World Quotes (page 392)
In stating these matters, I speak an open and disinterested language, dictated by no passion but that of humanity. To me, who have not only refused offers, because I thought them improper, but have declined rewards I might with reputation have accepted, it is no wonder that meaness and imposition appear disgustful. Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
Thomas Paine
I always
thought we only had two choices in our lives when it came to pizza crust—thin and crispy, or
thick and doughy. How was I to have known there could be a crust in this world that was thin
and doughy? Holy of holies! Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yummy, chewy, salty pizza paradise.
Elizabeth Gilbert
The mountains of the Great Divide are not, as everyone knows, born treeless, though we always think of them as above timberline with the eternal snows on their heads. They wade up through ancient forests and plunge into canyons tangled up with water-courses and pause in little gem-like valleys and march attended by loud winds across the high plateaus, but all such incidents of the lower world they leave behind them when they begin to strip for the skies: like the Holy Ones of old, they go...
Wallace Stegner
Perhaps magic was once a mighty force in the world, but no longer. What little remains is no more than the wisp of smoke that lingers in the air after a great fire has burned out, and even that is fading. Valyria was the last ember, and Valyria is gone. The dragons are no more, the giants are dead, the children of the forest forgotten with all their lore.
George R. R. Martin
They talked like this all the time. There was no malice in it: they were just brutally frank with each other. They were brothers, so there was no need to be nice." ~~Winter of the World (having 3 sons, it's nice to know this dynamic is normal b/c I'm always telling them to, 'Talk nice to your brother!') :)
Ken Follet
How come we've got these bodies? They are frail supports for what we feel. There are times I get so hemmed in by my arms and legs I look forward to getting past them. As though death will set me free like a traveling cloud... I'll be out there as a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood.
Louise Erdrich
He might have been encased in a thick glass bubble, so separate did he feel from his three dining companions. It was a sensation with which he was only too familiar, that of walking in a giant sphere of worry, enclosed by it, watching his own terrors roll by, obscuring the outside world.
J. K. Rowling
So word by word, and line by line,
The dead man touch'd me from the past,
And all at once it seem'd at last
The living soul was flash'd on mine,
And mine in his was wound, and whirl'd
About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is, and caught
The deep pulsations of the world,
onian music measuring out
The steps of Time—the shocks of Chance--
The blows of Death. At length my trance
Was cancell'd, stricken thro' with doubt.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
...But what has any of the three, or any mixture of the three, to do with that unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves?
C. S. Lewis