While Quotes (page 126)
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I've been in love with you for weeks.'
There's no such thing,' she says. 'It's a rhetorical device. It's a bourgeois fallacy.'
Haven't you ever been in love, then?'
When I was younger,' she says, 'I allowed myself to be constructed by the discourse of romantic love for a while, yes.'
What the hell does that mean?'
We aren't essences, Vic. We aren't unique individual essences existing prior to language. There is only language.
David Lodge
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,- -
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be otherwise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see thus, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream...
Paul Laurence Dunbar
What does reason know? It knows only what it has managed to learn (and it may never learn anything else; that isn't very reassuring, but why not admit it?), while human nature acts as a complete entity, with all that is in it, consciously or unconsciously; and though it may be wrong, it's nevertheless alive.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Now suzanne takes you hand. And she leads you to the river. She is wearing rags and feathers. From salvation army counters. And the sun pours down like honey. On our lady of the harbour. And she shows you where to look. Among the garbage and the flowers. There are heroes in the seaweed. There are children in the morning. They are leaning out for love. And they will lean that way forever. While suzanne holds the mirror. And you want to travel with her. And you want to travel blind. And you...
Leonard Cohen
Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them, while on the other hand to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.
Galileo Galilei
It is not while beauty. And youth are thine own. And thy cheeks. Unprofaned by a tear. That the ferver and faith. Of a soul can be known. To which time will but Make thee more dear. No the heart that has truly loved. Never forgets. But as truly loves. On to the close. As the sunflower turns. On her god when he sets. The same look which. She'd turned when he rose.
Thomas Moore
For twenty years it seemed to me that I had been taking part in a game, and that one day, at the stroke of midnight, I would return to the land of shadows. ...In a little while, the hands would be pointing to midnight; they would point to midnight tomorrow and the next day, and I would still be here.
Simone de Beauvoir
I smoked and looked down at the bottom of Pittsburgh for a little while, watching the kids playing tiny baseball, the distant figures of dogs snatching at a little passing car, a miniature housewife on her back porch shaking out a snippet of red rug, and I made a sudden, frightened vow never to become that small, and to devote myself to getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
Michael Chabon
When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, "What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?"
"They are the days of a long time ago, Laura," Pa said. "Go to sleep, now."
But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods,…
She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.
Laura Ingalls Wilder