Unlikely Quotes (page 5)
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You are in a melancholy humour, and fancy that any one unlike yourself must be happy. But remember that the pain of parting from friends will be felt by every body at times, whatever be their education or state. Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience? or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope.
Jane Austen
I had been hungry all the years-My noon had come, to dine-I, trembling, drew the table near. And touched the curious wine. 'Twas this on tables I had seen. When turning, hungry, lone, I looked in windows, for the wealth. I could not hope to own. I did not know the ample bread,'Twas so unlike the crumb. The birds and I had often shared. In Nature's diningroom. The plenty hurt me, 'twas so new,--Myself felt ill and odd, As berry of a mountain bush. Transplanted to the road. Nor was I hungry; so...
Emily Dickinson
I'm not a big scatology fan, unlike my sons, who can amuse themselves for an entire afternoon by repeating the phrase 'crocodile fart.' So I'll spare you from an overabundance of detail in this chapter. This chapter will be somewhat soft focus, like the TV camera in a Barbra Streisand interview.
A. J. Jacobs
I meet you. I remember you. Who are you? You’re destroying me. You’re good for me. How could I know this city was tailor-made for love? How could I know you fit my body like a glove? I like you. How unlikely. I like you. How slow all of a sudden. How sweet. You cannot know. You’re destroying me. You’re good for me. You’re destroying me. You’re good for me. I have time. Please, devour me. Deform me to the point of ugliness. Why not you? Why not you in this city and in this night, so like other...
Marguerite Duras
Even the sober desire for progress is sustained by faith—faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature and in the omnipotence of science. It is a defiant and blasphemous faith, not unlike that held by the men who set out to build a "city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven" and who believed that "nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
Eric Hoffer
The man who came into the room did not look as though his name was, or could have ever been, Robinson. It might have been Demetrius, or Isaacstein, or Perenna - though not one or the other in particular. He was not definitely Jewish, nor definitely Greek nor Portugese nor Spanish, nor South American. What did seem highly unlikely was that he was an Englishman called Robinson.
Agatha Christie
…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these...
John Updike
[My grandmother] was so humble of heart and so gentle that her tenderness for others and her disregard for herself and her own troubles blended in a smile which, unlike those seen on the majority of human faces, bore no trace of irony save for herself, while for all of us kisses seemed to spring from her eyes, which could not look upon those she loved without seeming to bestow upon them passionate caresses.
Marcel Proust
It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination in science. It is a very interesting kind of imagination, unlike that of the artist. The great difficulty is in trying to imagine something that you have never seen, that is consistent in every detail with what has already been seen, and that is different from what has been thought of; furthermore, it must be definite and not a vague proposition. That is indeed difficult.
Richard P. Feynman