Them Quotes (page 537)
People do not belong to others, either. How can the huincas buy and sell people if they do not own them. Sometimes the boy went two or three days without speaking a word, surly, and not eating, and when asked what was the matter, the answer was always the same: "There are content days and there are sad days. Each person is a master of his silence.
Isabel Allende
What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him. Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels? One whose self-rebukes never really inflicted pain?
Julian Barnes
And maybe no better. There is no government in Mexico. Hell, there's no God in Mexico. Never will be. We are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves. And do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for them.
Cormac McCarthy
If man had his way, the plan of redemption would be an endless and bloody conflict. In reality, salvation was bought not by Jesus' fist, but by His nail-pierced hands; not by muscle but by love; not by vengeance but by forgiveness; not by force but by sacrifice. Jesus Christ our Lord surrendered in order that He might win; He destroyed His enemies by dying for them and conquered death by allowing death to conquer Him.
Aiden Wilson Tozer
Recognize things when they are at their best, in their season, and know how to enjoy them then. The works of nature all amount to a peak of perfection; up to it they wax, beyond it they wane. Only in matters of art have a few gone to the point where they might not be improved. It is the mark of cultivated taste to enjoy everything at its best. But all may not do this, and not all who may, know how. Even the fruits of the spirit have their moment of ripeness, and it is well to recognize this,...
Baltasar Gracian
Lady, did you ever see anyone shot by a gun
without bleeding?” This film came out at the height of the Vietnam
War.
I love that line. That’s gotta be one of the principles behind
reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving
them that way. And bleeding. Shooting and bleeding.
Haruki Murakami
My head is like some ridiculous barn packed full of stuff I
want to write about,” she said. “Images, scenes, snatches of
words … in my mind they’re all glowing, all alive. Write! they
shout at me. A great new story is about to be born I can feel it.
It’ll transport me to some brand-new place. Problem is, once I
sit at my desk and put them all down on paper, I realize
something vital is missing. It doesn’t crystallize—no crystals,
just pebbles. And I’m not transported anywhere.
Haruki Murakami
Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven—corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats—account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors.
Bill Bryson
We are truth-speakers, we men of Gondor. We boast seldom, and then perform, or die in the attempt. "Not if I found it on the highway would I take it," I said. Even if I were such a man as to desire this thing, and even though I knew not clearly what this thing was when I spoke, still I should take those words as a vow, and be held by them.
J. R. R. Tolkien