Us Quotes (page 333)
No more cars in national parks. Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs--anything--but keep the automobiles and the motorcycles and all their motorized relatives out. We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and the other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places. An increasingly pagan and hedonistic people...
Edward Abbey
Among the gifts of the Spirit, scarcely is one of greater practical usefulness than the gift of discernment. This gift should be highly valued and frankly sought as being almost indispensable in these critical times. This gift will enable us to distinguish the chaff from the wheat and to divide the manifestations of the flesh from the operations of the Spirit.
Aiden Wilson Tozer
To tell a great story, you really do have to step through the box that the world has put around you; you have to see it. You have to see what the world has defined you as. And you have to refute it in language that the world will understand. ... Repay the debt that kept you alive, you will make an art and you will take a leap. And, oh God, I hope you get all the way over to the other side. Because some of us don’t.
Dorothy Allison
Gabrielle: When I was a little girl, on Sunday mornings, if I'd been good, I was allowed to feed the giraffes.
Richard: Giraffes! Don't tell me that you had giraffes too?
Gabrielle: You mean you...
Richard: But of course we did
Gabrielle: Oh what fun. Both of us having had giraffes as children.
George Axelrod
Nevertheless, let no one boast. Just as every man, though he be thegreatest genius, has very definite limitations in some one sphere ofknowledge, and thus attests his common origin with the essentiallyperverse and stupid mass of mankind, so also has every man somethingin his nature which is positively evil. Even the best, nay thenoblest, character will sometimes surprise us by isolated traits ofdepravity; as though it were to acknowledge his kinship with the humanrace, in which villainy--nay,...
Arthur Schopenhauer
In a life, or a portion of a life illuminated, there's a fullness and a balance that no theory or abstraction can match. Why do people waste so much time on abstraction? The life that is given to us, that we play out, is something that you cannot any more grasp with systems and ideas than you can tame an elephant with tweezers.
Mark Helprin
Come, Philander, let us be a marching, Every one his true love a searching,"Would be the most appropriate motto for this chapter, because, intimidated by the threats, denunciations, and complaints showered upon me in consequence of taking the liberty to end a certain story as I liked, I now yield to the amiable desire of giving satisfaction, and, at the risk of outraging all the unities, intend to pair off everybody I can lay my hands on.
Louisa May Alcott