Reflecting Quotes (page 16)
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To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write [...] so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write [...] so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on. If there is good to be said, the writer should say it. If there is bad to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living. The true artist [...] gets his sense...
John Gardner
O Deep Thought computer," he said, "the task we have designed you to perform is this. We want you to tell us...." he paused, "The Answer."The Answer?" said Deep Thought. "The Answer to what?"Life!" urged Fook."The Universe!" said Lunkwill."Everything!" they said in chorus. Deep Thought paused for a moment's reflection."Tricky," he said finally."But can you do it?"Again, a significant pause."Yes," said Deep Thought, "I can do it."There is an answer?" said Fook with breathless excitement."Yes,"...
Douglas Adams
The sick in mind, and, perhaps, in body, are rendered more darkly and hopelessly so by the manifold reflection of their disease, mirrored back from all quarters in the deportment of those about them; they are compelled to inhale the poison of their own breath, in infinite repetition.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A bird named Vlad the Impaler, who spent the bulk of his life hissing and looking at himself in a little mirror hanging[...] in the iron cage, a mirror so dull and cloudy with Vlad the Impaler’s bird-spit that Vlad the Impaler could not possibly have seen anything more than a vague yellowish blob behind a pane of mist[...] A bird that not infrequently literally bit the hand that fed it, before returning to dance in front of its own shapeless reflection, straining and contorting always for a...
David Foster Wallace
Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly miniscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favorable properties of physics on which life depends are in every respect deliberate ... . It is therefore almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect ... higher intelligences ... even to the limit of God ... such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The...
Fred Hoyle
The affair seems absurdly trifling, and yet I dare call nothing trivial when I reflect that some of my most classic cases have had the least promising commencement. You will remember, Watson, how the dreadful business of the Abernetty family was first brought to my notice by the depth which the parsley had sunk into the butter upon a hot day.
Arthur Conan Doyle
I liked the solitude and the silence of the woods and the hills. I felt there the sense of a presence, something undefined and mysterious, which was reflected in the faces of the flowers and the movements of birds and animals, in the sunlight falling through the leaves and in the sound of running water, in the wind blowing on the hills and the wide expanse of earth and sky.
Bede Griffiths