A Place Called Here Quotes

The more partners I had, the more I realized Gregory and I were the best pair I'd ever come across. But in my pursuit of answers to all the difficult questions in my life, I missed out on the obvious ones right in front of my very eyes. ~ Cecelia Ahern

I ... had what Kierkegaard called 'the sickness of infinitude,' wandering from one path to another with no real recognition that I was embarked upon a search, and scarcely a clue as to what I might be after. I only knew that at the bottom of each breath there was a hollow place that needed to be filled. ~ Peter Matthiessen

A very important part of the Irish way of life is death. See, if anybody else anywhere else in the world dies that's the end of it, they're dead, but in Ireland when somebody dies we lay them out and watch them for a couple of days. It's called a Wake. And it's great, it's a party, a send off. The fella is laid out on the table and there's drinking and dancing and all the food you can eat and all of your friends come from all over the place and they all stand around the wake table looking at you with a glass in their hands looking at you and they say "Here's to your health". The terrible thing about dying over there [Ireland] is you miss your own wake. It's the best day of your life. You've paid for everything and you can't join in. Mind you, if you did you'd be drinking on your own.

Dave Allen ~ Dave Allen

There is an Iroquois myth that describes a choice the nation was once forced to make. The myth has various forms. This is the simplest version. A council of the tribes was called to decide where to move on for the next hunting season. What the council had not known, however, was that the place they eventually chose was a place inhabited by wolves. Accordingly, the Iroquois became subject to repeated attacks, during which the wolves gradually whittled down their numbers. They were faced with a choice: to move somewhere else or to kill the wolves. The latter option, they realized, would diminish them. It would make them the sort of people they did not want to be. And so they moved on. To avoid repetition of their earlier mistake, they decided that in all future council meetings someone should be appointed to represent the wolf. Their contribution would be invited with the question, 'Who speaks for wolf? ~ Mark Rowlands

Too much credit is given to the end result. The true lesson is in the struggle that takes place between the dream and reality. That struggle is a thing called life! ~ Garth Brooks

When Carl asked the Brices to bring their whole family to therapy, everyone in the family knew intuitively what that meant. Their whole world would be exposed: all its caring, its history, its anger, its anxiety. All in one place at once time, subject to the scrutiny and invasion of a stranger. And that was too much vulnerability. With its own unconscious wisdom, the family elected Don to stay home and test the therapists. Did we really mean everybody? Would we weaken and capitulate if they didn't bring Don?

They had something to gain by the strategy. If we were hesitant and unconfident in our approach to their defiance, they would know that they could not trust us with the boiling cauldron of feeling which their family contained. If we were decisive and firm, they would guess that maybe we could handle the stresses which they intuitively knew had to be brought out into the open. One way or another, they had to find out how much power we had. In the meantime, they postponed facing that mysterious electricity, that critical mass, the whole family. Perhaps they thought they could be spared what Zorba called the full catastrophe. ~ Augustus Y. Napier

Some people, he says, they hide themselves away from the eyes of the world. They hunker down and shiver. They find four walls high enough to put between them and everything else. Those people, to them the world is a frightful place. See, you and me, we're different. When we are called on to move, we move. It don't matter the cause or the distance. Revenge or ministration, reason or folly - it's all the same to us. ~ Alden Bell

The fact was that one was left empty-handed. There was no system to soothe the unfairness of things; justice was without scope; it might snag the stealer of chickens, but great evasive crimes would have to be dismissed because, if identified and netted, they would bring down the entire structure of so-called civilization. For crimes that took place in the monstrous dealings between nations, for crimes that took place in those intimate spaces between two people without a witness ... ~ Kiran Desai

The Wizard was from a place called America, and to him, a female ruler was a strange and unsettling notion. ~ Danielle Paige

Everyone has his sphere of influence or territory in a society, which is a place where he is called to bring God's presence ~ Sunday Adelaja

I lived in my head most of the time - a lonely and messed up place - and suddenly there was a higher force called Allah I could lean on. A companion, who'd travel with me this road less trodden... My life. Islam means surrendering yourself to God. ~ Fadia Faqir

The Drowned Cities hadn't always been broken. People broke it. First they called people traitors and said they didn't belong. Said these people were good and those people were evil, and it kept going, because people always responded, and pretty soon the place was a roaring hell because no one took responsibility for what they did, and how it would drive others to respond. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

I experienced car creepery at thirteen. I was walking home from middle school past a place called the World's Largest Aquarium - which, legally, I don't know how they could call it that, because it was obviously an average-sized aquarium. Maybe I should start referring to myself as the World's Tallest Man and see how that goes? Anyway, I was walking home alone from school and I was wearing a dress. A dude drove by and yelled, "Nice tits." Embarrassed and enraged, I screamed after him, "Suck my dick." Sure, it didn't make any sense, but at least I don't hold in my anger. ~ Tina Fey

[Coleridge] selected an instance of what was called the sublime, in DARWIN, who imagined the creation of the universe to have taken place in a moment, by the explosion of a mass of matter in the womb, or centre of space. In one and the same instant of time, suns and planets shot into systems in every direction, and filled and spangled the illimitable void! He asserted this to be an intolerable degradation -referring, as it were, all the beauty and harmony of nature to something like the bursting of a barrel of gunpowder! that spit its combustible materials into a pock-freckled creation! ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called 'abolition of private property' which took place in the middle years of the century meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before: but with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals. ~ George Orwell

We came to Vienna to find this"-she pointed-"the desired thing. But we're running out of time and we don't know what it is or where to find it."
"Now splendid. You've come to the right place."
"I knew it!" Arriane crowed. She leaned back into her chair and slapped Annabelle, who was politely nibbling at a scone, on the back. "As soon as I saw you, I knew we'd be okay. You have the desideratum, don't you?"
"No, dear." Dee shook her head.
"Then…what?" Daniel asked.
"I am the desideratum." She beamed. "I've been waiting such a long time to be called into service. ~ Lauren Kate

I carry the memories of the ghosts of a place called Vietnam - the people of Vietnam, my fellow soldiers. ~ Tim O'Brien

Tolkien, then, was a philologist before he was a mythologist, and a mythologist, at least in intention, before he ever became a writer of fantasy fiction. His beliefs about language and about mythology were sometimes original and sometimes extreme, but never irrational, and he was able to express them perfectly clearly. In the end he decided to express them not through abstract argument, but by demonstration, and the success of the demonstration has gone a long way to showing that he did often have a point: especially in his belief, which I share, that a taste for philology, for the history of language in all its forms, names and place-names included, is much more widespread in the population at large than educators and arbiters of taste like to think. In his 1959 'Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford' (reprinted in Essays, pp. 224-40), Tolkien concluded that the problem lay not with the philologists nor with those they taught but with what he called 'misologists' – haters of the word. There would be no harm in them if they simply concluded language study was not for them, out of dullness or ignorance. But what he felt, Tolkien said, was:

"grievance that certain professional persons should suppose their dullness and ignorance to be a human norm; and anger when they have sought to impose the limitation of their minds upon younger minds, dissuading those with philological curiosity from their bent, encouraging those without this interest to believe that ~ Tom Shippey

Feminist "theory," as it is grandiloquently called, is simply whatever the women in the movement come up with in post facto justification of their attitudes and emotions. A heavy focus on feminist doctrine seems to me symptomatic of the rationalist fallacy: the assumption that people are motivated primarily by beliefs. If they were, the best way to combat an armed doctrine would indeed be to demonstrate that its beliefs are false. (…) A feminist in the strict and proper sense may be defined as a woman who envies the male role.

By the male role I mean, in the first place, providing, protecting, and guiding rather than nurturing and assisting. This in turn envolves relative independence, action, and competition in the larger impersonal society outside the family, the use of language for communication and analysis (rather than expressiveness or emotional manipulation), and deliberate behavior aiming at objective achievement (rather than the attainment of pleasant subjective states) and guided by practical reasoning (rather than emotional impulse).

Both feminist and nonfeminist women sense that these characteristically male attributes have a natural primacy over their own. I prefer to speak of"primacy" rather than superiority in this context since both sets of traits are necessary to propagate the race. One sign of male primacy is that envy of the female role by men is virtually nonexistent - even, so far as I know, among homosexuals. Normal women are att ~ F. Roger Devlin

And I would have answered:
The knottier the branch, the more twisted and misshapen, the more bent people called it, the harder it is to find it a place among the smooth planks, the more people agree that it should be thrown on the fire, the more useless it is, the more unsuitable for anything except letting one's imagination run riot, the more I covet it, the more I yearn to weigh it in my hand, the more I long to let my whittling knife be guided by its knots and veins ... Yes, bring that piece to me ... ~ Sjon

There's a book called
"A Dictionary of Angels."
No one has opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered
The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.
Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books. ~ Charles Simic

Lord, where shall I find you? Your place is lofty and secret. And where shall I not find you? The whole earth is full of your glory! You are found in our innermost heart, yet you fixed earth's boundaries. You are a strong tower for those who are near and the trust of those who go far. I have sought to come near you; I have called to you with all my heart; and when I went out towards you, I found you coming towards me. ~ Judah Halevi

THIS WOULD BE the first tricky part, they knew. They'd come in on the south side of the fairgrounds, between the swine and sheep barns. There would be cops all over the place - though fewer at night - and they wanted to get to the machinery grounds, where there were always a number of pickups parked. While they had the truck pass, it wouldn't stand a real check. If somebody called in the pass number, it'd show up as lost or stolen. ~ John Sandford

If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Where I lived, it was a cold mining place, a village called Dunston. The only time you saw a Rolls-Royce was when somebody died. ~ Brian Johnson

He told stories to help Two Mothers overcome childish fear. "Now,my son, why do you fear the storm? It is only the warriors of thunder and lightning. When you are tempted to be afraid, remember that God tells the lightning where it may go.Pretend that the noise and the light are from two warriors called Thunder and Lightning. They ride beautiful, swift ponies and carry lightning in their hands.As they race the wind,their ponies' hooves strike the clouds.That is the thunder.When they throw their lightning sticks, it flashes brightly in the sky.When God says 'Enough!' the warriors ride down to the earth, bringing the rain to water their ponies."
"Have you ever seen the ponies, Father?"
"Once, when I was hunting in the Black Hills, I thought I caught a glimpse of them. But before Wind and I could catch them, they rose again into the sky, taking the thunder and lightning with them to another place. ~ Stephanie Grace Whitson

I grew up in a very racially integrated place called Pottstown. It was an agricultural / industrial town which has since become a suburb of Philadelphia. I grew up basically in a black neighborhood. ~ Daryl Hall

Between the empty spaces is a place called forever. ~ Jacqueline Simon Gunn

As Merripen gave the ribbons to a stableman at the mews, Amelia glanced toward the end of the alley.
A pair of street youths crouched near a tiny fire, roasting something on sticks. Amelia did not want to speculate on the nature of the objects being heated. Her attention moved to a group - three men and a woman - illuminated in the uncertain blaze. It appeared two of the men were engaged in fisticuffs. However, they were so inebriated that their contest looked like a performance of dancing bears.
The woman's gown was made of gaudily colored fabric, the bodice gaping to reveal the plump hills of her breasts. She seemed amused by the spectacle of two men battling over her, while a third attempted to break up the fracas.
"'Ere now, my fine jacks," the woman called out in a Cockney accent, "I said I'd take ye both on - no need for a cockfight!"
"Stay back," Merripen murmured.
Pretending not to hear, Amelia drew closer for a better view. It wasn't the sight of the brawl that was so interesting - even their village, peaceful little Primrose Place, had its share of fistfights. All men, no matter what their situation, occasionally succumbed to their lower natures. What attracted Amelia's notice was the third man, the would-be peacemaker, as he darted between the drunken fools and attempted to reason with them.
He was every bit as well dressed as the gentlemen on either side … but it was obvious this man was no gentleman. He was black-haired and swa ~ Lisa Kleypas

Words written fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, can have as much of this power today as ever they had it then to come alive for us and in us and to make us more alive within ourselves. That, I suppose, is the final mystery as well as the final power of words: That not even across great distances of time and space do they ever lose their capacity for becoming incarnate. And when these words tell of virtue and nobility, when they move closer to that truth and gentleness of spirit by which we become fully human, the reading of them is sacramental; and a library is as holy a place as any temple is holy because through the words which are treasured in it the Word itself becomes flesh again and again and dwells among us and within us, full of grace and truth.
Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember, in an essay called The Speaking and Writing of Words. ~ Frederick Buechner

It is for the most part in our skill in manners, and in the observations of time and place and of decency in general, that what is called taste by way of distinction consists; and which is in reality no other than a more refined judgment. ~ Edmund Burke

A piece of rusty pump and a pile of stones,
all that was left of the place he and Marthy had called home. Home. What a big word that was. Lots of attempts made lately to belittle it. Plenty of fun poked at it. Young folks laughed about it,
called it a place to park. Everybody wanted to get some place else, seemed like. They'd find out. They'd understand some day. When they got old, they'd know. They'd want to go home. sometimes in their lives everybody wanted to go home. ~ Bess Streeter Aldrich

This is an example of what Jung called "the regressive restoration of the persona," namely, the re-identification with a former position, role, ideology because it offers a predictable content, security, and script. In the face of the new and uncertain, we often return to the old place, which is why we so often stop growing. (It has become clear to me, for example, that aging itself does not bring wisdom. It often brings regression to childishness, dependency, and bitterness over lost opportunities. ~ James Hollis

I come from south Wales. A place called Aberbargoed. ~ Luke Evans

Rats may scamper across it and remain rats. Birds may fly above it and remain
birds; they may alight and tear and eat and prick up their heads to stare motionless
and beady for a moment before pecking and eating again, and remain birds. But no
man may venture into this space between the lines and remain a man. That is the
difference. No man may enter, either stealthily on his belly alone, or noisily on two
feet racing through glue with a thousand versions of himself firing, falling, on either
side as far as the eye can see, and remain a man. It is possible to become a man
once more if you make it back behind your line again, but you suspend your
humanity for your sojourn in between. That is why the place is called No Man's Land. ~ Ann-Marie MacDonald

As for the other neighbors, they had been on vacation for a while already or had left Friday afternoon for a weekend in the mountains, at the sea. The three of us, too, would have been settled at least a month earlier at some seaside vacation place, as we were every year, if Mario hadn't left. The lech. Empty building, August was like that. I felt like guffawing at every door, sticking out my tongue, thumbing my nose. I didn't give a shit about them. Happy little families, good money from professions, comfort constructed by selling at a high price services that should be free. Like Mario, who allowed us to live well by selling his ideas, his intelligence, the persuasive tones of his voice when he taught. Ilaria called to me from the landing:
"I don't want to stay with the vomit stink. ~ Elena Ferrante

Happiness was a real, actual, achievable possibility. It came when you called. Or no, it never left you in the first place. They ~ Lev Grossman