Vision Quotes (page 18)
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For I perceived that man's estate is as a citadel: he may throw down the walls to gain what he calls freedom, but then nothing of him remains save a dismantled fortress, open to the stars. And then begins the anguish of not-being. Far better for him were it to achieve his truth in the homely smell of blazing vine shoots, or of the sheep he has to shear. Truth strikes deep, like a well. A gaze that wanders loses sight of God. And that wise man who, keeping his thoughts in hand, knows little...
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Not like this vision before us, who was shaking water out of his slightly overlong reddish-brown
hair as he leaned over to lay down his board (revealing, as he did so, the fact that beneath his
baggy swim trunks—so weighted down with water that they had sunk somewhat dangerously low
on his hips—lurked what appeared to be an exceptionally well-formed gluteus maximus)
Meg Cabot
It was a grey day, that least fleshly of all weathers; a day of dreams and far hopes and clear visions. It was a day easily associated with those abstract truths and purities that dissolve in the sunshine or fade out in mocking laughter by the light of the moon. The trees and clouds were carved in classical severity; the sounds of the countryside had harmonized to a monotone, metallic as a trumpet, breathless as the Grecian urn.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and...
W. G. Sebald
We're a lukewarm people for all our feast days and hard work. Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision. Our children frighten us in their intimacy, but we make sure they grow up like us. Lukewarm like us. On a night like this, hands and faces hot, we can believe that tomorrow will show us angels in jars and that the well-known woods will suddenly reveal another path.
Jeanette Winterson
You're enjoying this, aren't you?"I'd feel better if I could guard your back."You're going to do that with a rifle from the closest hill, remember."Night vision and scope, fine, but I can't kill them all from a distance."You couldn't kill them all if you were johnny on the spot, either," I said. No but I'd feel better."Worried about me?" He shrugged. I'm your bodyguard. If you die under my protection, the other bodyguards will make fun of me." It took me a second to realize he was making a...
Laurell K. Hamilton
I always think about what it means to wear eyeglasses. When you get used to glasses you don't know how far you could really see. I think about all the people before eyeglasses were invented. It must have been weird because everyone was seeing in different ways according to how bad their eyes were. Now, eyeglasses standardize everyone's vision to 20-20. That's an example of everyone becoming more alike. Everyone could be seeing at different levels if it weren't for glasses.
Andy Warhol
Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin' you to defy it
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind
Bob Dylan
Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing? or rather, they died for work. But work is...
Bob Black
She had witnessed a conflict between two men who held her liberty in their hands, her very life and that of her child; one had sought to drag her deeper into darkness, the other to restore her to light. The two contestants, in the heightened vision of her terror, had seemed like giants, one speaking with the voice of a demon, the other in the tones of an angel. The angel had won, and what caused her to tremble from head to foot was the fact that this rescuing angel was the man she abhorred,...
Victor Hugo