Sudden Quotes (page 45)
-
-
-
The wise man has struggled to find You in his wisdom, and he has failed. The just man has striven to grasp You in his own justice, and he has gone astray. But the sinner, suddenly struck by the lightning of mercy that ought to have been justice, falls down in adoration of Your holiness: for he had seen what kings desired to see and never saw, what prophets foretold and never gazed upon, what the men of ancient times grew weary of expecting when they died. He has seen that Your love is so...
Thomas Merton
Mr. Crossley suddenly wondered why he was why he was worrying about the note. It was only a joke, after all. He cleared his throat. Everyone looked up hopefully. 'Somebody,' said Mr. Crossley, 'seems to have sent me a Halloween message.' And he read out the note: 'SOMEONE IN THIS CLASS IS A WITCH.'
6B thought this was splendid news. Hands shot up all over the room like a bed of beansprouts.
'It's me, Mr. Crossley!'
'Mr. Crossley, I'm the witch!'
'Can I be the witch, Mr. Crossley?'
'Me, Mr....
Diana Wynne Jones
It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a little glint of flame. Do you know how sometimes on very fine days the sun will shine with a particular intensity that makes the most mundane objects in the landscape glow with an unusual radiance, so that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting,...
Bill Bryson
You know that point in your life when you realize that the house you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore… All of the sudden, even though you have some place to put your shit, that idea of home is gone… Or maybe it's like this rite of passage… You will never have that feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start. It’s like a cycle or something. Maybe that’s all family really is: a group of people that miss the same...
Zach Braff
The gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats. Every month as it wanes bring you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars...
Oscar Wilde
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happened better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case....
Mary Oliver
And just like that, something inside shifted very subtly, so that all the empty spaces in him suddenly disappeared, so that his breath timed to hers, so that his blood sang.
This is why there was music, he realized. There were some feelings that just didn’t have words big enough to describe them.
Jodi Picoult
The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveler, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the ride.
Virginia Woolf