Them Quotes (page 667)
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None of this is important in itself, but I feel somewhere that it has a lot to do with why I have always felt separate, why I have always felt unable to join in, to let go, to become part of the tribe, why I have always sniped or joked from the sidelines, why I have never, ever, lost my overwhelmingly self-conscious self-consciousness. It's not all that bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing - they are not all bad. Those devils...
Stephen Fry
When they came to harvest my corpse(open your mouth, close your eyes)cut my body from the rope, surprise, surprise: I was still alive. Tough luck, folks, I know the law: you can't execute me twicefor the same thing. How nice. I fell to the clover, breathed it in, and bared my teeth at themin a filthy grin. You can imagine how that went over. Now I only need to lookout at them through my sky-blue eyes. They see their own ill willstaring then in the foreheadand turn tail. Before, I was not a...
Margaret Atwood
I have nothing to offer you' said Hactar faintly, 'but tricks of the light. It is possible to be comfortable with tricks of the light, though, if that is all you have.'His voice evanesced, and in the dark a long, velvet paisley-covered sofa coalesced into hazy shape.... At least, if it wasn't real, it did support them, and as that is what sofas are supposed to do, this, by any test that mattered, was a real sofa.
Douglas Adams
It seems to me to be true that heavens are placed in the sky because it is the unreachable. The unreachable and therefore the unknowable always seems divine--hence, religion. People need religion because the great masses fear life and its consequences. Its responsibilities weigh heavy. Feeling a weakness in the face of great forces, men seek an alliance with omnipotence to bolster up their feeling of weakness, even though the omnipotence they rely upon is a creature of their own minds. ...
Zora Neale Hurston
Because everybody on the school board, and the railroad, and the PTA and paper mill had to be somebody’s mother or father, whether really or as a member of a category; and there was a point at which the reflex to their covering warmth, protection, effectiveness against bad dreams, bruised heads and simple loneliness took over and made worthwhile anger with them impossible.
Thomas Pynchon
There Rhoda sits staring at the blackboard,' said Louis, 'in theschoolroom, while we ramble off, picking here a bit of thyme, pinching here a leaf of southernwood while Bernard tells a story. Her shoulder-blades meet across her back like the wings of a smallbutterfly. And as she stares at the chalk figures, her mind lodgesin those white circles, it steps through those white loops intoemptiness, alone. They have no meaning for her. She has no answerfor them. She has no body as the others...
Virginia Woolf
Teach your scholar to observe the phenomena of nature; you will soon rouse his curiosity, but if you would have it grow, do not be in too great a hurry to satisfy this curiosity. Put the problems before him and let him solve them himself. Let him know nothing because you have told him, but because he has learnt it for himself. Let him not be taught science, let him discover it. If ever you substitute authority for reason he will cease to reason; he will be a mere plaything of other people's...
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
No, I'm not religious, I'm sorry to say. But I was once and shall be again. There is no time now to be religious."No time. Does it need time to be religious?"Oh, yes. To be religious you must have time and, even more, independence of time. You can't be religious in earnest and at the same time live in actual things and still take them seriously, time and money and the Odon Bar and all that.
Herman Hesse