But Of It Quotes

That means laying out a vision of the world that competes directly with the one on harrowing display at the Heartland conference and in so many other parts of our culture, one that resonates with the majority of people on the planet because it is true: That we are not apart from nature but of it. That acting collectively for a greater good is not suspect, and that such common projects of mutual aid are responsible for our species' greatest accomplishments. That greed must be disciplined and tempered by both rule and example. That poverty amidst plenty is unconscionable. ~ Naomi Klein

There are so many things we can have in this world, but only 10 percent of it changes the condition of someone's heart. ~ Shannon L. Alder

We who are gathered here may represent a particular delete, not of money and power, but of concern for the earth for the earth's sake. ~ Ansel Adams

Blues became rock, rock became soul, and all of it was colorblind. ~ Shawn Amos

Because we should do things we're afraid of. It makes it easier every time we do it. ~ Jeff Zentner

It is what writers do, imagine and feel the pain of others, sometimes at the expense of feeling their own. Here, then, in these pages is mine, the fear of death, of loss, of unexpressed love. Here is the truth told in a story. And in the telling of it perhaps I have found some way to have courage, to believe. ~ Niall Williams

Why is it that we are so busy with the future? It is not our province; and is there not a criminal interference with Him to whom it belongs, in our feverish, anxious attempts to dispose of it, and in filling it up with shadows of good and evil shaped by our own wild imaginations? To do God's will as fast as it is made known to us, to inquire hourly
I had almost said each moment
what He requires of us, and to leave ourselves, our friends, and every interest at His control, with a cheerful trust that the path which He marks out leads to our perfection and to Himself,
this is at once our duty and happiness; and why will we not walk in the plain, simple way? ~ William Ellery Channing

The politician is the creature of the public sentiment
never goes ahead of it because he depends on it ... ~ Lucy Stone

I've been amazed by the numbers that have come out to see the torch relay, so being a part of it is lovely. ~ Bryn Terfel

Act as if what you intend to manifest in life is already a reality. Eliminate thoughts of conditions, limitations, or the possibility of it not manifesting. If left undisturbed in your mind and in the mind of intention simultaneously, it will germinate in the physical world. ~ Wayne Dyer

Now, what is food? Why is food so important? Why do human beings need so much of it - three times a day, every day, year after year? Why do they live on food instead of on something else? Wouldn't it be better if human beings didn't need food at all? Wouldn't it be better if they could live on air, for instance? Get stronger and bigger by breathing sea air, or the air of the mountains, or the forests, or the meadows, or the vineyards and orchards, the wheat fields, the gardens all over the world? Wouldn't that be a better way for men to stay alive?
(spoken by 10-year-old Aram Saroyan) ~ William, Saroyan

It struck at the root of intentions, not at the flower.
And both root and the flower were important to him, one having to do with what one meant to do ... and the other, most fearsome, with the outcome of it. ~ C.J. Cherryh

Graved inside of it, "Italy". ~ Robert Browning

Some people are magic, and others are just the illusion of it. ~ Beau Taplin

I was looking at my past self through the one-way interrogation window of my current self, and it caused me to experience the strange sadness that accompanies helplessness. If only I could have told teenage Elizabeth that none of it actually mattered. It all seemed to matter so much at the time. ~ Penny Reid

It's not enough to identify the Superobjective intellectually; you have to justify it, to find the emotional drive behind it. You need your own specific interpretation of the superobjective so that every time you think of it, it makes you emotional and drives you into action. ~ Larry Moss

However I dress it up, I was a spy and I am not proud of it. ~ Christine Keeler

He tells her things he's never told anyone. About the man who broke his heart in such a long, drawn out process that he couldn't discern hurt from love and how whenever he tries to sort out how it feels now, long after the end of it the feeling is just a void. ~ Erin Morgenstern

I'm talking about an intense, private bonding between a dominant personality and a submissive one. Between two people who have chosen to make a loving gift to one another of themselves...not just of their bodies, but of the parts of themselves that they hold back from the rest of the world. The control dynamic in a relationship like that may look uneven, but the power is really quite...balanced ~ Indigo Wren

She told me that she meant to be grateful for all things. I stared and repeated, "I am". She knows me well enough to know that I just wasn't getting it, and I know she somehow knew that I needed to hear this. So, very patiently she said, "I mean everything, the good, the bad, your thoughts, your moods, mean people, all of it". ~ Rhiannon Smith

Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us. If this freedom be abused, it is an offense against God, not against man:To God, therefore, not to man, must an account of it be rendered. ~ James Madison

When I was an activist in the 1980s, ninety-eight percent of my time was spent stuffing envelopes and writing addresses on them. The remaining two percent was the time we spent figuring out what to put in the envelopes. Today, we get those envelopes and stamps and address books for free. This is so fantastically, hugely different and weird that we haven't even begun to feel the first tendrils of it. ~ Cory Doctorow

A mirror does not develop because an historical pageant passes in front of it. It only develops when it gets a fresh coat of quicksilver in other words, when it acquires new sensitiveness; and the novel's success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its subject matter. ~ E. M. Forster

When I began work on my first book, 'The River of Doubt,' which tells the story of Theodore Roosevelt's 1914 descent of an unmapped river in the Amazon rainforest, I thought of it as a tale of adventure, exploration and extraordinary courage. ~ Candice Millard

To be happy, you must fancy that everything you have is a gift, and you the chosen, though you worked your tail off for every bit of it. ~ Robert Breault

I got mixed up with some oddness in my youth, and the long and short of it is that I can't shuffle off this mortal coil until I have read the ten most boring classics. ~ Jasper Fforde

Ye cannae fix injustice-with more of it. ~ Douglas Bond

Death is a strange thing. People live their whole lives as if it does not exist, and yet it's often one of the great motivations for the living. Some of us, in time, become so conscious of it that we live harder, more obstinately, with more fury. Some need its constant presence to even be aware of its antithesis. Others become so preoccupied with it that they go into the waiting room long before it has announced its arrival. We fear it, yet most of us fear more than anything that it may take someone other than ourselves. For the greatest fear of death is always that it will pass us by. And leave us there alone. ~ Fredrik Backman

Trying to describe the process of becoming an alcoholic is like trying to describe air. It's too big and mysterious and pervasive to be defined. Alcohol is everywhere in your life, omnipresent, and you're both aware and unaware of it almost all the time, all you know is you'd die without it, and there is no simple reason why this happens, no single moment, no physiological event that pushes a heavy drinker across a concrete line into alcoholism. It's a slow, gradual, insidious, elusive becoming. ~ Caroline Knapp

Thinking remembering how his uncle had said that all man had was time, all that stood between him and the death he feared and abhorred was time yet he spent half of it inventing ways of getting the other half past: ~ William Faulkner

Another flaw of the system is the fact that various danger fronts often require very different firmaments. As a logical superstructure is built upon each, there follow clashes of incommensurable modes of feeling and thought. Then despair can enter through the rifts. In such cases, a person may be obsessed with destructive joy, dislodging the whole artificial apparatus of his life and starting with rapturous horror to make a clean sweep of it. The horror stems from the loss of all sheltering values, the rapture from his by now ruthless identification and harmony with our nature's deepest secret, the biological unsoundness, the enduring disposition for doom. ~ Peter Wessel Zapffe

One Zen master said, The whole universe is my true personality. This is a very wonderful saying ... If you want to see what you truly are, open the window, and everything you see is in fact the expression of your inner reality. Can you embrace all of it? ~ Adyashanti

The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if they had never been. There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought
to call it by a prouder name than it deserved
had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until
you know the little tug
the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. ~ Virginia Woolf

Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed, for everybody thinks he is so well supplied with it that even those most difficult to please in all other matters never desire more of it than they already possess. ~ Rene Descartes

Jai pointed at the car. "Get in the car. I'm pissed at you for getting out of it in the first place."
Outrage lit through her. "Hey, I'm a big girl, I can make my own decisions."
"Get in the car, Ari!" Charlie yelled now, his own eyes glittering with anger.
Her mouth fell open, her cheeks blazing with indignation as the two men in her life stared at her, their expressions implacable. She made a 'pfft' sound and whirled around, stomping like a child towards the car.
"Too much testosterone, infuriating cavemen, need someone else to boss around, stupid jerks ... " she kept muttering insults under her breath until Charlie and Jai had cleared the road. ~ Samantha Young

It's amazing when you come to think of it how the human spirit seems to blossom in the shadow of the abattoir! ~ Malcolm Lowry

Minstrelsy makes the audience comfortable. Now that I am on the other side of it, and proud of my blackness, they wouldn't know what to do with me. People don't know what to do with you if you are not trying to assimilate. ~ Gabrielle Union