Quotes To Live By (page 250)
People were so naive about plants, Ellie thought. They just chose plants for appearance, as they would choose a picture for the wall. It never occurred to them that plants were actually living things, busily performing all the living functions of respiration, ingestion, excretion, reproduction---and defense.
Michael Crichton
We should be telling girls what they already know but rarely see affirmed: that the lives they lead inside their own self-contained bodies; the skills they attain through their own concentration and rigor, and the unique phase in their lives during which they may explore boys and eroticism at their own pace - these are magical. And they constitute the entrance point to a life cycle of a sexuality that should be held sacred.
Naomi Wolf
Though my work may be menial, though my contribution may be small, I can perform it with dignity and offer it with unselfishness. My talents may not be great, but I can use them to bless the lives of others.... The goodness of the world in which we live is the accumulated goodness of many small and seemingly inconsequential acts.
Gordon B. Hinckley
Sonnet 54 O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem by that sweet ornament which truth doth give The rose looks fair but fairer we it deem for that sweet odour which doth in it live. The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye as the perfumed tinture of the roses hang on such thorns and play as wantonly when summer's breath their masked buds discloses: But for their virtue only is their show they live unwoo'd and unrespected fade die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so of their sweet deaths...
William Shakespeare
He and his wife loved each other and brought each other daily pain. Everything else he was doing in his life, even his longing for Lalitha, amounted to little more than flight from circumstance. He and Patty couldn't live together and couldn't imagine living apart. Each time he thought they'd reached the unbearable breaking point, it turned out that there was still further they could go without breaking.
Jonathan Franzen
That moment - to this ... may be years in the way they measure, but it's only one sentence back in my mind - there are so many dayswhen living stops and pulls up and sitsand waits like a train on the rails. I pass the hotel at 8and at 5; there are cats in the alleysand bottles and bums, and I look up at the window and think, I no longer know where you are, and I walk on and wonder wherethe living goeswhen it stops.
Charles Bukowski
There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading -- that is a good life.
Annie Dillard
A story wearing another dress every time you hear it - what could be better? A story that grows and puts out flowers like a living thing! But look at the stories people press in books! They may last longer, yes, but they breathe only when someone opens the book. They are sound pressed between the pages, and only a voice can bring them back to life! Then they throw off sparks, Balbulus! Then they go free as birds flying out into the world. Perhaps you're right, and the paper makes them...
Cornelia Funke
I live alone," he said simply. "I live in the open. I hear the waves at night and see the black patterns of the pine boughs against the sky. With sound and silence and color and solitude, of course I see visions. Anyone would."But you don't believe in them?" Doc asked hopefully."I don't find it a matter for belief or disbelief," the seer said. "You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks into the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself everytime that it's an illusion...
John Steinbeck