The One Thing Quotes (page 57)
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There's a certain kind of conversation you have from time to time at parties in New York about a new book. The word "banal" sometimes rears its by-now banal head; you say "underedited," I say "derivative." The conversation goes around and around various literary criticisms, and by the time it moves on one thing is clear: No one read the book; we just read the reviews.
A. Whitney Brown
I think people expect too much from marriage today,' he said. 'They expect perfection. Every moment should be bliss. That's TV or movies. But that is not the human experience.. . . twenty good minutes here, forty good minutes there, it adds up to something beautiful. The trick is when things aren't so great, you don't junk the whole thing. It's okay to have an argument. It's okay that the other one nudges you a little, bothers you a little. It's part of being close to someone. But the joy you...
Mitch Albom
When one's married for so long, always walking on four feet and alwaysbreathing double breaths and thinking every thought twice through andthe time between the main things is packed double full with minordetails - then, sometimes, naturally, one yearns like an arrow for onewhole space thin as air. And you start up in the night, terrified byyour own breathing, which had just been going along as evenly withoutyou. But you don't rise up free - or even really as far as your knees- not once. You...
Robert Musil
When we no longer pray, no longer listen to the voice of love that speaks to us in the moment, our lives become absurd lives in which we are thrown back and forth between the past and the future. If we could just be, for a few minutes each day, fully where we are, we would indeed discover that we are not alone and that the One who is with us wants only one thing: to give us love
Henri Nouwen
I would hesitate to use the word 'success' in the way many people do. I don't know that I would apply it to what I've done as though I have now reached the ultimate goal. To me success is a continuing thing. It is growth and development. It is achieving one thing and using that as a stepping stone to achieve something else. Success comes as you have confidence in yourself. Self-confidence is built by succeeding, even if the success is small. It is the believing that makes it possible.
Walter Knott
It’s like the end of the day where you feel nothing has been achieved and you’re in a hurry to get the day over with so you can start the next one. You tell yourself you’re going to do lots of positive things. But the next day is just like the one before. Sometimes it goes on for weeks.
Robert Smithson
Articulation! There, by Joe, was MY absolute, if I could be said to have one. At any rate, it is the only thing I can think of about which I ever had, with any frequency at all, the feelings one usually has for one's absolutes. To turn experience into speech - that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it - is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I...
John Barth