Watchfulness Quotes (page 24)
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And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of your neighbor's pocket? No, it's not as easy as that. If that were all, I'd say ninety-five percent of humanity were honest, upright men. Only, as you can see, they aren't. Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.
Ayn Rand
I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning; my great thought in living is himself. Nelly, I AM Heathcliff--he's always, always in my mind--not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself--but as my own being.
Emily Bronte
The room was a machine that measured my condition: how much of me remained, how much of me was no longer there. I was both perpetrator and witness, both actor and audience in a theater of one. I could follow the progress of my own dismemberment. Piece by piece, I could watch myself dissapear.
Paul Auster
And I watch my words from a long way off. They are more yours than mine. They climb on my old suffering like ivy. It climbs the same way on damp walls. You are to blame for this cruel sport. They are fleeing from my dark lair. You fill everything, you fill everything. Before you they peopled the solitude that you occupy, and they are more used to my sadness than you are. Now I want them to say what I want to say to youto make you hear as I want you to hear me.
Pablo Neruda
In general, I weathered even the worst sermons pretty well. They had the great virtue of causing my mind to wander. Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons. Or I would look out the windows. In winter, when the windows were closed, the church seemed to admit the light strictly on its own terms, as if uneasy about the frank sunshine of this benighted world. In summer, when the sashes were raised, I watched with a great, eager pleasure the town and the...
Wendell Berry
Oh no, not -'
OF COURSE, WHAT'S SO BLOODY VEXING ABOUT THE WHOLE BUSINESS IS THAT I WAS EXPECTING TO MEET THEE IN PSEPHOPOLOLIS
'But that's five hundred miles away!'
YOU DON'T HAVE TO TELL ME, THE WHOLE SYSTEM'S GOT SCREWED UP AGAIN, I CAN SEE THAT. LOOK, THERE'S NO CHANCE OF YOU-?
Rincewind backed away, hands spread protectively in front of him...
'Not a chance!'
I COULD LEND YOU A VERY FAST HORSE.
'No!'
IT WON'T HURT A BIT.
'No!' Rincewind turned and ran. Death watched him go, and...
Terry Prachett
They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and- leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.
Cormac McCarthy
When I watch the living meet, And the moving pageant file. Warm and breathing through the street. Where I lodge a little while, If the heats of hate and lust. In the house of flesh are strong, Let me mind the house of dust. Where my sojourn shall be long. In the nation that is not. Nothing stands that stood before; There revenges are forgot, And the hater hates no more; Lovers lying two and two. Ask not whom they sleep beside, And the bridegroom all night through. Never turns him to the bride.
A. E. Housman
