Useful Quotes (page 96)
You see, what I really want, and what I'm getting with Stephen, is the opportunity to rebuild myself from scratch. David's picture of me is complete now, and I'm pretty sure neither of us likes it much; I want to rip the page out and start again on a fresh sheet, just like I used to do when I was a kid and had messed a drawing up. It doesn't even matter who the fresh sheet is, really, so its beside the point whether I like Stephen, or whether he knows what to do with me in bed, or anything...
Nick Hornby
Stanley always followed the rules. All sorts of things could go wrong if you didn't. So far he'd done 1: Upon Discovery of the Fire, Remain Calm. Now he'd come to 2: Shout 'Fire!' in a Loud, Clear Voice.'Fire!' he shouted, and then ticked off 2 with his pencil. Next was: 3: Endeavour to Extinguish Fire If Possible. Stanley went to the door and opened it. Flames and smoke billowed in. He stared at them for a moment, shook his head, and shut the door. Paragraph 4 said: If Trapped by Fire,...
Terry Prachett
A terrible crisis unquestionably has arisen in the Church. In the ministry of evangelical churches are to be found hosts of those who reject the gospel of Christ. By the equivocal use of traditional phrases, by the representation of differences of opinion as though they were only differences about the interpretation of the Bible, entrance into the Church was secured for those who are hostile to the very foundations of the faith.
John Gresham Machen
It's only a matter of discovering the lever. If you learn how to rule one single man's soul, you can get the rest of mankind. It's the soul, Peter, the soul. Not whips or swords or fire or guns. That's why the Caesars, the Attilas, the Napoleons were fools and did not last. We will. The soul, Peter, is that which can't be ruled. It must be broken. Drive a wedge in, get your fingers on it--and the man is yours. You won't need a whip--he'll bring it to you and ask to be whipped. Set him in...
Ayn Rand
It would hardly be kindness if he didn't punish sin, not to use every means to put the evil thing far from us. Whatever may be meant by the place of misery Mr. Sutherland, it's only another form of his love. Love shining through the fogs of evil, and thus made to look very different.
George MacDonald
I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry. When the storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me where I lie in the ditch unregarded I need no words. Nothing neat. Nothing that comes down with all its feet on the floor. None of those resonances and lovely echoes that break and chime from nerve to...
Virginia Woolf
Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions. from "On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense
Friedrich Nietzsche
Why do you read then?'
Partly for pleasure, because it's a habit and I'm just as uncomfortable if I don't read as if I don't smoke, and partly to know myself. When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me; I've got out of the book all that's any use to me and I can't get anything more if I read it a dozen times. ...
W. Somerset Maugham
You know, people don't want their intelligence insulted. They don't want to be preached to. They don't want to be degraded. All they want to do is sit, laugh, have a good time, love one another, forget about what's going on in the world, and find something out so they can be useful in this life. Do this and you have common sense.
Tyler Perry
Don't listen to me. Advice so rarely finds its inteded audience. It's like the sword in the stone? you leave it there, maybe someday someone finds it useful. Sorry, people? we're driving through lativia and I can't reach for my state of mind. 1. Thoughts are made of water and water always finds a way. 2. If you can't dodge the water, run.
Dave Eggers