Once Quotes (page 145)
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Do you ever get scared?
Yeah. Sometimes. It's not like you're walking around terrified all the time, even when things are going to hell around you.
It's just you're....reacting, trying to stay alive. Things are happening so fast that you don't have time to think much of anything except doing your job and trying not to die.
It usally affects you afterward, once you're clear. That's when you realize how close you came and sometimes you get the shakes or puke or whatever.
Nicholas Sparks
Life's very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I've got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged--well, one can't do all these things at once, worse luck, because they're so contradictory. It's then that proportion comes in--to live by proportion. Don't begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed...
E. M. Forster
I have never seen much point in getting heavy with stupid people or Jesus freaks, just as long as they don't bother me. In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone. They will not inherit the earth, but then neither will I... And I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness, either. But as long as I know...
Hunter S. Thompson
[Jos] Saramago for the last 25 years stood his own with any novelist of the Western world [..] He was the equal of Philip Roth, Gunther Grass, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. His genius was remarkably versatile? he was at once a great comic and a writer of shocking earnestness and grim poignancy. It is hard to believe he will not survive.
Harold Bloom
I can't keep my head above water one minute to the next: it's not just the parties and the goo-gooing with what's-her-name, I've got the decide how long the Five Hundredth Anniversary Parade is going to be and where does it start and when does it start and which nobleman gets to march in front of which other nobleman so that everyone's still speaking to me at the end of it, plus I've got a wife to murder and a country to frame for it, plus I've got to get the war going once that's all...
William Goldman
Pain (any pain--emotional, physical, mental) has a message. The information it has about our life can be remarkablyspecific, but it usually falls into one of two categories: Wewould be more alive if we did more of this and Life would bemore lovely if we did less of that. Once we get the pain'smessage, and follow its advice, the pain goes away.
Peter McWilliams
To travel is to be born and to die at every instant; perhaps, in the vaguest region of his mind, he did make comparisons between the shifting horizon and our human existence: all the things of life are perpetually fleeing before us; the dark and bright intervals are intermingled; after a dazzling moment, an eclipse; we look, we hasten, we stretch out our hands to grasp what is passing; each event is a turn in the road, and, all at once, we are old; we feel a shock; all is black; we...
Victor Hugo