Still Life Quotes (page 6)
And we all nodded at him: the man of finance, the man of accounts, the man of law, we all nodded at him over the polished table that like a still sheet of brown water reflected our faces, lined, wrinkled; our faces marked by toil, by deceptions, by success, by love; our weary eyes looking still, looking always, looking anxiously for something out of life, that while it is expected is already gone? has passed unseen, in a sigh, in a flash? together with the youth, with the strength, with the...
Joseph Conrad
Answers I kept my answers small and kept them near; Big questions bruised my mind but still I let. Small answers be a bullwark to my fear. The huge abstractions I kept from the light; Small things I handled and caressed and loved. I let the stars assume the whole of night. But the big answers clamoured to be moved Into my life. Their great audacity. Shouted to be acknowledged and believed. Even when all small answers build up to. Protection of my spirit, still I hear. Big answers striving for...
Edith Sitwell
High Pasture. Come up--come up: in the dim vale below. The autumn mist muffles the fading trees, But on this keen hill-pasture, though the breeze. Has stretched the thwart boughs bare to meet the snow, Night is not, autumn is not--but the flow. Of vast, ethereal and irradiate seas, Poured from the far world's flaming boundaries. In waxing tides of unimagined glow. And to that height illumined of the mindhe calls us still by the familiar way, Leaving the sodden tracks of life behind, Befogged...
Edith Wharton
I saw the way she was looking at you, and I knew that she still loved you. More than that, I know she always will. It breaks my heart, but you know what? I'm still in love with her, and to me that means that I want nothing more than for her to be happy in life. I want that more than anything. It's all I've ever wanted for her.
Nicholas Sparks
Abraham Zogoiby covered his face that night in August 1939 because he had been assailed by fear, [...] a sudden apprehension that the ugliness of life might defeat its beauty; that love did not make lovers invulnerable. Nevertheless, he thought, even if the world's beauty and love were on the edge of destruction, theirs would still be the only side to be on; defeated love would still be love, hate's victory would not make it other than it was.
Salman Rushdie
So much about life in a global economy feels as though it has passed beyond the individual's control--what happens to our jobs, to the prices at the gas station, to the vote in the legislature. But somehow food still feels a little different. We can still decide, every day, what we're going to put into our bodies, what sort of food chain we want to participate in. We can, in other words, reject the industrial omelet on offer and decide to eat another.
Michael Pollan
There were moments when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.
Joseph Conrad
[Speaking] is never without fear; of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now, that if I were to have been born mute, and had maintained an oath of silence my whole life for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die.
Audre Lorde
For this new-married man approaching here, Whose salt imagination yet hath wrong'd. Your well defended honour, you must pardon. For Mariana's sake: but as he adjudged your brother,--Being criminal, in double violation. Of sacred chastity and of promise-breach. Thereon dependent, for your brother's life,--The very mercy of the law cries out. Most audible, even from his proper tongue,'An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!'Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure; Like doth quit...
William Shakespeare
No matter where you are in your life, whatever set of people you're with, it all still breaks down like high school does. You have your social cliques, you have the people you get along with, the people you don't and the people you're ambivalent about. All of the dynamics are still here.
Colin Hanks