Mays Quotes (page 170)
You know what it's like when two people start a conversation. First one of them does all the talking, the other breaks in with "That's just like me, I... " and goes on himself until his partner finds a chance to say, "That's just like me, I... "The "That's just like me, I... 's" may look like a form of agreement, a way of carrying the other party's idea a step further, but that is an illusion...
Milan Kundera
He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of a great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is...
Cormac McCarthy
All our knowledge hast its origins in our perceptions? In nature there is no effect without a cause? Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments? Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass.
Leonardo da Vinci
Educationalists who think they can understand the young are enthusiasts. Youth does not want to be understood; it wants only to be let alone. It preserves itself immune against the insidious bacillus of being understood. The grown-up who would approach it too importunately is as ridiculous in its eyes as if he had put on children's clothes. We may feel with our youth, but youth does not feel with us. That is its salvation.
Erich Maria Remarque
Are they not fresh and beautiful?" [Watson] cried...Holmes shook his head gravely."... You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed bu their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed here... They always filled me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson... that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and...
Arthur Conan Doyle
Plainly, such an approach does not exclude other ways of trying to comprehend the world. Someone committed to it (as I am) can consistently believe (as I do) that we learn much more of human interest about how people think and feel and act by reading novels or studying history than from all of naturalistic psychology, and perhaps always will; similarly, the arts may offer appreciation of the heavens to which astrophysics cannot aspire.
Noam Chomsky
I was no conscious chronicler or witness of the events that unfolded in those times. Surely you understand. You must understand. Do you look thousands of years into the future? Do you measure what's happening to you now by what may matter a thousand years hence? I was stumbling and lurching, groping and from time to time drowning, as any man might.
Anne Rice