218 Quotes

And here we are, in the middle, surrounded by a sea of stars.
A million suns.
Any of them could hold a planet. Any of them could hold a home.
But all of them are out of reach. [p.218] ~ Beth Revis

JB's friends were poets and performance artists and academics and modern dancers and philosophers
he had, Malcolm once observed, befriended everyone at their college who was least likely to make money
and their lives were grants and residencies and fellowships and awards. Success, among JB's Hood Hall assortment, wasn't defined by your box-office numbers (as it was for his agent and manager) or your costars or your reviews (as it was by his grad-school classmates): it was defined simply and only by how good your work was, and whether you were proud of it. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

Had the ancient Greek poet Archilochus and the modern philosopher Isaiah Berlin been magically transported to northern Italy in November of 218 B.C., they might well have speculated on the strategic prospects. "Hannibal knows many things, but Rome knows one big thing," the Greek might have proposed. To which Berlin might have replied, "Perhaps at the outset. But then the fox could get stuck in a rut, and the hedgehog might learn new tricks." This would have been the Second Punic War epitomized. ~ Anonymous

Picture yourself, Jack, a confirmed homebody, a sedentary fellow who finds himself walking in a deep wood. You spot something out of the corner of your eye. Before you know anything else, you know that this thing is very large and that it has no place in your ordinary frame of reference. A flaw in the world picture. Either it shouldn't be here or you shouldn't. Now the thing comes into full view. It is a grizzly bear, enormous, shiny brown, swaggering, dripping slime from its bared fangs. Jack, you have never seen a large animal in the wild. The sight of this grizzer is so electrifyingly strange that it gives you a renewed sense of yourself, a fresh awareness of the self - the self in terms of a unique and horrific situation. You see yourself in a new and intense way. You rediscover yourself. You are lit up for your own imminent dismemberment. The beast on hind legs has enabled you to see who you are as if for the first time, outside familiar surroundings, alone, distinct, whole. The name we give this complicated process is fear. [...]

Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.
(p. 218) ~ Don DeLillo

My father was too distracted to see anything in this. Mimicking my mother, he taped it to the fridge in the same place Buckley's long-forgotten drawing of the Inbetween had been. But my brother knew something was wrong with his story. Knew it by how his teacher reacted, doing a double take like they did in his comic books. He took the story down and brought it to my old room while Grandma Lynn was downstairs. He folded it into a tiny square and put it inside the now-empty insides of my four poster bed.

~pgs 217-218; Buckley's childhood ~ Alice Sebold

Back in the 1970s, I ate a high-protein diet to get bigger and stronger. As a senior at Utah State, I weighed 218 pounds with eight percent body fat, and threw the discus over 190 feet. Then I got some advice from the people at the Olympic Training Center. I needed carbs, they advised, and lots of them. They pointed to studies done on the American distance runners. Being an idiot, I took the advice to eat like emaciated, over-trained sub-performers. It took years of high carbohydrate grazing to learn the evils of this advice. ~ Dan John

While I listened to the words of homage to Mao, I remembered Mao's awesome power, like a blanket over China threatening to smother whomever he chose. Pg. 218 ~ Nien Cheng

A bird who flies is special. You would never trap a bird who flies" (218). ~ James McBride

I don't know, I guess I agree with them. That if everyone would just keep learning about the world around them, they would have far fewer problems. ~ Veronica Roth

To say it was a beautiful day would not begin to explain it. It was that day when the end of summer intersects perfectly with the start of fall ... [p.218 ff.] ~ Ann Patchett

218.The same principle probably explains why dogs, when feeling affectionate, like rubbing against their masters and being rubbed or patted by them, for from the nursing of their puppies, contact with a beloved object has become firmly associated in their minds with the emotion of love. The feeling of affection of a dog towards his master is combined with a strong sense of submission, which is akin to fear. Hence dogs not only lower their bodies and crouch a little as they approach their masters, but sometimes throw themselves on the ground with their bellies upwards. ~ Charles Darwin

But to procrastinate and prevaricate simply because you're afraid of erring, when others - I mean our brethren in Germany - must make infinitely more difficult decisions every day, seems to me almost to run counter to love. To delay or fail to make decisions may be more sinful than to make wrong decisions out of faith and love. (Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, 218) ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer