Meaning Of Quotes (page 160)
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It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow, could overwhelm us and our children. One is tempted to turn away with a grimace and close one's mind: this is a temptation one must resist. In fact, the existence of the death squads had a meaning, a message: 'We, the master race, are your destroyers, but you are no better than we are; if we so wish, and we do so...
Primo Levi
The Bible is clear here: I am to love my neighbor as myself, in the manner needed, in a practical way, in the midst of the fallen world, at my particular point of history. This is why I am not a pacifist. Pacifism in this poor world in which we live -- this lost world -- means that we desert the people who need our greatest help.
Francis Schaeffer
I don’t trust compliments. I’ve been getting them for years. Sometimes I deserve them, sometimes I didn’t. But generally when people give you compliments there’s one of two things wrong with them. Either they’re false, or what’s worse is they’re sincere. They really mean the compliment. And then they’re offering you their loyalty. And I’m kind of a stingy… Well, I don’t necessarily want to give all that loyalty back. So either way, let’s skip the compliments.
Norman Mailer
We have all lived through that shriveling moment when a parent walks into a room and repeats, with sardonic disbelief, a couplet picked up from the stereo or the TV. 'What does that mean, then?' my mother asked me during Top of the Pops. "Get it on / Bang a gong"? How long did it take him to think of that, do you reckon?' And the correct answer - 'Two seconds, and it doesn't matter' - is always beyond you, so you just tell her to shut up, while inside you're hating Marc Bolan for making you...
Nick Hornby
When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.
Tom Robbins
So -- I confess I have been a rake at reading. I have read those things which I ought not to have read, and I have not read those things which I ought to have read, and there is no health in me -- if by health you mean an inclusive and coherent knowledge of any body of great literature. I can only protest, like all rakes in their shameful senescence, that I have had a good time.
Robertson Davies
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the...
C. S. Lewis
And now we look upon the earth and sky. This spread of naked rock and peaks and moonlight is like a world ready to be born, a world that waits. It seems to us it asks a sign from us, a spark, a first commandment. We cannot know what word we are to give, nor what great deed this earth expects to witness. We know it waits. It seems to say it has great gifts to lay before us. We are to speak. We are to give its goal, its highest meaning to all this glowing space of rock and sky.
Ayn Rand
Toast was a pointless invention from the Dark Ages. Toast was an implement of torture that caused all those subjected to it to regurgitate in verbal form the sins and crimes of their past lives. Toast was a ritual item devoured by fetishists in the belief that it would enhance their kinetic and sexual powers. Toast cannot be explained by any rational means. Toast is me. I am toast.
Margaret Atwood
The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time. Three hours seem like three minutes. Then there is the business of surprise. I never know what is coming next. The phrase that sounds in the head changes when it appears on the page. Then I start probing it with a pen, finding new meanings. Sometimes I burst out laughing at what is happening as I twist and turn sentences. Strange business, all in all. One never gets to the end of it. That’s why I go on, I suppose....
Gore Vidal