Train Quotes (page 26)
The tea ceremony requires years of training and practice ... yet the whole of this art, as to its detail, signifies no more than the making and serving of a cup of tea. The supremely important matter is that the act be performed in the most perfect, most polite, most graceful, most charming manner possible.
Lafcadio Hearn
People nowadays seemed to resent the railroads for abandoning romantic steam power in favor of diesel. People didn't understand the first goddamned thing about running a railroad. A diesel locomotive was versatile, efficient, and low-maintenance. People thought the railroad owed them romantic favors, and then they belly ached if a train was slow. That was the way most people were—stupid.
Jonathan Franzen
Even at the age of eight she would fall asleep by pressing one hand into the other and making believe she was holding the hand of the man whom she loved, the man of her life. So if in her sleep she pressed Tomas hand with such tenacity, we can understand why: she had been training since childhood.
Milan Kundera
Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities--that's training or instruction--but is rather a making visible what is hidden as a seed...To be educated, a person doesn't have to know much or be informed, but he or she does have to have been exposed vulnerably to the transformative events of an engaged human life...One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated.
Thomas Moore
I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.
Sylvia Plath
Like you're riding a train at night across some vast plain, and youcatch a glimpse of a tiny light in a window of a farmhouse. In aninstant it's sucked back into the darkness behind and vanishes. Butif you close your eyes, that point of light stays with you, justbarely for a few moments.
Haruki Murakami
It is when one begins to lose the consciousness of freedom, and when the idea of necessity enters the world at all, when there is any hurry or strain anywhere, a letter to be written or a train to catch, when you have got to work, to make the horses of the dream gallop, or to make the rifles go off, that the dream is declining, and turning into the nightmare, which belongs to the poorest and most vulgar class of dreams.
Isak Dinesen
O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever renew’d;
Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad,...
Walt Whitman