Thing Quotes (page 362)

• 
• 
• 

• regret
• she
• looking back

But she never looked back with regret. There were so many ways for things to get better.-Jing-mei Amy Tan

• love
• nature
• country

The love of one's country is a natural thing. But why should love stop at the border? Pablo Casals

• positive
• she
• saying

Woolf wanted to say dangerous things in Orlando but she did not want to say them in the missionary position. Jeanette Winterson

• world
• ocean
• waste

Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence. Cormac McCarthy

• art
• understanding
• wise

[Wise men] have tried to understand our state of being, by grasping at its stars, or its arts, or its economics. But, if there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere. Charles Fort

• silence
• eyes
• communication

She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted." Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: "She never asked me. Edith Wharton

• heart
• house
• feeling hurt

Friends. They aren’t any such thing as good friend or bad friend. Maybe there are just friend. People who stand by you when you're hurt and who helped you feel not so lonely. Maybe there are worth being scared for and hoping for and living for. Maybe worth dying for too. If that what has to be. No bad friends. Only people you want. Need to be with. People who build their houses in your heart. Stephen King

• hurt
• terribly
• causes

Oh, Celie, unbelief is a terrible thing. And so is the hurt we cause others unknowingly. Alice Walker

• sad
• best
• learning

The best thing for being sad ... is to learn something. T. H. White

• wisdom
• desperate
• characteristics

But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. Henry David Thoreau

• real
• originate
• names

The unnamable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things. Lao Tzu

• women
• children
• giving

Published in this month's Harper's, from a conversation held in Beijing in February 1973: Chairman Mao Zedong: Do you want our Chinese women? We can give you ten million. U. S. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger: The chairman is improving his offer. Mao: We can let them flood your country with disaster and therefore impair your interests. In our country we have too many women, and they have a way of doing things. They give birth to children, and our children are too many. Mao Zedong

• beauty
• help
• simplicity

As I drift back into sleep, I can't help thinking that it's a wonderful thing to be right about the world. To weigh the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, to recognize its beauty, its simplicity, its truth. It's as close as we get to God in this life, and reside in the glow of such brief flashes of understanding, fully awake, sometimes for two or three seconds, at peace with our existence. And then back to sleep we go. Richard Russo

• watch
• thinking
• look

I’m ALIVE. Thinking about it, noticing it, is new. You do things and don’t watch. Then all of a sudden you look and see what you’re doing and it’s the first time, really. Ray Bradbury

• true
• wonder
• dead

Every day I wonder how many things I am dead wrong about. -- True North Jim Harrison