Telling Quotes (page 66)
Where has God gone?” [the madman asked] “I shall tell you. We
have killed him – you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we
done this? How were we able to drink up the seas? Who gave us the
sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we
unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now?
Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually
falling? Backwards, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there
any up or down left? Are we...
Friedrich Nietzsche
You've got to shake your fists at lightning now, you've got to roar like forest fire. You've got to spread your light like blazes all across the sky. They're going to aim the hoses on you, show 'em you won't expire. Not till you burn up every passion, not even when you die. Come on now, you've got to try, if you're feeling contempt, well then you tell it. If you're tired of the silent night, Jesus, well then you yell it. Condemned to wires and hammers, strike every chord that you feel. That...
Joni Mitchell
The days that followed passed slowly. I lay in my hotel room and watched the kind of strange European TV that would probably make perfect sense if I understood the language, but because I didn’t, the programs just seemed dreamlike and baffling. In one studio show a group of Scandinavian academics watched as one of them poured liquid plastic into a bucket of cold water. It solidified, they pulled it out, handed it around the circle, and, as far as I could tell, intellectualized on its random...
Jon Ronson
But what would have been the good?" Aslan said nothing. "You mean," said Lucy rather faintly, "that it would have turned out all right? somehow? But how? Please, Aslan! Am I not to know?" "To know what would have happened, child?" said Aslan. "No. Nobody is ever told that." "Oh dear," said Lucy. "But anyone can find out what will happen," said Aslan. "If you go back to the others now, and wake them up; and tell them you have seen me again; and that you must all get up at...
C. S. Lewis
I marveled at how mixed up people got when it came to love. I myself, for instance. It seemed like I was now thinking of Zach forty minutes out of every hour, Zach, who was an impossibility. That's what I told myself five hundred times: impossibility. I can tell you this much: the word is a great big log throw on the fires of love.
Sue Monk Kidd
Here's what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite. Put me into a crusader's armor, a cardinal's vestments. Let me feel the pygmy's heartbeat, the queen's breast, the torturer's pleasure, the Nile's taste, or the nomad's thirst. Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.
Pat Conroy
He woke whimpering in the night and the man held him. Shh, he said. Shh. It's okay.
I had a bad dream.
I know.
Should I tell you what it was?
If you want to.
I had this penguin that you wound up and it would waddle and flap its flippers. And we were in that house that we used to live in and it came around the corner but nobody had wound it up and it was really scary.
Okay.
It was a lot scarier in the dream.
I know. Dreams can be really scary.
Why did I have that scary dream?
I dont...
Cormac McCarthy