Parts Of A Whole Quotes (page 2)
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I've never written a book, except my first, without at some point considering that I might die before it was completed. This is all part of the superstition, the folklore, the mania of the business, the fetishistic fuss.....Dying in the middle of a wo(rd), or three-fifths of the way through a nov(el). My friend the nov(el)ist Brian Moore used to fear this as well, though for an extra reason: "Because some bastard will come along and finish it for you." Here is a novelist's would-you-rather....
Julian Barnes
Conversation is more than the sum of the words. It isalso a way of signaling the importance of another person byshowing your willingness to give that person your rarestresource: time. It is a way of conveying respect. Conversationreminds us that we are part of a greater whole, connected insome way that transcends duty or bloodline or commerce. Conversation can be many things, but it can never be useless.
Scott Adams
but most of all he liked to listen to stories of real life. He smiled gleefully as he listened to such stories, putting in words and asking questions, all aiming at bringing out clearly the moral beauty of the action of which he was told. Attachments, friendships, love, as Pierre understood them, Karataev had none, but he loved and lived on affectionate terms with every creature with whom he was thrown in life, and especially so with man- not with any particular man, but with the men that...
Leo Tolstoy
If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature’s larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization.
Terence McKenna
The fact was that, as droves of demon kings had noticed, there was a limit to what you could do to a soul with, e. g., red-hot tweezers, because even fairly evil and corrupt souls were bright enough to realize that since they didn't have the concomitant body and nerve endings attached to them there was no real reason, other than force of habit, why they should suffer excruciating agony. So they didn't. Demons went on doing it anyway, because numb and mindless stupidity is part of what being a...
Terry Prachett
Anyone who has lost a love to death can tell you about that fall. You wake from a hard-won sleep and be there warm and groggy and consider engaging the day. And then you remember. Half of you is not there, and never will be again. The person who focused all the disparate parts of you into a whole is gone. The agony is too much; you almost welcome the great slide ahead of you. But there is no oblivion in it. Only blackness and an endless well of red pain.
Anne Rivers Siddons
Back in the autumn I had awakened to a growing darkness and cacophony, as if something in the depths were crying out. A whole chorus of voices. Orphaned voices. They seemed to speak for all the unlived parts of me, and they came with a force and dazzle that I couldn't contain. They seemed to explode the boundaries of my existence. I know now that they were the clamor of a new self struggling to be born.
Sue Monk Kidd
No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.
Alan Watts
He seriously thought that there is less harm in killing a man than producing a child: in the first case you are relieving someone of life, not his whole life but a half or a quarter or a hundredth part of that existence that is going to finish, that would finish without you; but as for the second, he would say, are you not responsible to him for all the tears he will shed, from the cradle to the grave? Without you he would never have been born, and why is he born? For your amusement, not for...
Gustave Flaubert
It is (to describe it figuratively) as if an author were to make a slip of the pen, and as if this clerical error became conscious of being such. Perhaps this was no error but in a far higher sense was an essential part of the whole exposition. It is, then, as if this clerical error were to revolt against the author, out of hatred for him, were to forbid him to correct it, and were to say, "No, I will not be erased, I will stand as a witness against thee, that thou art a very poor writer.
Soren Kierkegaard
Something is unfolding, being revealed to me. I see that there's a whole world of of girls and their doings that has been unknown to me, and that I can be part of without making any effort at all. I don't have to keep up with anyone, run as fast, aim as well, make loud explosive noises, decode messages, die on cue. I don't have to think about whether I do these things well, as well as a boy. All I have to do is sit on the floor and cut frying pans our of the Eaton's Catalogue with embroidery...
Margaret Atwood
He had an egglike head, froglike jaws, and a grey hairy fringe of aureole round the lower part of his face; the whole combined with a reddish, acquiline nose. He wore a shabby black frock-coat, a sort of semi-clerical tie worn at a very unclerical angle, and looking, generally speaking, about as unlike a house-agent as anything could look, short of something like a sandwich-man or a Scotch Highlander.
Gilbert K. Chesterton