Turns Quotes (page 38)
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Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so called pleasure.
Erich Fromm
How many times have you said, 'This is it. I've finally found my one true love'? And how many times has the reality turned out differently? Paperback romances and fairy tales promote an ideal of a first and only love, but few of us can claim to have had such uncomplicated good fortune. For most people, the process of finding the perfect partner is one trial and error: breakups, makeups, missed opportunities and misunderstandings. Human love is a fragile creation, and sometimes the smallest...
Haruki Murakami
But then I have long since grown accustomed to the thought that what we call dreams is semi-reality, the promise of reality, a foreglimpse and a whiff of it; that is they contain, in a very vague, diluted state, more genuine reality than our vaunted waking life which, in its turn, is semi-sleep, an evil drowsiness into which penetrate in grotesque disguise the sounds and sights of the real world, flowing beyond the periphery of the mind—as when you hear during sleep a dreadful insidious tale...
Vladimir Nabokov
He was a boy, just a boy, when I was a very young girl. When I was sixteen, I made the discovery - love. All at once and much, much too completely. It was like you suddenly turned a blinding on something that had always been half in shadow, that's how it struck the world for me. But I was unlucky. Deluded.
Tennessee Williams
The following evening as they rode up onto the western rim they lost one of the mules. It went skittering off down the canyon wall with the contents of the panniers exploding soundlessly in the hot dry air and it fell through sunlight and through shade, turning in that lonely void until it fell from sight into a sink of cold blue space that absolved it forever of memory in the mind of any living thing that was.
Cormac McCarthy
Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I am coming to see that the sensation of the worst nightmares, a sensation that can be felt asleep or awake, is identical to those worst dreams' form itself: the sudden intra-dream realization that the nightmares' very essence and center has been with you all along, even awake: it's just been ... overlooked; and then that horrific interval between realizing what you've overlooked and turning your head to look back at what's been right there all along, the whole time...
David Foster Wallace
Property breeds lawyers, I said, forbearing to add a belief that unfortunately property now seemed the only thing palpable enough to demand the respect of governments, and perhaps was the generating clout against encroachments on the spiritual protections for speech, assembly, and so on. It might turn out that without the right to possess we are not sure we really have the right to speak and to be.
Arthur Miller
One day—when the emperor had come to call on his uncle the cardinal—our worthy priest happened to be waiting as his Majesty went by. Noticing that the old man looked at him with a certain curiosity, Napoleon turned around and said brusquely, ‘Who is this good man looking at me?’
‘Sire,’ replied M. Myriel, “you are looking at a good man, and I at a great one. May we both be the better for it.”
That evening the emperor asked the cardinal the priest’s name, Still later, M. Myriel was totally...
Victor Hugo