Say Quotes (page 355)
The trees are coming into leaf. Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again. And we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new. Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh. In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
Philip Larkin
And there has been no attempt to investigate it,' I said, 'to see what it really is?'
'Eh, Cornel,' said the coachman's wife, 'wha would investigate, as ye call it, a thing that nobody believes in? Ye would be the laughing-stock of a' the country-side, as my man says.'
'But you believe in it,' I said, turning upon her hastily. The woman was taken by surprise. She made a step backward out of my way.
'Lord, Cornel, how ye frichten a body! Me! there's awful strange things in this world. An...
Margaret Oliphant
It’s a sort of furtiveness … Like we were a generation of furtive. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public’, a kind of beatness – I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are – and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world … It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.
Jack Kerouac
Alas, I have begun my loneliest walk. But whoever is of my kind, cannot escape such an hour, the hour which says to him, 'Only now are you going your way to greatness. Peak and abyss, they are now joined together, for all things are baptized in a well of eternity, and lie beyond good and evil.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged. When our Founding Fathers passed the First Amendment, they sought to protect churches from government interference. They never intended to construct a wall of hostility between government and the concept of religious belief itself.? To those who cite the First Amendment as reason for excluding God from more and more of our institutions every day, I say: The First Amendment of the Constitution was not...
Ronald Reagan
Life is an endless recruiting of witnesses. It seems we need to be observed in our postures of extravagance or shame, we need attention paid to us. Our own memory is altogether too cherishing, which is the kindest thing I can say for it. Other are required, other perspectives, but even so our most important ceremonies? birth, love, and death? are secured by whomever and whatever is available. What chance, what caprice!
Carol Shields
They sat as if the weight of the world had in this minute been lifted from them both and left them dumb with surprise. But this lasted only for the moment. Arthur held her murderously tight, as if to vanquish her spirit even in the first short contest. But she responded to him, as if she would break him first. It was stalemate, and they sought relief from the great decision they had just brought upon themselves. He spoke to her softly, and she nodded her head to his words without knowing what...
Alan Sillitoe