Long Way Quotes (page 13)
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How could he convey to someone who'd never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turnec the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, bus as long as Em was with him, he was at home?
Jodi Picoult
When you open a book,” the sentimental library posters said, “anything can happen.” This was so. A book of fiction was a bomb. It was a land mine you wanted to go off. You wanted it to blow your whole day. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of books were duds. They had been rusting out of everyone’s way for so long that they no longer worked. There was no way to distinguish the duds from the live mines except to throw yourself at them headlong, one by one.
Annie Dillard
The opposite of esprit d'escalier is the way that life's embarrassments come back to haunt us even after they're long past. I could remember every stupid thing I'd ever said or done, recall them with picture-perfect clarity. Any time I was feeling low, I'd naturally start to remember other times I felt that way, a hit parade of humiliations coming one after another to my mind.
Cory Doctorow
I had a dogwho loved flowers. Briskly she wentthrough the fields, yet pausedfor the honeysuckleor the rose, her dark headand her wet nosetouchingthe faceof every onewith its petalsof silkwith its fragrancerisinginto the airwhere the bees, their bodiesheavy with pollenhovered -and easilyshe adoredevery blossomnot in the seriouscareful waythat we choosethis blossom or that blossomthe way we praise or don't praise -the way we loveor don't love -but the waywe long to be -that happyin the heaven...
Mary Oliver
Everyone must leave something behind when he dies . . . Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die . . . It doesn't matter what you do, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.
Ray Bradbury
People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.
Flannery O'Connor
We know the battle ahead will be long, but always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change. We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics... they will only grow louder and more dissonant ........... We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been...
Barack Obama
But will anyone again look at that tree, read that poem, love a dog in quite my way? I am a particular and, despite the commonness of all people, a unique person in the way I perceive and think and appreciate, and I am sad that this particularity shall before too long be gone. This is not arrogance; it is the simple truth, known to anyone who has loved a person dead in the fullness of her life: what we miss is the particularity, that unique voice. [pp. 184-185]
Carolyn Gold Heilbrun
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that...
George Orwell
In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.
Benjamin Franklin
Fictions are useful so long as they are taken as fictions. They are thensimply ways of "figuring" the world which we agree to follow so thatwe can act in cooperation, as we agree about inches and hours, numbersand words, mathematical systems and languages. If we have noagreement about measures of time and space, I would have no way ofmaking a date with you at the corner of Forty-second Street and FifthAvenue at 3 P.M. on Sunday, April 4.
Alan Watts
