Only Quotes (page 482)
One question at any rate was answered. Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes, no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed on the floor, clutching uselessly at his disabled left arm.
George Orwell
Open the old cigar-box .....let me consider anew..... Old friends, and who is Maggie that I should abandon you? A million surplus Maggies are willing 'o bear the yoke; And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a Smoke. Light me another Cuba..... I hold to my first-sworn vows, If Maggie will have no rival, I'll have no Maggie for spouse!
Rudyard Kipling
The Roman Emperor Julian, writing in the fourth century, regretted the progress of Christianity because it pulled people away from the Roman gods. He said, 'Atheism [I.e. the Christian faith!] has been specially advanced through the loving service rendered to strangers, and through their care for the burial of the dead. It is a scandal that there is not a single Jew who is a beggar, and that the godless Galileans care not only for their own poor but for ours as well; while those who belong to...
John Piper
![Michael Cunningham quote: "Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It's James Dean jumping into..."](/pic/312577/600x316/quotation-michael-cunningham-youth-is-the-only-sexy-tragedy-its-james.jpg)
it was not a matter of miracles. It was not an expectation of miracles, frivolous in its impatience. Alyosha did not need miracles then for the triumph of certain convictions (it was not that at all), nor so that some sort of former, preconceived idea would quickly triumph over another...Again, it was not miracles he needed, but only a "higher justice," which, as he believed, had been violated--it was this that wounded his heart so cruelly and suddenly...it was justice, justice he thirsted...
Fyodor Dostoevsky
[E]very plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dnouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the dnouement constantly in view that we can plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points tend to the development of the intention.
Edgar Allan Poe
She asked me why I never came, said she had heard all sorts of stories about me. This was only to gain time. Asked me, was I writing poems? About whom? I asked her. This confused her more and I felt sorry and mean. Turned off that valve at once and opened the spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri...
James Joyce