Never Quotes (page 581)
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First maid: If I was a princess, with silver and gold, And loved by a hero, I'd never grow old: Oh, if a young hero came a-marrying me, I'd always be beautiful, happy, and free! Chorus: Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave - The water below is as dark as the grave, And maybe you'll sink in your little blue boat - It's hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat.
Margaret Atwood
Late in the night I paythe unrest I ownto the life that has never livedand cannot live now. What the world could be is my good dream and my agony when, dreaming it, I lie awake and turnand look into the dark. I think of a luxury in the sturdiness and graceof necessary things, notin frivolity. That would heal the earth, and heal men. But the end, too, is partof the pattern, the last labor of the heart: to learn to lie still, one with the earth again, and let the world go.
Wendell Berry
What we see as death,
empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this
endlessly waving ocean. It is all part of the illusion that there should
seem to be something to be gained in the future, and that there is an
urgent necessity to go on and on until we get it. Yet just as there is no
time but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there is
never anything to be gained—though the zest of the game is to pretend
that there is.
Alan Watts
If you have regard to your future happiness, any view of living comfortably with a husband, any hope of preserving your fortunes or restoring them after any disaster, never, ladies, marry a fool. Any husband rather than a fool. With some other husband you may be unhappy, but with a fool you will be miserable.
Daniel Defoe
Theophilus Hopkins was a moderately famous man. You can look him up in the 1860 Britannica. There are three full columns about his corals and his corallines, his anemones and starfish. It does not have anything very useful about the man. It does not tell you what he was like. You can read it three times over and never guess that he had any particular attitude to Christmas pudding.
Peter Carey
It was an evening of torment, and I remember only one other thing about it. At some point after everyone was asleep, I wandered away from the inn in a daze and ended up on the sea cliffs, staring out into the darkness with sound of the roaring water below me. The thundering of the ocean was like a bitter lament. I seemed to see beneath everything a layering of cruelty I have never known was there. The howling of the wind and shaking of the trees seemed to mock me. Could it really be that the...
Arthur Golden