The Who Quotes (page 341)
Singing is my pleasure, but not in church, for the parson said the gargoyles must remain on the outside, not seek room in the choir stalls. So I sing inside the mountain of my flesh, and my voice is as slender as a reed and my voice has no lard in it. When I sing the dogs sit quiet and people who pass in the night stop their jabbering and discontent and think of other times, when they were happy. And I sing of other times, when I was happy, though I know that these are figments of my mind and...
Jeanette Winterson
My fear was not the fear of God but, as in the case of the whole Turkish secular bourgeoisie, fear of the anger of those who believe in God too zealously(...) I experienced the guilt complex as something personal, originated less from the fear of distancing myself from God than from distancing myself from the sense of community shared by the entire city .
Orhan Pamuk
Suits obviously had helped to promote bad government and he was as guilty as anyone for wearing them so steadfastly for twenty years. Of late he had become frightened of the government for the first time in his life, the way the structure of democracy had begun debasing people rather than enlivening them in their mutual concern. The structure was no longer concerned with the purpose for which it was designed, and a small part of the cause, Nordstrom thought, was probably that all politicians...
Jim Harrison
A tub was brought in to melt snow for mortar. They heard somebody saying it was twelve o'clock already. "It's sure to be twelve," Shukhov announced. "The sun's over the top already." "If it is," the captain retorted, "it's one o'clock, not twelve." "How do you make that out?" Shukhov asked in surprise. "The old folk say the sun is highest at dinnertime." "Maybe it was in their day!" the captain snapped back. "Since then it's been decreed that the sun is highest at one o'clock." "Who...
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
In general, democracy and individualism have advanced in spite of and often against specific economic interest. Both democracy and individualism have been based upon financial sacrifice, not gain. Even in Athens, a large part of the 7,000 citizens who participated regularly in assemblies were farmers who had to give up several days' work to go into town to talk and listen.
John Ralston Saul
There was nothing now but this empty treadmill of what Clifford called the integrated life, the long living together of two people, who are in the habit of being in the same house with one another. Nothingness! To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that make up the grand sum-total of nothingness!
David Herbert Lawrence
But, back of this, still broods silently the deep religious feeling of the real Negro heart, the stirring, unguided might of powerful human souls who have lost the guiding star of the past and are seeking in the great night a new religious ideal. Some day the Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of 10,000,000 souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes life worth living - Liberty, Justice and Right - is marked "For...
W. E. B. Du Bois
When a captive lion steps out of his cage, he comes into a wider world than the lion who has known only the wilds. While he was in captivity, there were only two worlds for him - the world of the cage, and the world outside the cage. Now he is free. He roars. He attacks people. He eats them. Yet he is not satisfied, for there is no third world that is neither the world of the cage nor the world outside the cage.
Yukio Mishima
Some people spend their entire lives thinking about one particular famous person. They pick one person who's famous, and they dwell on him or her. They devote almost their entire consciousness to thinking about this person they've never even met, or maybe met once. If you ask any famous person about the kind of mail they get, you'll find that almost every one of them has at least one person who's obsessed with them and writes constantly. It feels so strange to think that someone is spending...
Andy Warhol