Momentous Quotes (page 20)
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How- how did I get here?"It would take another Earthling to explain it to you. Earthlings are the great explainers, explaining why this event is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved or avoided. I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said...
Kurt Vonnegut
I get the idea perfectly, Mickey," said Archimboldi, thinking all the while that this man was not only irritating but ridiculous, with the particular ridiculousness of self-dramatizers and poor fools convinced they've been present at a decisive moment in history, when it's common knowledge, thought Archimboldi, that history, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.
Roberto Bolano
Now at this very moment I knew that the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! ... How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care ... We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end ... Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to a powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force.
Winston Churchill
Gaudium is what I dream of: to enjoy a lifelong pleasure. But being unable to accede to Gaudium, from which I am separated by a thousand obstacles, I dream of falling back on Laetitia: if I could manage to confine myself to the lively pleasures the other affords me, without contaminating them, mortifying them by the anxiety which serves as their hinge? If I could take an anthological view of the amorous relation? If I were to understand, initially, that a great preoccupation does not include...
Roland Barthes
There were moments when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.
Joseph Conrad
Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for beings vague. After all, the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection. I feel that especially about representations of women. As if a woman were a mere colored superficies! You must wait for movement and tone. There is a difference in their very breathing: they change from moment to moment.
George Eliot
I could dream it forever and still not do it, but when the time comes for it to be done, God, I want to be ready for it, to be ready for the moment of convergence between the thing done and the doing of it, between the thing to be made and its maker. At that moment, I am speaking for everyone; I am dreaming for the billions yet to come; I am taking part of us that cannot be understood by God, and letting it bleed from the wrist onto the canvas. And it can only be made, because I have felt...
Steve Martin