Should I Quotes (page 152)
innocence is not safe in a civilization like ours, where a man must practice a 'ruled undemonstrative distrustfulness' in order to defend himself against traps. This 'ruled undemonstrative distrustfulness' is not confined to business men, but exists everywhere. We all exercise it. I know I do, and I should be surprised if you, who are listening to me, didn't. All we can do (and Melville gives us this hint) is to exercise it consciously, as Captain Vere did. It is unconscious distrustfulness...
E. M. Forster
This is tantamount to saying, "My hand is weak. I cannot draw a straight line,—that is, a line which will be the shortest line between two given points,—and so, in order to make it more easy for myself, I, intending to draw a straight, will choose for my model a crooked line." The weaker my hand, the greater the need that my model should be perfect.
Leo Tolstoy
... we are so full of apprehensions, fears, that we don't know exactly to what it points... a great change of our psychoglocal attitude is imminent, that is certain...because we need more understanding of human nature because ...the only real danger that exists is man himself... and we know nothing of man - his psyche should be studied because we are the origin of all coming evil...
Carl Jung
Though simple, the trick was something that struck me as useful right now. Thus, the 'when I was little' nostalgia was misleading: it turned something that I was taking seriously as an adult into something soupier, less precise, more falsely exotic, than it really was. Why should we need lots of nostalgia to license any pleasure taken in the discoveries we carry over from childhood, when it is now so clearly an adult pleasure? I decided that from now on I wouldn't get that faraway look when...
Nicholson Baker
I don't think you need to worry about Jake too much. Anyone who can cuss with that kind of energy is going to recover."Jake was awake when you saw him?" I asked, spinning to look at him."Oh, yeah he was awake. You should have heard him-actually, it's better you didn't. I don't think there was anyone in La Push who couldn't hear him. I don't know where he picked up that vocabulary, but I hope he hasn't been using that kind of language around you.
Stephenie Meyer
People claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.
Marcel Proust
To speak truth, sir, I don't understand you at all: I cannot keep up the conversation, because it has got out of my depth. Only one thing I know: you said you were not as good as you should like to be, and that you regretted your own imperfection--one thing I can comprehend: you intimated that to have a sullied memory was a perpetual bane. It seems to me, that if you tried hard, you would in time find it possible to become what you yourself would approve; and that if from this day you began...
Charlotte Bronte