Times Quotes (page 248)
Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change... If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances? and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse? then you don't have life after death; you just have death.
Iain Banks
It seems to make a difference to some girls. If you say something that isn't sexist to the right sort ofgirl, she likes you more. Say one of your mates is going on about how all girls are stupid, and you say 'not all girls are stupid,' then it can make you look good. There have to be girls listening, though, obviously. Otherwise it's a waste of time.
Nick Hornby
Lines 34-35: Stilletos of a frozen stillicide [...] In the lovely line heading this comment the reader should note the last word. My dictionary defines it as 'a succession of drops falling from the eaves, eavesdrop, cavesdrop.' I remember having encountered it for the first time in a poem by Thomas Hardy. The bright frost has eternalized the bright eavesdrop.
Vladimir Nabokov
The human being is only a reed, the most feeble in nature; but this is a thinking reed. It isn't necessary for the entire universe to arm itself in order to crush him; a whiff of vapor, a taste of water, suffices to kill him. But when the universe crushes him, the human being becomes still more noble than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and the advantage that the universe has over him. The universe, it does not have a clue."All our dignity consists, then, in thought....
Blaise Pascal
When I think of you and me and what we shared, I know it would be easy for others to dismiss our time together as simply a by-product of the days and nights we spent by the sea, a "fling" that, in the long run, would mean absolutely nothing. Thats why I don't tell people about us. They wouldn't understand, and I don't feel the need to explain, simply becasue I know in my heart how real it was... how real this is. When I think of you I cant help smiling, knowing that you've completed me...
Nicholas Sparks
Our human tragedy is that we are unable to comprehend our experience, it slips through our fingers, we can't hold on to it, and the more time passes, the harder it gets...My father said that the natural world gave us explanations to compensate for the meanings we could not grasp. The slant of the cold sunlight on a winter pine, the music of water, an oar cutting the lake and the flight of birds, the mountains' nobility , the silence of the silence. We are given life but must accept that it is...
Salman Rushdie
I should like to ask you: Does your childhood seem far off? Do the days when you sat at your mother’s knee seem days of very long ago?”
Twenty years back, yes; at this time of my life, no. For as I draw closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning. It seems to be one of kind smoothings and preparings of the way…
Charles Dickens
Do you feel, yet, that you belong to this terrestrial scheme again, Mr. Darnay?"I am frightfully confused regarding time and place, but I am so far mended as to feel that."It must be an immense satisfaction!"He said it bitterly, and filled up his glass again: which was a large one."As to me, the greatest desire I have is to forget that I belong to it. It has no good in it for me--except wine like this--nor I for it. So we are not much alike in that particular. Indeed, I begin to think we are...
Charles Dickens