Cul De Sacs Quotes

#1. I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth. - Author: Sylvia Plath

#2. The human race is homesick for Eden, which only two humans have ever known. We spend our lives chasing peaceful delight, following dead ends or cul-de-sacs in pursuit of home. We know intuitively that we've wandered. What we don't know is how to return. Our lives are largely the story of the often wrong and occasionally right turns we take in our attempts to get home to Happiness with a capital H - God himself. - Author: Randy Alcorn

#3. Sometimes the noes are just as important as the yeses because they represent cul-de-sacs, allowing you to narrow your field of inquiry until you stumble into the heart of the maze. - Author: Sue Grafton

#4. The path of least resistance never gets us where we want to go. Shortcuts always end up being cul-de-sacs. The key to spiritual growth is the willingness to go out of your way for God. You will find God in uncomfortable places at inconvenient times. But if you go out of your way for God, God will go out of His way for you. Crash the party! - Author: Mark Batterson

#5. Paradise is not the place in which you arrive but the journey toward it. Sometimes I think victories must be temporary or incomplete; what kind of humanity would survive paradise? The industrialized world has tried to approximate paradise in its suburbs, with luxe, calme, volupté, cul-de-sacs, cable television and two-car garages, and it has produced a soft ennui that shades over into despair and a decay of the soul suggesting that Paradise is already a gulag. Countless desperate teenagers will tell you so. For paradise does not require of us courage, selflessness, creativity, passion: paradise in all accounts is passive, is sedative, and if you read carefully, soulless. - Author: Rebecca Solnit

#6. I am dropping my keys on the table inside the door before I fully remember. There is no one to hear this news, nowhere to go with the unmade plan, the uncompleted thought. There is no one to agree, disagree, talk back. "I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense," C. S. Lewis wrote after the death of his wife. "It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now there's an impassable frontierpost across it. So many roads once; now so many cul de sacs." We - Author: Joan Didion

#7. Look at all those cul-de-sacs, the streets that turn in on themselves all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people in their paper houses burning the furniture to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking the beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. - Author: John Green

#8. It's a paper town. I mean look at it, Q: look at all those cul-de-sacs, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All those paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenient store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the thing paper-thin and paper-frail. - Author: John Green

#9. think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense," C. S. Lewis wrote after the death of his wife. "It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now there's an impassable fron-tierpost across it. So many roads once; now so many cul de sacs. - Author: Joan Didion

#10. All the cul-de-sacs are closed for Scotland. - Author: Joe Jordan

#11. I came here in a car like everybody else. In a car filled with shit I thought meant something and shortly thereafter tossed on the street: DVDs, soon to be irrelevant, a box of digital and film cameras for a still-latent photography talent, a copy of On the Road that I couldn't finish, and a Swedish-modern lamp from Walmart. It was a long, dark drive from a place so small you couldn't find it on a generous map...Does anyone come to New York clean? I'm afraid not….Yes, I'd come to escape, but from what? The twin pillars of football and church? The low, faded homes on childless cul-de-sacs? Morning of the Gazette and boxed doughnuts? The sedated, sentimental middle of it? It didn't matter. I would never know exactly, for my life, like most, moved only imperceptibly and definitely forward...Let's say I was born in late June of 2006 when I came over the George Washington Bridge at seven a.m. with the sun circulating and dawning, the sky full of sharp corners of light, before the exhaust rose, before the heat gridlocked in, windows unrolled, radio turned up to some impossibly hopeful pop song, open, open, open. - Author: Stephanie Danler

#12. There are no philosophical problems, there is only a suite of interconnected linguistic cul de sacs created by language's inability to reflect the truth. - Author: Victor Pelevin

#13. There's might too in the incomplete. In feeling fractional. A failure to carry out is perhaps no failure at all, but rather a minced metric of splendor. The ongoing. The outlawed. The no-patrol. The act of making loose. Of not doing as you've been told. Of betting on miscalculations and cul-de-sacs. Why force conciliation when, from time to time, long-held deep breaths follow what we consider defeat? Why not want a little mania? The shrill of chance, of what's weird. Of purple hats and hiccups. Endurance is a talent that seldom worries about looking good, and abiding has its virtues even when the tongue dries. The intention shouldn't only be to polish what we start but to acknowledge that beginning again and again can possess the acquisitive thrill of a countdown that never reaches zero. Groping - Author: Durga Chew-Bose

#14. The bright side of life's unpredictability is that it's not over until it's over. As dark as the passages and confusing as the cul-de-sacs that you find yourself in are, progress is nevertheless being made. Something is unfolding. You are becoming. - Author: Marion Winik

#15. The sky was turning the color of a fresh bruise as we pulled into my grandfather's subdivision, a bewildering labyrinth of interlocking cul-de-sacs known collectively as Circle Village. - Author: Ransom Riggs

#16. 'State' can be a word that is a noun or a verb or an adverb - it's kind of why I chose that title. It's not to confound the audience but to keep me from painting myself into a cul-de-sac in the early stages of making a record by having too high concept or having some really strict set of rules I have to adhere to. - Author: Todd Rundgren

#17. According to reliable and never-named sources in the hospital, my situation was critical, then desperate, then critical but stable, then just stable, then uncertain, then (for twelve hours) improving, then uncertain again and then steadily bleaker with each passing day until everyone agreed that there was very little chance of my ever waking up. At that point I woke up, escaping the cul-de-sac into which I'd been written. - Author: Gavin Extence

#18. Everyone is in a tribe, and the sooner we realize we are not each unique, like a snowflake - a special, one-of-a-kind person, just like Mama said - the sooner we will make sense of ourselves and the spiritual cul-de-sac we call home. You are likely not unique, particularly special, - Author: Mark Driscoll

#19. 'Venus in Fur' is very Polanski: you have the knife of 'Rosemary's Baby'; you have Thomas disguised as a woman as in 'The Tenant,' when Vanda puts makeup on him, it's like 'Cul de Sac'; the dress of Tess and other details that are very Polanski. He fell in love with the play because it was so much him. - Author: Emmanuelle Seigner

#20. Ashe was typical of that strata of mankind which conducts its human relationships according to a principle of challenge and response. Where there was softness, he would advance; where he found resistance, retreat. Having himself no particular opinions or tastes he relied upon whatever conformed with those of his companion. He was as ready to drink tea at Fortnum's as beer at the Prospect of Whitby; he would listen to military music in St. James's Park or jazz in Compton Street cellar; his voice would tremble with sympathy when he spoke of Sharpeville, or with indignation at the growth of Britain's colored population. To Leamas this observably passive role was repellent; it brought out the bully in him, so that he would lead the other gently into a position where he was committed, and then himself withdraw, so that Ashe was constantly scampering back from some cul-de-sac into which Leamas had enticed him. - Author: John Le Carre

#21. Human beings have a natural urge to worship that "something greater" which coheres us, but we, in modernity, are living in a kind of spiritual cul-de-sac where our gifts only serve the human community. Unlike the many shamanic cultures that practice dreamwork, ritual, and thanksgiving, Westerners have forgotten what indigenous people understand to be cardinal: that this world owes its life to the unseen. Every hunt and every harvest, every death, and every birth is distinguished by ceremony for that which we cannot see, feeding back that which feeds us. I believe our epidemic alienation is, in good part, the felt negligence of that reciprocity. - Author: Toko-pa Turner

#22. They were like an overconstructed novel, each representative of some cul-de-sac of idiolect and stereotype, missing only a handicapped person – No! At Berkeley we say handi capable person – and a Jew and a Hispanic, and an Asian not of the subcontinent, Louis always said. He had once placed a personals ad on Craigslist to recruit for those positions: Diverse social club seeking to make quota requires the services of East Asian, Jew, Hispanic, and handicapable individuals to round out Multicultural Brady Bunch Troupe. All applicants must be visibly identifiable as members of said group. Reformed Jews and ADHDers need not apply. - Author: T. Geronimo Johnson

#23. Anything that's motivated from fear will ultimately take you down the wrong road and lead you in a cul de sac, anything motivated from purpose, from joy, and from love will take you on an evolutionary path to greater and greater happiness. - Author: Jack Canfield

#24. I like to watch old films. Meet Me in St Louis, Cul-de-Sac and Buffalo 66 are some of my favourites. - Author: Stella Vine

#25. You [film critics] always overstress the value of images. You judge films in the first place by their visual impact instead of looking for content. This is a great disservice to the cinema. It is like judging a novel only by the quality of its prose. I was guilty of the same sin when I first started writing for the cinema ... Now I feel that only the literary mind can help the movies out of that cul de sac into which they have been driven by mere technicians and artificers. - Author: Orson Welles

#26. Politics is a dirty business, a ruse, an ideological cul-de-sac, a vast looter of intellectual and financial resources, a lie that corrupts, a deceiver, a means of unleashing vast evil in the world of the most unexpected and undetected sort and the greatest diverter of human productivity ever concocted by those who do not believe in authentic social and economic progress. - Author: Jeffrey Tucker

#27. Gabby's house was the same model as ours but reversed. Her bedroom was the same bedroom as mine, the dimensions exactly equal. For twelve years, we'd slept between walls erected by the same construction crews and looked out on the same fading cul-de-sac through identically sized windows. Grown under similar conditions, we had become very different, two specimens of girlhood, now diverging. - Author: Karen Thompson Walker

#28. Death is ... a travelling asunder into elemental chaos. And from the elemental chaos all is cast forth again into creation. Therefore death also is but a cul-de-sac, a melting-pot. - Author: D.H. Lawrence

#29. In that house I built
a bonfire that illuminated
the fecund earth around it.
And in that split-level
my friend Tommy, only eight
teeth left in his whole head,
dug a huge illegal grave
to bury his father's packhorse.
He marched that sumpter
into the dark study
and shot its head on the left
so it would fall right.
That night, as if to argue
with the day,
Karen and I made love
on the front lawn of the mansion
one cul-de-sac down,
four feet away
from what would be
a window cracked
open to allow the outside
in. - Author: B.J. Ward

#30. The road simply ended. No cul-de-sac. No sign like the ones they had seen before: "Private Property. No Trespassing." Or "No Motorized Vehicles Beyond This Point." Just road ... then trees. - Author: Robert Liparulo

#31. I love the word Quetzalcoatl.'
'The word!' he repeated.
His eyes laughed at her teasingly all the time.
'What do you think, Mrs Leslie,' cried the pale-faced young Mirabal, in curiously resonant English, with a French accent. 'Don't you think it would be wonderful if the gods came back to Mexico? our own gods?' He sat in intense expectation, his blue eyes fixed on Kate's face, his soup-spoon suspended.
Kate's face was baffled with incomprehension.
'Not those Aztec horrors!' she said.
'The Aztec horrors! The Aztec horrors! Well, perhaps they were not so horrible after all. But if they were, it was because the Aztecs were all tied up. They were in a cul de sac, so they saw nothing but death. Don't you think so?'
'I don't know enough!' said Kate.
'Nobody knows any more. But if you like the word Quetzalcoatl, don't you think it would be wonderful if he came back again? Ah, the names of the gods! Don't you think the names are like seeds, so full of magic, of the unexplored magic? Huitzilopochtli!--how wonderful! And Tlaloc! Ah! I love them! I say them over and over, like they say Mani padma Om! in Tibet. I believe in the fertility of sound. Itzpapalotl--the Obsidian Butterfly! Itzpapalotl! But say it, and you will see it does good to your soul. Itzpapalotl! Tezcatlipocá! They were old when the Spaniards came, they needed the bath of life again. But now, re-bathed in youth, how wonderful they must be! - Author: D.H. Lawrence

#32. Put it this way. As long as Jeyaretnam [Workers' Party leader] stands for what he stands for -- a thoroughly destructive force for me -- we will knock him. There are two ways of playing this. One, a you attack the policies; two, you attack the system. Jeyaretnam was attacking the system, he brought the Chief Justice into it. If I want to fix you, do I need the Chief Justice to fix you? Everybody knows that in my bag I have a hatchet, and a very sharp one. You take me on, I take my hatchet, we meet in the cul-de-sac. That's the way I had to survive in the past. That's the way the communists tackled me. He brought the Chief Justice into the political arena. He brought my only friend in university into our quarrel. How dare he! - Author: Lee Kuan Yew

#33. The French expression 'cul-de-sac' describes what the Baudelaire orphans found when they reached the end of the dark hallway, and like all French expressions, it is most easily understood when you translate each French word into English. The word 'de,' for instance is a very common French world, I would be certain that 'de' means 'of.' The word 'sac' is less common, but I can fairly certain that it means something like 'mysterious circumstances.' And the word 'cul' is such a rare French word that I am forced to guess at its translation, and my guess is that in this case it would mean 'At the end of the dark hallway, the Baudelaire children found an assortment,' so that the expression 'cul-de-sac' here means 'At the end of the dark hallway, the Baudelaire children found an assortment of mysterious circumstances. - Author: Lemony Snicket

#34. Was it that these particular occult streets had been made, then hidden? Their names leaked as traps in an elaborate double-bluff, so that no one could go except those who knew that such
traps were actually destinations? Or were there really no streets there when the traps were set? Perhaps these cul-de-scas were residues, yawned into illicit existence when the atlases were drawn up by liars. - Author: China Mieville

#35. You can argue that it's a different world now than the one when Matthew Shepard was killed, but there is a subtle difference between tolerance and acceptance. It's the distance between moving into the cul-de-sac and having your next door neighbor trust you to keep an eye on her preschool daughter for a few minutes while she runs out to the post office. It's the chasm between being invited to a colleague's wedding with your same-sex partner and being able to slow-dance without the other guests whispering. - Author: Jodi Picoult

#36. I think we all realized that we had really been replicating things that had already been happening. I don't know if we were smart enough to realize that we were in a cul-de-sac, but we were curious. - Author: David Baker

#37. We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little Styrofoam. Maybe. A little Styrofoam. The planet'll be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance. - Author: George Carlin

#38. The cultural problem was 'the fallacy of insignificance', and it was a philosophical form of this fallacy that had somehow landed existentialism in a cul de sac. - Author: Colin Wilson

#39. A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled. - Author: Barnett Cocks

#40. Supposing Catherine Lim was writing about me and not the prime minister ... She would not dare, right? Because my posture, my response has been such that nobody doubts that if you take me on, I will put on knuckle-dusters and catch you in a cul de sac ... Anybody who decides to take me on needs to put on knuckle dusters. If you think you can hurt me more than I can hurt you, try. There is no other way you can govern a Chinese society. - Author: Lee Kuan Yew

#41. He started to do that, started to inform me of everything; the inconsequential, the meaningful; conversations that ended in a cul-de-sac of unanswerable rhetoric. i think it was because I knew everything about him, had read it all - the beautiful, the sordid, the all of his book. I had been his editor for 5 years, and now it seemed, had become his editor away from the printed page. - Author: Sarah Winman

#42. I would hate to think that some people have found themselves in a musical cul-de-sac and have ceased to explore new music, or at least music that is new to them, because they are so glued to the past. - Author: Henry Rollins

#43. ... you couldn't find your way out of a cul-de-sac with a map, a compass and a guide... - Author: Trevor Alan Foris

#44. So it goes for those of us who live in a cul-de-sac, where babies are brought home from the hospital and watched over, where hearts stop and feet slip, where we wonder if there is a hidden road that leads somewhere.
We believe and we doubt. Believing and doubting share the same inevitability, but they are not equal. They cannot lay the same claim on our allegiance. They do not share the same power.
If there are places beyond the cul-de-sac, doubt cannot take us there. - Author: John Ortberg

#45. The reins of our life are in the hands of the future. Man always lives today in the hope of tomorrow. And likewise he will live tomorrow in the hope of the day after, because when tomorrow comes, it will come as today. So he never lives really, he goes on postponing living for the future.
And he will never live as long as he lives on hope for the future. His whole life will pass away unlived and unfulfilled. At the time of his death he will say with great remorse, "All my life I only desired to live, but I could not really live." He had wasted all his todays in the hope of a tomorrow that never came. And on the last day of his life he faces a cul-de-sac beyond which there is no tomorrow, and no hope of any fruits of action. That is the despair of a future-oriented life. - Author: Osho

#46. The Cul-de-Sac ( French for "dead end" ) ... is a situation where you work and work and work and nothing much changes - Author: Seth Godin

#47. My main home is in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a college town in the Ozark Mountains. I live on the highest hill in a quiet cul-de-sac, surrounded by friends. - Author: Ellen Gilchrist

#48. It is sometimes useful to pretend we are deceived, because when we show a deceiving man that we see through his artifices, we only encourage him to increase his deceptions. - Author: Madeleine De Souvre, Marquise De ...

#49. If you wish to be popular in society consent to be taught many things you already know. - Author: Charles Maurice De Talleyrand

#50. Maybe in that earlier phase I was painting the woman in me. Art isn't a wholly masculine occupation, you know. - Author: Willem De Kooning

#51. An now the silences come in a single lifetime, in a single year ... when species die, leaving a silent space in the world song that can never be filled. - Author: Charles De Lint

#52. We may go to the moon, but that' s not very far. The greatest distance we have to cover still lies within us. - Author: Charles De Gaulle

#53. I believe that happiness consists in having a destiny in keeping with our abilities. Our desires are things of the moment, often harmful even to ourselves; but our abilities are permanent, and their demands never cease. - Author: Madame De Stael

#54. Ones reputation is like a shadow, it is gigantic when it precedes you, and a pigmy in proportion when it follows. - Author: Charles Maurice De Talleyrand

#55. I don't think more concentration is required for Robert De Niro to do what he does as for Jim Carrey to do what he does. - Author: Eddie Murphy

#56. Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others. - Author: Marquis De Sade

#57. What ease our seemingly entrenched lives might be altered were we simply to walk down a corridor and onto a craft that in a few hours would land us in a place of which we had no memories and where no one knew our name. - Author: Alain De Botton

#58. No road is to long for him who advances slowly and does not hurry and no attainment is beyond his reach who equips himself with patience to achieve it - Author: Jean De La Bruyere

#59. A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas. - Author: Ferdinand De Saussure