August Pullman Quotes

He is the greatest,' " he finally continued, " 'whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.' Without further ado, this year I am very proud to award the Henry Ward Beecher medal to the student whose quiet strength has carried up the most hearts. "So will August Pullman please come up here to receive this award? ~ R.J. Palacio

And I wondered how it would feel to be in Heaven and not have my face matter anymore. Just like how it never, ever mattered to Daisy. ~ R.J. Palacio

Maybe art itself was a kind of voodoo, possessing you, giving you supernatural power, letting you see in the dark. ~ Philip Pullman

As soon as white folks say a play's good, the theater is jammed with blacks and whites. ~ August Wilson

Religion is, as I say, something universal and something human, and something impossible to eradicate, nor would I want to eradicate it. I am a religious person, although I am not a believer.

Religion is at its best when it is a long way from political power. The founder of the Christian religion -- or, the founders of the Christian religion, Jesus and St. Paul -- were both clear about this. "Blessed are the meek." "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." St. Paul is perfectly clear that the highest Christian virtue is charity, not patriotism, not martial valor, not exalting your class, your group, your race above others, but charity. That's the highest virtue. When religion remembers that and acts accordingly, it does good.

But religion, at various points in human history, notably the history of western Europe and the history of some parts of the Middle East more recently, has acquired political power, and put its hands on the levers of social authority. It decides who shall live and who shall die. It decides how we shall dress, what we shall be allowed to read, whether we shall go to war, and so on. When religion acquires that power, it goes bad very rapidly. ~ Philip Pullman

You know something has really stuck in Tim's head when he's drawn what the character looks like. Weird Girl and Elsa actually switched places, at one point. I may be mis-remembering it, but the original design for Weird Girl was actually Elsa, but then it became Winona Ryder's character, and the new Weird Girl was just fantastic with those giant wide eyes. ~ John August

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book. In adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness ... The present-day would-be George Eliots take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They're embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them. We all need stories, but children are more frank about it. ~ Philip Pullman

I need you, your boat and your equipment for a month, maybe two. I can't dive alone because I just don't know the waters well enough to risk it, and I don't have the time to waste. I have to be back in Connecticut by the end of August."
"To get more chalk dust under your fingernails."
She sat back slowly. "You have no right to criticize my profession."
"I'm sure the chalk's very exclusive at Yale," Ky commented. ~ Nora Roberts

He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have led to something; and found consolation in trifles so slight compared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes. ~ Virginia Woolf

Summoning artists to participate In the august occasions of the state Seems something artists ought to celebrate. Today is for my cause a day of days. ~ Robert Frost

Unlike proportionality, progression provides no principle which tells us what the relative burden of different persons ought to be the argument based on the presumed justice of progression provides no limitation, as has often been admitted by its supporters, before all incomes above a certain figure are confiscated, and those below left untaxed. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

Epic, epic love is not about having someone. It's about being willing to give them up. It's sacrifice. It's my mom's theater tickets stuffed down at the bottom of her jewelry box. It's Noah and August. It's my sister and Annabelle. It's Jordan and his mom, the truth he reserves to protect her. And see, that's the thing I didn't understand. The thing no one tells you. That just because you find love doesn't mean it's yours to keep. Love never belongs to you. It belongs to the universe. ~ Rebecca Serle

August was almost over. The first cool touch of autumn moved slowly through the town and there was a softening and the first gradual burning fever of color in every tree, a faint flush and coloring in the hills, and the color of lions in the wheat fields. Now the pattern of days was familiar and repeated like a penman beautifully inscribing again and again, in practice, a series of it's and w's and m's, day after day the line repeated in delicate rills. ~ Ray Bradbury

Nothing distinguishes more clearly conditions in a free country from those in a country under arbitrary government than the observance in the former of the great principles known as the Rule of Law. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

All stories teach, whether the storyteller intends them to or not. They teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by. They teach it much more effectively than moral precepts and instructions. ~ Philip Pullman

And why does man weep when he is sad? I asked at last - Because the glass in the eyes must be washed now and then, so that we can see clearly, said the child. ~ August Strindberg

In man, the mechanical breathing is essential to life, and it is one of the old tests for death to see whether these movements have ceased completely. ~ August Krogh

Maybe the school was the problem, August thought. Maybe everybody wants a science lesson if they're sitting in the middle of one of the greatest geothermal wonders of the world. Maybe we've removed all the relevance from the information we teach kids so they have no idea why they should care. Maybe it's not the kids' fault. Maybe we made the first mistake. ~ Catherine Ryan Hyde

One sort of optional thing you might do is to realize there are six seasons instead of four. The poetry of four seasons is all wrong for this part of the planet, and this may explain why we are so depressed so much of the time. I mean, Spring doesn't feel like Spring a lot of the time, and November is all wrong for Fall and so on. Here is the truth about the seasons: Spring is May and June! What could be springier than May and June? Summer is July and August. Really hot, right? Autumn is September and October. See the pumpkins? Smell those burning leaves. Next comes the season called "Locking." That is when Nature shuts everything down. November and December aren't Winter. They're Locking. Next comes Winter, January and February. Boy! Are they ever cold! What comes next? Not Spring. Unlocking comes next. What else could April be? ~ Kurt Vonnegut

What is he? A friend or an enemy? The alethiometer answered: He is a murderer. ~ Philip Pullman

Aunt Esther: You think you supposed to know everything. Life is a mystery. Don't you know life is a mystery? I see you still trying to figure it out. It ain't all for you to know. It's all an adventure. That's all life is. But you got to trust that adventure. ~ August Wilson

I do think that this represents a kind of shift towards myth, a recovery of myth, largely through the popularity of writers like Philip Pullman. Somehow myths have returned as a serious subject. It used to be scorned ... really scorned. It was part of a nursery tradition, and it was also rather tainted - but not in an immovable way - by the association with right-wing ideologies after the World Wars. ~ Marina Warner

Tell them stories. ~ Philip Pullman

She had suddenly realized something about people like this -- whether they were businessmen, policemen, civil servants, hotel proprietors, landlords, or what: it was that they didn't mean what they said. They never told the truth. What they seemed to be doing -- catching criminals, buying and selling, banking, administering, making things -- wasn't the real business of their lives at all. It was a cover. They were only playing at it, and they didn't even do it well, because they didn't believe in it. The real, secret business of their lives lay in keeping power for people like themselves. That was all they really cared about, and they were desperately serious about it, because the thought of losing the little power they had was terrifying to them: and they didn't mind what damage they did to truth or honesty or justice in the struggle to hang on to it. ~ Philip Pullman

After modernism, things changed. Indeed, modernism sometimes seems to me like an equivalent of the Fall. Remember, the first thing Adam and Eve did when they ate the fruit was to discover that they had no clothes on. They were embarrassed. Embarrassment was the first consequence of the Fall. And embarrassment was the first literary consequence of this modernist discovery of the surface. Am I telling a story? Oh my God, this is terrible. I must stop telling a story and focus on the minute gradations of consciousness as they filter through somebody's ... ~ Philip Pullman

Someone who was talking about
enemies, is afraid of showing to be
it's own enemy.

P. Hermans
August 19, 2016 ~ Petra Hermans

[Addams's] idea was that the conflict between Pullman and his workers was analogous to the conflict between King Lear and his daughter Cordelia in Shakespeare's play: an old set of values, predicated on individualism and paternalism, had run up against a new set of values, predicated on mutuality and self-determination. ~ Louis Menand

If there is a war to be fought, we don't consider cost one of the factors in deciding whether or not to fight. ~ Philip Pullman

What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting. ~ August Wilhelm Von Schlegel

All you need in the world is love and laughter. That's all anybody needs. To have love in one hand and laughter in the other. ~ August Wilson

We were perfect, a little messy and a lot wild. There were no rules for August and me. ~ Kelly Siskind

Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow. ~ Joan Didion

O stars, isn't it from you that the lover's desire for the face of his beloved arises? Doesn't his secret insight into her pure features come from the pure constellations? - from "The Third Elegy" by Rainer Maria Rilke Fine ~ Philip Pullman

Her last conscious thought was disgust at life; her senses had lied to her. The world was not made of energy and delight but of foulness, betrayal, and lassitude. Living was hateful, and death was no better, and from end to end of the universe this was the first and last and only truth. ~ Philip Pullman

There's another difference between us, Mr. Scoresby. A witch would no sooner give up flying than give up breathing. To fly is to be perfectly ourselves. ~ Philip Pullman