Thy Quotes (page 883)
There’s a bed, a little fold-out table, and cabinets made of actual wood. These in combination with the photographs of family and friends give it a cozy, domestic flavor which is, however, completely ruined by the framed picture of Adolf Hitler on the wall. Waterhouse finds this to be shockingly poor taste until he remembers it’s a German boat.
Neal Stephenson
I had not particularly liked the way in which he wrote about literature in Beginnings, and I was always on my guard if not outright hostile when any tincture of 'deconstruction' or 'postmodernism' was applied to my beloved canon of English writing, but when Edward talked about English literature and quoted from it, he passed the test that I always privately apply: Do you truly love this subject and could you bear to live for one moment if it was obliterated?
Christopher Hitchens
If there’s any other message in this to readers, it’s in these two characters as icons of hope, that it doesn’t make any difference where you come from, or where you went to school, or who you are, there’s hope. That a kid from Jersey with Superman as the icon that kept him alive for years would one day end up writing the character is as absoutely unlikely as it is utterly inevitable. And if that’s true for me, it’s true for you, if you follow your dreams and your passions in full...
J. Michael Straczynski
Seeking the face of God in everything, everyone, all the time, and his hand in every happening; This is what it means to be contemplative in the heart of the world. Seeing and adoring the presence of Jesus, especially in the lowly appearance of bread, and in the distressing disguise of the poor.
Mother Teresa
She had a horror he would die at night. And sometimes when the light began to fade. She could not keep from noticing how white. The birches looked? and then she would be afraid, Even with a lamp, to go about the house. And lock the windows; and as night wore on. Toward morning, if a dog howled, or a mouse. Squeaked in the floor, long after it was gone. Her flesh would sit awry on her. By day. She would forget somewhat, and it would seem. A silly thing to go with just this dream. And get a...
Edna St. Vincent Millay
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I am glad that the country world…retains a power to use our English tongue. It is a part of its sense of reality, of its vocabulary of definite terms, and of its habit of earthly common sense. I find this country writing an excellent corrective of the urban vocabulary of abstractions and of the emotion disguised as thinking which abstractions and humbug have loosed upon the world. May there always be such things as a door, a milk pail, and a loaf of bread, and words to do them honor.
Henry Beston
For that moment at least they seemed to give up external plans, theories, and codes, even the inescapable romantic curiosity about one another, to indulge in being simply and purely young, to share that sense of the world's affliction, that outgoing sorrow at the spectacle of Our Human Condition which anyone this age regards as reward or gratuity for having survived adolescence.
Thomas Pynchon
The dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful re-invasion of darkness, seemed, in the lawyer's eyes, like a district of some city in a nightmare. (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)
Robert Louis Stevenson
I didn’t know what to say to that. I just stared at him. He was right, of course he was right, but… “I can’t do my job like this.”
“No,” he said, “you can’t.”
Then suddenly I felt the first tear slide down my face.
“No crying,” he said.
Another tear joined the first. I fought not to wipe at them.
His hand dropped to his side and he took a deep breath. “That’s not fair. Don’t cry.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to, but you’re right, I think. I’m pregnant, damn it, not...
Laurell K. Hamilton
I laughed. “You’re too young to be so … pessimistic,” I said, using the English word.
“Pessi-what?”
“Pessimistic. It means looking only at the dark side of things.”
“Pessimistic … pessimistic …” She repeated the English to herself over and over, and then she looked up at me with a fierce glare. “I’m only sixteen,” she said, “and I don’t know much about the world, but I do know one thing for sure. If I’m pessimistic, then the adults in this world who are not pessimistic are a bunch of idiots.
Haruki Murakami