Past Quotes (page 54)
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his tired gaze - from passing endless bars -has turned into a vacant stare which nothing holds. to him there seem to be a thousand bars, and out beyond these bars exists no world. his supple gait, the smoothness of strong stridesthat gently turn in ever smaller circlesperform a dance of strength, centered deep withina will, stunned, but untamed, indomitable. but sometimes the curtains of his eyelids part, the pupils of his eyes dilate as imagesof past encounters enter while through his limbsa...
Rainer Maria Rilke
I've lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.
Jeanette Winterson
Habit is necessary. It is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways.
Edith Wharton
The song is gone; the danceis secret with the dancers in the earth, the ritual useless, and the tribal storylost in an alien tale. Only the grass stands upto mark the dancing-ring; the apple-gumsposture and mime a past corroboree, murmur a broken chant. The hunter is gone; the spearis splintered underground; the painted bodiesa dream the world breathed sleeping and forgot. The nomad feet are still. Only the rider's hearthalts at a sightless shadow, an unsaid wordthat fastens in the blood of...
Judith Wright
My name isn't Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because t's forbidden. I tell myself it doesn't matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter. I keep the knowledge of this name like something hidden, some treasure I'll come back to dig up, one day. I think of this name as buried. This name has an aura around it, like an amulet, some charm that's survived from an unimaginably distant past. I lie in my...
Margaret Atwood
Ogbuef Ezedudu, who was the oldest man in the village, was telling two other men when they came to visit him that the punishment for breaking the Peace of Ani had become very mild in their clan. "It has not always been so," he said. "My father told me that he had been told that in the past a man who broke the peace was dragged on the ground through the village until he died. but after a while this custom was stopped because it spoiled the peace which it was meant to preserve.
Chinua Achebe
Girls are simply wonderful. Just to stand on a corner and watch them going past is delightful. They don't walk. At least not what we do when we walk. I don't know how to describe it, but it's much more complex and utterly delightful. They don't move just their feet; everything moves and in different directions . . . and all of it graceful.
Robert A. Heinlein
Unlike my father, who blindly churned out one canvas after another, I had real ideas about the artistic life. Seated at my desk, my beret as tight as an acorn’s cap, I projected myself into the world represented in the art books I’d borrowed from the public library. Leafing past the paintings, I would admire the photographs of the artists seated in their garrets, dressed in tattered smocks and frowning in the direction of their beefy nude models. To spend your days in the company of naked...
David Sedaris