Rites Quotes
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He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the...
Ursula K. Le Guin
For instance, if you come at four in the afternoon, I'll begin to be happy by three. The closer it gets to four, the happier I'll feel. By four I'll be excited and worried; I'll discover what it costs to be happy! But if you come at any od time, I'll never know when I should prepare my heart... There must be rites.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I was glad that our venerable, almost formless religions, drained of all intransigence and purged of savage rites, linked us mysteriously to the most ancient secrets of man and of earth, not forbidding us, however, a secular explanation of facts and a rational view of human conduct.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Why was it that in cases of real love the one who is left does not more often follow the beloved by suicide? Only because the living must bury the dead? Because of the measured rites that must be fulfilled after a death? Because it is as though the one who is left steps for a time upon a stage and each second swells to an unlimited amount of time and he is watched by many eyes? Because there is a function he must carry out? Or perhaps, when there is love, the widowed must stay for the...
Carson McCullers
I felt that the success of the enterprise was in my hands: the moment had an obscure meaning which had to be trimmed and perfected ; certain motions had to be made, certain words spoken : I staggered under the weight of my responsibility. I started and saw nothing, I struggled in the midst of rites which were invented on the spot and tore them to shreds with my strong arms. At those times she hated me.
Jean-Paul Sartre
To plot is to live. […] We start out lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that's not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control. Even after death, most particularly after death, the search continues. Burial rites are an attempt to complete the scheme, in ritual. Picture a state funeral, Jack. It is all precision,...
Don DeLillo
Arma virumque cano........."*Literally: "I sing of arms and man".__I sing the praises of a man's struggles_? Translation of the opening verses of the first book of Virgils Aeneid, by John Dryden( XVII century)"Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc\'d by fate, And haughty Juno\'s unrelenting hate, Expell\'d and exil\'d, left the Trojan shore. Long labors, both by sea and land, he bore, And in the doubtful war, before he won. The Latian realm, and built the destin\'d town; His banish\'d gods...
Virgil
I’m not sure that I care for the idea of strangers examining my daily habits and folkways, studying my language, inspecting my costume, questioning me about my religion, classifying my artifacts, investigating my sexual rites and evaluating my chances for cultural survival. So I lived alone.
Edward Abbey
It would have been better to come back at the same hour,” said the fox. “If, for example, you came at four o’clock in the afternoon, then at three o’clock I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o’clock, I shall already be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you . . . One must observe the proper rites . . .
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song - but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.
Pablo Neruda
The Tower is not a usual spectacle; to enter the Tower, to scale it, to run around its courses, is, in a manner both more elementary and more profound, to accede to a view and to explore the interior of an object (though an openwork one), to transform the touristic rite into and adventure of sight and of the intelligence.
Roland Barthes
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