One Time Quotes (page 42)
He told me how he had first met her during the war and then lost her and won her back, and about their marriage and then about something tragic that had happened to them at St-Raphael about a year ago. This first version that he told me of Zelda . and a French naval aviator falling in love was truly a sad story and I believe it was a true story. Later he told me other versions of it as though trying them for use in a novel, but none was as sad as this first one and I always believed the first...
Ernest Hemingway
I was just rather fascinated by certain what seemed to me insoluble paradoxes about reflection, about what it was like to look in one direction and see in another. I was struck by the strange capability we have to look through the front window of a motor car and at the same time look through the driving mirror and not to confuse the view that one saw inside one frame with the view that surrounded it in another frame.
Jonathan Miller
What do we see by [our enlightened age] which our ancestors saw not, and which at the same time is worth seeing? We see a hundred men hanged, where they saw one. We see five hundred transported, where they saw one. We see five thousand in the workhouse, where they saw one. . . . We see children perishing in manufactories, where they saw them flourishing in the fields. We see prisons, where they saw castles. We see masters, where they saw representatives. In short, they saw true men, where we...
Thomas Love Peacock
Who's they?" He wanted to know. "Who, specifically, do you think is trying to murder you?"Every one of them," Yossarian told him."Every one of whom?"Every one of whom do you think?"I haven't any idea."Then how do you know they aren't?"Because..." Clevinger sputtered, and turned speechless with frustration. Clevinger really thought he was right, but Yossarian had proof, because strangers he didn't know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up into the air to drop bombs on them, and it...
Joseph Heller
I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more...
Sylvia Plath
When one's married for so long, always walking on four feet and alwaysbreathing double breaths and thinking every thought twice through andthe time between the main things is packed double full with minordetails - then, sometimes, naturally, one yearns like an arrow for onewhole space thin as air. And you start up in the night, terrified byyour own breathing, which had just been going along as evenly withoutyou. But you don't rise up free - or even really as far as your knees- not once. You...
Robert Musil
In tropical climes, there are certain times of day, When the citiens retire to tear their clothes off and perspire.--It s one of those rules that the greatest fools obey,--because the sun is much too sultry, and one must avoid it s ultra-violet-ray.--Mad dogs and englishmen go out in the mid-day sun.--The Japanese don t care to, The Chinese wouldn t dare to. Hindoos and Argentines sleep firmly from twelwe to one.--But mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the mid-day sun.
Noel Coward
I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?
Voltaire