugeness - you are alone to make your choice. On one side you have warmth and companionship and sweet understanding, and on the other cold, lonely greatness. There you make your choice. I’m glad I chose mediocrity, but how am I to say what reward might have come with the other?
John Steinbeck
I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry. When the storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me where I lie in the ditch unregarded I need no words. Nothing neat. Nothing that comes down with all its feet on the floor. None of those resonances and lovely echoes that break and chime from nerve to...
Virginia Woolf
Yes. I was looking for Lettie. They were both very kind to me,” Percival said, “Even though they’d never seen me before. And Wizard Howl kept visiting to court Lettie. Lettie didn’t want him, and she asked me to bite him to get rid of him, until Howl suddenly began asking her about you and—“
“what?”
he said, “ I know someone called sophie who looks a little like you.. And Lettie said, that’s my sister,’ without thinking,” Percival said. “ And she got terribly worried then, particularly as...
Diana Wynne Jones
Do you think that I am a machine? That I can bear it?
Do you think because I'm poor, plain, obsure, and little
that I have no heart? That I'm without soul?
I have as much heart as you and as much soul.
And if God had given me as much beauty and wealth,
I would make it as hard for you to leave me as it is now for me to leave you.
Charlotte Bronte
I know I'm a little different from everyone else, but I'm still human being. That's what I'd like you to realize. I'm just a regular person, not some monster. I feel the same things everyone else does, act the same way. Sometimes, though, that small difference feels like an abyss. But I guess there's not much I can do about it.
Haruki Murakami
Someone did a study on the cell phone calls made from the Twin Towers as they fell. The question: Was there any pattern in what people said? The researcher expected they would find repeated SOSes—pleas for life, asking for absolution—but there was remarkably little of that. Instead, what the people said over and over again as they died, what they sent out across the sea of static: “I love you. These words, when said sincerely, have the capacity to right our wrongs, and live on long...
Rosie O'Donnell
Fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live - for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken? fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.
John Steinbeck