Passing Through Quotes (page 7)
-
-
-
When a great figure passed through a city of Burgundy or Champagne, the corporation of the city turned out to deliver an address and present him with four silver goblets in which there were four wines. On the first goblet he read the inscription “monkey wine,” on the second “lion wine,” on the third “sheep wine,” on the fourth “swine wine.” These four inscriptions expressed the four descending degrees of drunkenness: the first, which enlivens; the second, which irritates; the third, which...
Victor Hugo
Absolute silence greeted the mystery of death, and for a time impossible to measure they waited, motionless, while Lynn's spirit rose from her body. Severo felt a long howl surging from the center of the earth and passing through his body to his lips, but it did not escape. The scream invaded him, filled him, and burst inside his head in a silent explosion. Portrait in Sepia, Isabel Allende.
Isabel Allende
I’m not ashamed of what I am - of how I pass through this life. What I am has given me the strength to do it. At my lowest ebb I have never contemplated suicide. I value what is here too much. I have a contribution to make. I am not just take up space in this life. I can add something to the lives I touch. I don’t like everything I know about myself, and I’ll never be satisfied, but nobody’s perfect. I’m not sure where the next years will take me - what they will hold - but I’m open to...
Lauren Bacall
I love the night passionately. I love it as I love my country, or my mistress, with an instinctive, deep, and unshakeable love. I love it with all my senses: I love to see it, I love to breathe it in, I love to open my ears to its silence, I love my whole body to be caressed by its blackness. Skylarks sing in the sunshine, the blue sky, the warm air, in the fresh morning light. The owl flies by night, a dark shadow passing through the darkness; he hoots his sinister, quivering hoot, as though...
Guy de Maupassant
I was walking along a path with two friends? the sun was setting? suddenly the sky turned blood red? I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence? there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city? my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety? and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.
Edvard Munch
...this protracted war will pass through three stages. The first stage covers the period of the enemy's strategic offensive and our strategic defensive. The second stage will be the period of the enemy's strategic consolidation and our preparation for the counter-offensive. The third stage will be the period of our strategic counter-offensive and the enemy's strategic retreat.
Mao Zedong
When forced to leave my house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me, and together we endure the wretchedness of passing through the X-ray scanner. The laptops roll merrily down the belt, while I’m instructed to stand aside and open my bag. To me it seems like a normal enough thing to be carrying, but the typewriter’s declining popularity arouses suspicion and I wind up eliciting the sort of reaction one might expect when traveling with a cannon.
It’s a typewriter,’ I...
David Sedaris
If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you're saying, because it's too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience. And that makes sense. If you've resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, "You're an asshole," which maybe he or she is, and if you don't...
Noam Chomsky
Dantes passed through all the stages of torture natural to prisoners in suspense. He was sustained at first by that pride of conscious innocence which is the sequence to hope; then he began to doubt his own innocence, which justified in some measure the governor's belief in his mental alienation; and then, relaxing his sentiment of pride, he addressed his supplications, not to God, but to man. God is always the last resource. Unfortunates, who ought to begin with God, do not have any hope in...
Alexander Dumas
Every person passing through this life will unknowingly leave something and take something away. Most of this “something” cannot be seen or heard or numbered or scientifically detected or counted. It’s what we leave in the minds of other people and what they leave in ours. Memory. The census doesn’t count it. Nothing counts without it.
Robert Fulghum
The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing th orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work.
Edward Said