Original Thing Quotes (page 4)
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You do not need to belong to the cat for a long time to realize the main thing that cats like to do is to wrap theirselves up in mystery, perhaps only except for a hobby of jumbling up everything that is in order. And if the cat can, and usually so, make a great mystery of where it was when you were searching for it even if a moment ago it was sitting by your side, do not have any doubts: its ancestors had a great pleasure to surround its origin by mystery.
Cleveland Amory
Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character. We extend this into all our thinking. Between us and the realities of social life we build up a mass of generalizations, abstract ideas, ancient glories, and personal wishes. They simplify and soften experience. It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of...
Walter Lippmann
One of the effects of original sin is an instinctive prejudice in favour of our own selfish desires. We see things as they are not, because we see them centered on ourselves. Fear, anxiety, greed, ambition and our hopeless need for pleasure all distort the image of reality that is reflected in our minds. Grace does not completely correct this distortion all at once: but it gives us a means of recognizing and allowing for it. And it tells us what we must do to correct it. Sincerity must be...
Thomas Merton
She was very fond of thinking and getting at the truth of things, but was so far from being pedantic, so full of youthful ways that from the first moment one began to love all these originalities in her, and to accept them. [...] This naive combination in her of the child and the thinking woman, this childlike and absolutely genuine thirst for truth and justice, and absolute faith in her impulses--all this lighted up her face with a fine glow of sincerity, giving it a lofty, spiritual beauty,...
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentred, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose conciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages. From this perspective then...
Edward Said
There is some comfort in killing that which has hurt you, but it is cold comfort. It'll destroy things inside of you that the original pain wouldn't have harmed. Sometimes it's not a question of whether a piece of your soul is going to go missing, only which piece it's going to be.
Laurell K. Hamilton
Two things of opposite natures seem to depend. On on another, as Logos depends. On Eros, day on night, the imagined. On the real. This is the origin of change. Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace. And forth the particulars of rapture come. Music falls on the silence like a sense. A passion that we feel, not understand. Morning and afternoon are clasped together. And North and South are an intrinsic couple. And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers. That walk away together as one in...
Wallace Stevens
Perhaps because the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and out weaknesses by an alliance with the beautiful and noble. But if the loved ones love us back, we are forced to return to ourselves, and are hence reminded of the things that had driven us into love in the first place. Perhaps it was not love we wanted after all, perhaps it was simply someone in whom to believe, but how can we continue to believe the the beloved now that they believe in us?
Alain de Botton
Annabel played and sang it; she was the oldest of the sisters and the loveliest, though it was a chore to pick among them, for they were like quadruplets of unequal height. One thought of apples, compact and flavorful, sweet but cider-tart; their hair, loosely plaited, had the blue luster of a well-groomed ebony racehorse, and certain features, eyebrows, noses, lips when smiling, tilted in an original style that added humor to their charms. The nicest thing was that they were a bit plump:...
Truman Capote
Give those who are gentle strength,Give those who are strong a generous imagination,And make their half-truth true and let the crooked Footpath find its parent road at length....For never to beginAnything new because we know there is nothingNew, is an academic sophistry--The original sin.I have already had friendsAmong things and hours and peopleBut taking them one by one--odd hours and passing people;Now I must make amendsAnd try to correlate event with instinctAnd me with you or you with...
Louis MacNeice
The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, and the first fire and the last ever to be.
Cormac McCarthy