Reached Quotes (page 8)
I never heard weeping like that before or after; not from a child, nor a man wounded in the palm, nor a tortured man, nor a girl dragged off to slavery from a taken city. If you heard the woman you most hate in the world weep so, you would go to comfort her. You would fight your way through fire and spears to reach her. And I knew who wept, and what had been done to her, and who had done it.
C. S. Lewis
In the use of force, one simplifies the situation by assuming that the evil to be overcome is clear-cut, definite, and irreversible. Hence there remains but one thing: to eliminate it. Any dialogue with the sinner, any question of the irreversibility of his act, only means faltering and failure. Failure to eliminate evil is itself a defeat. Anything that even remotely risks such defeat is in itself capitulation to evil. The irreversibility of evil then reaches out to contaminate even the...
Thomas Merton
In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden instant "now," even having lived such a moment before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happier moment to come. Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is still young, carry on with the belief that everything could only get worse: If a...
Orhan Pamuk
Thirsty for being, the poet ceaselessly reaches out to reality, seeking with the indefatigable harpoon of the poem a reality that is always better hidden, more re(g)al. The poem’s power is as an instrument of possession but at the same time, ineffably, it expresses the desire for possession, like a net that fishes by itself, a hook that is also the desire of the fish. To be a poet is to desire and, at the same time, to obtain, in the exact shape of the desire.
Julio Cortazar
Being beautiful in itself, youth needs no transfiguration: in its abundance of strong life it is drawn to the tragic, and is happy to let melancholy suck sweetly from its still inexperienced bloom, and the very same phenomenon accounts for the readiness of young people to face danger and reach out a fraternal hand to all spiritual suffering
Stefan Zweig
Each thing, just by looking at it, aroused in me an irresistible longing to write so I would not die. I had suffered this on other occasions, but only on that morning did I recognize it as a crisis of inspiration, that word, abominable but so real, that demolishes everything in its path in order to reach its ashes in time.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
He wanted to write urgent love letters to her all day long and crowd the endless pages with desperate, uninhibited confessions of his humble worship and need with careful instructions for administering artificial respiration. He wanted to pour out to her in torrents of self-pity all his unbearable loneliness and despair and warn her never to leave the boric acid or the aspirin in reach of the children or to cross a street against the traffic light. He did not wish to worry her.
Joseph Heller
Gideon opened his and read, “Prosperity will knock on your door soon.”
I snorted.
Cary shot me a look. “I know, right? You snatched someone else’s cookie, Cross.”
“He better not be anywhere near someone else’s cookie,” I said dryly.
Reaching over, Gideon plucked half of mine out of my fingers. “Don’t worry, angel. Your cookie is the only one I want.
Sylvia Day
My outlook was so limited that I assumed that all deviates were openly despised and rejected. Their grief and their fear drew my melancholy nature strongly. At first I only wanted to wallow in their misery, but, as time went by, I longed to reach its very essence. Finally I desired to represent it. By this process I managed to shift homosexuality from being a burden to being a cause. The weight lifted and some of the guilt evaporated.
Quentin Crisp
I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
She'd run her life according to the Prophecies and now there were no more Prophecies. She must be feeling like a train which had reached the end of the line but still had to keep going, somehow. From now on she'd be able to go through life with everything coming as a surprise, just like everyone else. What luck.
Neil Gaiman