Josiah Bancroft Quotes

We shouldn't have to go around congratulating each other for behaving with basic human dignity.

If I ever get to the point where I can stand idly by while a child falls to his death, I don't think I can claim to have priorities of any kind.

Every important journey I have undertaken has begun the same: with crushed sheets, a balled pillow, flung open books, and not a wink of sleep.

You intellectuals are always so surprised to discover how fragile your body is. The mind is so robust, so remote. But muscles and bones are as simple as tied-up straw. They unravel and snap. And the more they break, the more the mind shrinks. In the moments before the cascade into death, the great intellect is reduced to a silent kernel. The mind is nothing more than a door into the dark.

With subjugation comes certainty. Liberty is full of gambles.

Senlin did not believe in that sort of love: sudden and selfish and insatiable. Love, as the poets so often painted it, was just bald lust wearing a pompous wig. He believed true love was more like an education: it was deep and subtle and never complete.

The gaps are part of the set, too," she'd said. "You can't replace them. I know how each piece was broken or lost. I broke a plate myself when I was nine. Now I'm an immortal part of the pattern. I'll take my gaps, thank you.

Spring is gray and miserable and rainy for three or four weeks while the snow melts. The ditches turn into creeks and everything you own is clammy as a frog belly. Then one morning, you walk outside and the sun is out and the clover has grown over the ditches and the trees are pointed with leaves, like ten thousand green arrowheads, and the air smells like..." and here he had to fumble for a phrase, "like a roomful of stately ladies and one wet dog.

If one machine could do the work of so many men, what would be left for those men to do? In a thousand years, when the last human work was taken over by an automatic engine, would it conclude the liberation or the eslavement of the race?

Never let a rigid itinerary discourage you from an unexpected adventure.

Even beauty diminishes with study. It is better to glance than gawk.

The semigloom of the Tower's nightfall made Senlin shiver. He cleared his throat and turned toward Adam, silhouetted by the rapidly fleeing line of sunlight. "Who will bury them?" Senlin rubbed tenderly at the dust-clotted gash in his cheek.
"The vultures," Adam said grimly. "We should go.

The only event I'm certain to attend is my funeral, and I hope to arrive very, very late.

Learning starts with failure.

Yes, I hear that people who suffer from brain damage are quite happy. That's what I always wanted for you, Edith: for you to be happy, no matter how many blows to the head it takes.

Each spring, the schoolhouse was painted white as a bride, and every year the oceanic elements slowly undressed it.

Senlin could easily tell which porters only became busy at his approach. The hardest workers moved slowly, deliberately, while the lazy appeared eternally fresh and enthusiastic.

She would not tell him the truth for some weeks, but she would eventually confess that she had left with him because the fear had gone out of her daily leaps. Her hours were filled with confident, minor feats and toothless dangers. She would not call it such, but Adam would later name it for her: it was boredom that had driven her from her mother's side and a secure home.

Iren broke the moment of quiet reflection. "He was a bad captian"

"But a worse bird" said Voleta.

Man, what a thing to say after a dude falls to his death.

She had to rediscover fear and, tucked somewhere inside that fear, life.

All I know is that, at the end of the day, dreams don't matter, but neither does regret. We aren't what we want or wish for. We are only what we do.

Often the simplest way to unlock a door is to knock upon it.

He believed true love was more like an education: it was deep and subtle and never complete. The

If the law is malleable, Mr. Senlin, if it bends and conforms to man, then man will become resolute in his flaws. The law exists to give shape to man's ideals. When you think about it, doesn't mercy serve the wicked at the expense of the law?

Some friendships develop like flowers in a garden: they are conscientiously planted and nurtured. The ground about them is kept clear of competition. Then, after some weeks and months of incremental growth and laborious pruning, a flower blooms. Such cultivated friendships are agreeable and convenient, if not enduring. Other friendships seem to arise spontaneously, like an egg in a nest or a freckle upon an arm, and these are often mystifying, as both parties are left to wonder how exactly this unexpected affection took hold.

Suits me. I'd rather be a nothing at the center of everything than a puffed-up somebody at the edge of it all." She said this in her usual unguarded way. And without meaning to, she had described him exactly: a puffed-up somebody at the edge of it all.

It is not cynical to admit that the past has been turned into a fiction. It is a story, not a fact. The real has been erased. Whole eras have been added and removed. Wars have been aggrandized, and human struggle relegated to the margins. Villains are redressed as heroes. Generous, striving, imperfect men and women have been stripped of their flaws or plucked of their virtues and turned into figurines of morality or depravity. Whole societies have been fixed with motive and vision and equanimity where there was none. Suffering has been recast as noble sacrifice!

You've made it impossible for me to read a book in peace. When you're not here, I just gaze at the words until they tumble off the page into a puddle in my lap. Instead of reading, I sit there and review the hours of the day I spent in your company, and I am more charmed by that story than anything the author has scribbled down. I have never been lonely in my life, but you have made me lonely. When you are gone, I am a moping ruin. I thought I understood the world fairly well. But you have made it all mysterious again. And it's unnerving and frightening and wonderful, and I want it to continue. I want all your mysteries.

The essential lesson of the zoetrope is this: movement, indeed all progress, even the passage of time, is an illusion. Life is the repetition of stillness.

My sense of being, my identity, whatever you want to call it, it doesn't reside in my parts. It lives in my past, and in the continuity of my present thoughts, and in my hopes for the future. I'm more afraid of losing a memory than a limb.

I'm glad your self-righteousness has given you some exercise, but you forget: we are not such a tidy, reasonable, and humane race. Our thoughts don't stand in grammatical rows, our hearts don't draw equations, our consciences don't have the benefit of historians whispering the answers to us.

Only people who go to bed early believe in happy endings. We night owls understand that happiness does not dwell in finales. It resides in anticipation, in revelry, and in worn-out welcomes. Endings are always sad.