Shape Quotes (page 30)
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Great engines crawled across the field; and in the midst was a huge ram, great as a forest-tree a hundred feet in length, swinging on mighty chains. Long had it been forging in the dark smithies of Mordor, and its hideous head, founded of black steel, was shaped in the likeness of a ravening wolf; on it spells of ruin lay. Grond they named it, in memory of the Hammer of the Underworld of old. Great beasts drew it, orcs surrounded it, and behind walked mountain-trolls to wield it.
J. R. R. Tolkien
An insane person believes his world is consistent. If hebelieves the government is trying to kill him, he will seeample evidence of his belief in the so-called real world. Hewill be wrong, but his evidence is no better or worse thanyour evidence that it rained this morning. Both of you willbe converting evidence of the present into impressionsstored in your minds and you will both be certain your evidenceis solid and irrefutable. Your mind will mold the factsand shape the clues until it all...
Scott Adams
[T]here is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can be known only implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly definable forms and shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal flux. In this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather, they are different aspects of our whole and unbroken movement.
David Bohm
Everything is in constant flux on this earth. Nothing keeps the same unchanging shape, and our affections, being attached to things outside us, necessarily change and pass away as they do. Always out ahead of us or lagging behind, they recall a past which is gone or anticipate a future which may never come into being; there is nothing solid there for the heart to attach itself to. Thus our earthly joys are almost without exception the creatures of a moment...
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned. And that's what a poem does. Poems match sounds up the way you matched them when you were a...
Nicholson Baker
You are burnt beyond recognition," he added, looking at his wife as onelooks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered somedamage. She held up her hands, strong, shapely hands, and surveyed themcritically, drawing up her fawn sleeves above the wrists. Looking atthem reminded her of her rings, which she had given to her husbandbefore leaving for the beach. She silently reached out to him, and he, understanding, took the rings from his vest pocket and dropped theminto her open...
Kate Chopin
Whenever I put the headset on now," he'd continued, "I really do understand what I find there. When those kids sing about 'She loves you,' yeah well, you know, she does, she's any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different colors, sizes, ages, shapes, distances from death, but she loves. And the 'you' is everybody. And herself. Oedipa, the human voice, you know, it's a flipping miracle." His eyes brimming, reflecting the color of beer."Baby," she said, helpless,...
Thomas Pynchon
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.
William Shakespeare