Not Knowing Quotes (page 103)
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I am a wicked man... But do you know, gentlemen, what was the main point about my wickedness? The whole thing, precisely was, the greatest nastiness precisely lay in my being shamefully conscious every moment, even in moments of the greatest bile, that I was not only not a wicked man but was not even an embittered man, that I was simply frightening sparrows in vain, and pleasing myself with it.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Jake knew that his mother had a tendency to mistake rules, her rules, for principles. She did not bend because she did not have enough confidence to know when or how far. She did not listen well because one ear was always otherwise engaged - either listening to what she herself had just said or what she would say next.
E. L. Konigsburg
I shall not vote for Sen. Obama and it will not be because he—like me and like all of us—carries African genes. And I shall not be voting for Mrs. Clinton, who has the gall to inform me after a career of overweening entitlement that there is 'a double standard' at work for women in politics; and I assure you now that this decision of mine has only to do with the content of her character. We will know that we have put this behind us when [...] we have outgrown and forgotten the original...
Christopher Hitchens
Dear me! We Tooks and Brandybucks, we can't live long on the heights.''No,' said Merry. 'I can't. Not yet, at any rate. But at least, Pippin, we can now see them, and honour them. It is best to love first what you are fitted to love, I suppose: you must start somewhere and have some roots, and the soil of the Shire is deep. Still there are things deeper and higher; and not a gaffer could tend his garden in what he calls peace but for them, whether he knows about them or not.
J. R. R. Tolkien
I know," I said, "but it scares me. It reminds me of my father."I'm not your father," said Mark. "Repeat after me, 'Mark Feldman is not my father.'"Mark Feldman is not my father," I said. Am I fat?" said Mark. No," I said. Am I bald?"No."Do I smell of Dr. Scholl's foot pads?"No," I said. I rest my case," said Mark.
Nora Ephron
One cannot always know what children are thinking. Children are hard to understand, especially when careful training has accustomed them to obedience, and experience has made them cautious in their conversation with their teachers. Will you not draw from this the fine maxim that one should not scold children too much, but should make them trustful, so that they will not conceal their stupidities from us?
Catherine II
His act was rather that of a harmless lunatic than an enemy. We were not so new to the country as not to know that the solitary life of many a plainsman had a tendency to develop eccentricities of conduct and character not always easily distinguishable from mental aberration. A man is like a tree: in a forest of his fellows he will grow as straight as his generic and individual nature permits; alone, in the open, he yields to the deforming stresses and tortions that environ him.
Ambrose Bierce
What a lost person needs is a map of the territory, with his own position marked on it so he can see where he is in relation to everything else. Literature is not only a mirror; it is also a map, a geography of the mind. Our literature is one such map, if we can learn to read it as our literature, as the product of who and where we have been. We need such a map desperately, we need to know about here, because here is where we live. For the members of a country or a culture, shared...
Margaret Atwood
We have learned of evil, though not as the Evil One wished us to learn. We have learned better than that, and know it more, for it is waking that understands sleep and not sleep that understands waking. There is an ignorance of enil that comes from being young: there is a dardker ignorance that comes from doing it, as men by sleeping lose the knowledge of sleep. You are more ignorant of evil in Thulcandra now than in the days before your Lord and Lady began to do it. But Maleldil has...
C. S. Lewis