Useful Quotes (page 80)
Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent.
Saul Bellow
the mystic must be steadily told,—All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,—universal signs, instead of these village symbols,—and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When she was in Djibouti and I was in Aden, and I used to go and see her for twenty-four hours, she managed to multiply the misunderstandings between us until there were exactly sixty minutes before I had to leave; sixty minutes, just long enough to make you feel the seconds passing one by one.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Many feelings are simply too good to last--using the phrase not in the unbelieving sense in which it is generally used, but to express the fact that intensity and endurance cannot coexist in the human frame. But the virtue of a mood depends by no means on its immediate presence. Like any other experience, it may be believed in, and, in its absence, which leaves the mind free to contemplate it, works even more good than its presence
George MacDonald
I go to the saltwater and wash off the blood, trying to decide which I hate more, pain or itching. Fed up, I stomp back onto the beach, turn my face upward and snap, "Hey, Haymitch, if you're not too drunk, we could use a little something for our skin."It's almost funny how quickly the parachute appears above me. I reach up and the tube lands squarely in my open hand. "About time" I say, but I can't keep the scowl on my face. Haymitch. What I wouldn't give for five minutes of conversation...
Suzanne Collins
He said that hate makes the world go round. People are afraid of what they really want. They make enemies of all the things that they would like to be. They condition themselves to not embrace what they are. Love is a clinging nausea. I tried to disagree with him. It was no use. I never saw a more honest look in anyone's eyes.
Henry Rollins
I trembled to think of a world without stars. No guide for the sailor to trust at see, no jewels to dazzle our sense of beauty [...] But all around the globe, the air is so dirty and the lights from the cities are so bright that for some people few stars can be seen anymore. A generation of children may grow up seeing a blank sky and asking, "Did there used to be stars there?
Michael Jackson
I must passed the crest a while ago. And now I am going down. Strange to have crossed the crest and not to know, But the brambles were always catching the hem of my gown. And the morning I thought how proud I should be. To stand there straight as a queen, Wrapped in the wind and the sun with the world under me. But the air was dull; there was little I could have seen. It was nearly level along the beaten track. And the brambles caught in my gown. But it's no use now to think of turning back,...
Sara Teasdale
In the modern world all terrors could be gutted by simple use of the transitive axiom of quality. Some fears were justified, of course (you don't drive when you're too plowed to see, don't extend the hand of friendship to snarling dogs, don't go parking with boys you don't know - how did the old joke go? Screw or walk?), but until now she had not believed that some fears were larger than comprehension, apocalyptic and nearly paralyzing. This equation was insoluble. The act of moving forward...
Stephen King