Pointing Quotes (page 63)
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In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?
John Steinbeck
Why were you lurking under our window?"Yes - yes, good point, Petunia! What were you doing under our windows, boy?"Listening to the news," said Harry in a resigned voice. His aunt and uncle exchanged looks of outrage."Listening to the news! Again?"Well, it changes every day, you see," said Harry.
J. K. Rowling
Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v ofhis mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes werehorizontal. The V motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creasesabove a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down--from high flat temples--in a point onhis forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.
Dashiell Hammett
We believe that the death of Christ is just that point in history at which something absolutely unimaginable from outside shows through into our world... Indeed, if we found that we could fully understand it, that very fact would show it was not what it professes to be - the inconceivable, the uncreated, the thing from beyond nature, striking down into nature like lightning.
C. S. Lewis
Part of the reason I actually preferred Twin Peaks's second season to its first was the fascinating spectacle of watching a narrative structure disintegrate and a narrative artist freeze up and try to shuck and jive when the plot reached a point where his own weaknesses as an artist were going to be exposed (just imagine the fear: this disintegration was happening on national TV).
David Foster Wallace
It's not the critic who counts. It's not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled. Credit belongs to the man who really was in the arena, his face marred by dust, sweat, and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs to come short and short again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming. It is the man who actually strives to do the deeds, who knows the great enthusiasm and knows the great devotion, who spends himself on a worthy cause, who at best, knows in the end the...
Theodore Roosevelt
Empress of the Universe would be way too much work. I'd have to wear fancy clothes, probably including lady shoes with pointed toes, and could no longer slouch into the study in PJs and slippers. Someone would (avert!) straighten my desk. Someone would reorganize my yarn stash...in fact, they'd assign someone else to knit my socks, thus depriving me of an excuse to rest my brain while pretending to accomplish something useful.
Elizabeth Moon
It is well to have specifically holy places, and things, and days, for, without these focal points or reminders, the belief that all is holy and "big with God" will soon dwindle into a mere sentiment. But if these holy places, things, and days cease to remind us, if they obliterate our awareness that all ground is holy and every bush (could we but perceive it) a Burning Bush, then the hallows begin to do harm.
C. S. Lewis