Without Quotes (page 102)
You feel, I suppose, that, in losing Isabella, you lose half yourself: you feel a void in your heart which nothing else can occupy? Society is becoming irksome; and as for the amusements in which you were wont to share at Bath, the very idea of which without her is abhorrent? You would not, for instance, now go to a ball for the world? You feel that you have no longer any friend to whom you can speak with unreserve; on whose regard you can place dependence; or whose counsel, in any difficult,...
Jane Austen
Miro, I'm so sorry. I always felt such pity for you humans because you could only think of one thing at a time and your memories were so imperfect and . . . now I realize that just getting through the day without killing somebody can be an achievement."It gets to be a habit. Most of us manage to keep our body count quite low. It's the neighborly way to live.
Orson Scott Card
Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take...
Arthur Schopenhauer
It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and every face was areal mask so there was no mask and there was no face for there was but one dance in which there was butone mask but one true face which was the same and which was a thing without a name which changed andchanged into itself over and over.
Leonard Cohen
Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes. There must always be believers. Fools, idiots, those who hear voices, those who speak in tongues. We are your lunatics. We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible. You are sure that you are right but you don’t want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools. We are your fools, your...
Don DeLillo
Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius."The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up. But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible--villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word
Brenda Ueland
Must like the rest of us on the surface, he had an underlying obliging and considerate strain which barred him from being a really important member of the class. You had to be rude at least sometimes and edgy often to be credited with "personality," and without that accolade no one at Devon could be anyone. No one, with the exception of course of Phineas.
John Knowles