Cutting For Stone Memorable Quotes

My father played the melodion
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east;
And they danced to his music.
Across the wild bogs his melodion called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.
Outside in the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.
A water-hen screeched in the bog,
Mass-going feet
Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,
Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.
My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.
Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy's hanging hill,
I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon - the Three Wise Kings.
An old man passing said:
"Can't he make it talk" -
The melodion, I hid in the doorway
And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.
I nicked six nicks on the door-post
With my penknife's big blade -
There was a little one for cutting tobacco.
And I was six Christmases of age.
My father played the melodion,
My mother milked the cows,
And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned
On the Virgin Mary's blouse ~ Patrick Kavanagh

The stone in quarries is found to be of different and unlike qualities. In some it is soft ... in others it is medium ... in still others it is hard as in lava quarries. There are also numerous other kinds: for instance, in Campania , red and black tufas ; in Umbria , Picenum, and Venetia , white tufa which can be cut with a toothed saw like wood. ~ Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

During one memorable meeting, a female employee pointedly asked Bezos when Amazon was going to establish a better work-life balance. He didn't take that well. "The reason we are here is to get stuff done, that is the top priority," he answered bluntly. "That is the DNA of Amazon. If you can't excel and put everything into it, this might not be the place for you. ~ Brad Stone

And here, over the portals of my fort, I shall cut in the stone the word which is to be my beacon and my banner. The word which will not die should we all perish in battle. The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory.
The sacred word:
EGO ~ Ayn Rand

Because thou hast plundered many nations, all the remnant of the peoples shall plunder thee, because of men's blood, and for the violence done to the land, to the city and to all that dwell therein. 9 Woe to him that getteth an evil gain for his house, that he may set his nest on high, that he may be delivered from the hand of evil! 10 Thou hast devised shame to thy house, by cutting off many peoples, and hast sinned against thy soul. 11 For the stone shall cry out of the wall, and the beam out of the ~ Anonymous

The reader, knowing nothing about the 'dark continent,' filled in the blanks. Pictured Stone in a tent, kerosene lamp held up by a Hottentot providing the only light, elephants stampeding outside while the good doctor recited Cicero and excised part of himself as blithely as if he were cutting for stone on the body of another. ~ Abraham Verghese

Of course he burst through the door. It cracked against the massive slabs that formed the stone walls, sending splinters flying, and I didn't have to try very hard for the startled jump as Lord Pecus strode into the room.
I gave a maidenly shriek, and in a moment of truly inspired acting, snatched my dressing gown from the bed to my chest and assumed pose #35, Maidenly Horror. Hands clasped below the breasts and clutching my dressing gown as if to protect girlish modesty, eyes wide- maybe finishing school had been useful for something after all. I thought I might have gone too far, but Lord Pecus, who at my shriek had stopped two strides into the room with a look of horror on his mask, hastily turned his face to the wall. He tried to utter a disjointed apology but I threw one of the pot-pourri bowls at him, and it smashed satisfyingly on the wall, cutting off the attempt. ~ W.R. Gingell

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to your new home.' He gestured to the stone walls of the cavern that surrounded them. 'Your lives as you once knew them are over,' he continued. 'You have been selected, all of you, the worst, the most cunning, the most mischievous minds from around the world . . . selected to become part of an institution like no other. You have all exhibited certain unique abilities, abilities that set you apart from the mediocrity of the teeming masses and which mark you out as the leaders of tomorrow. Here, in this place, you will be furnished with the knowledge and experience to best exploit your own natural abilities, to hone your craft to a cutting edge.'

He paused and slowly surveyed the pale, wide-eyed faces before him.

'Each of you has within you a rare quality, a gift if you will, a special talent for the supremely villainous. Society would have us believe that this is an undesirable characteristic, something that should be subdued, controlled, destroyed. But not here . . . no, here we want to see you blossom into all that you can be, to see your innate wickedness flourish, to make you the very worst that you can be.'

He stepped out from behind the lectern and walked to the edge of the raised platform. As he loomed over them he seemed to grow taller and some of those at the front of the group edged backwards nervously.

'For today all of you have the unique honour and privilege of becoming the newest students ~ Mark Walden

The visionary is destined to walk in solitude.
If the vision is truly original;
If the vision is truly unprecedented;
Then by its very nature, only the visionary is privy to its wonders.
It is the burden of a single soul.
Alone.
For even the visionary must peel back, chisel and ax away at the status quo to eventually reveal for all humanity what is yet unseen and unheard of.
The visionary is the sculptor releasing the vision from the block of stone that is convention. ~ A.E. Samaan

Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted ~ Abraham Verghese

Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
From Cutting for Stone ~ Abraham Verghese

Everybody has the blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith. In music, especially this broad category called jazz, there is a stepping-stone to all of these. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

My husband and I have just really been on this journey to live cleaner and eat healthier and allow our children to see us doing that so that's the kind of lifestyle they'll want for themselves. Just a healthier, aware, conscious life. Now we buy organic, we go to the farmers markets. We really try to involve the kids in cutting up the vegetables, cleaning them, preparing the meals, just making it fun. ~ Ali Landry

Abandoned.
The word alone sends shudders down a sensitive spine, troubling the thoughts of pained souls as their hurt swells in ripples. It is a sentence of undesired solitude often pronounced on the innocent, the trusting - administered without warning or satisfactory cause.
One day the moon is yours, or so you believe. The next, his countenance transforms from Jekyll to Hyde with no intention of ever turning back, and you are left trampled upon in a deserted street, concealed by dirty fog that squelches all illumination or any hope for future rays of light.
It is the worst of mysteries why a beast considered noble would forsake his duty, exhibiting a heart of stone. And all who once looked on him, now turn down their eyes and suffer, beguiled.
Some poisons have no antidote, but are slow, silent, torturous ends that curl up the broken body swept into a cold, dark corner. There she is left to drown in her tears - a dying heart.
Abandoned. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

It kind of freaked me out. Because I don't know if I'm ready for that kind of thing yet." Or maybe the problem was that I wasn't prepared for how ready I was…
"Ready for-?" He broke off, and then frowned as if it had all become clear. "Wait." He dropped his arms from around my waist and took a step away from me. "You think I spent the night wit you?"
"Didn't you?" I blinked back at him. "There's only the one bed. And…well, you were in it when I woke up."
Thunder boomed overhead. It wasn't as loud as the violent cracks that had occurred in my dream. Although the rumbles were long enough-and intense enough-that the silverware on the table began to make an eerie tinkling sound.
And my bird, who'd been calmly cleaning herself on the back of my chair, suddenly took off, seeing shelter on the highest bookshelf against the far wall.
I realized I'd just insulted my host, and no joke was going to get me out of it this time.
"For your information, Pierce," John said, his tone almost disturbingly calm-but his eyes flashed the same shade as the stone around my neck, which had gone the color of the metal studs at his wrists-"I spent most of last night on the couch. Until one point early this morning, when I heard you call my name. You were crying in your sleep."
The salt water I'd tasted on my lips. Not due to rain from a violent hurricane, but from the tears I'd shed, watching him die in front of me.
"Oh," I said uncomfortably. "John, I'm so-"
Meg Cabot

I sketch in a way that people can nearly do the dresses without me coming in for a fitting. Every single detail, every proportion, every cut
everything. ~ Karl Lagerfeld

A hypocrite is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation. ~ Adlai E. Stevenson II

Being a stand-up comic, this isn't a stepping-stone for me; it's what I do, and this is what I'm always going to do. And even if I do a TV show, the only reasons to do a TV show is to get more people to know me to come out to my stand-up shows. ~ Bill Burr

Cut through the ridicule and search for factual information in most of the skeptical commentary and one is usually left with nothing. This is not surprising. After all, how can one rationally object to a call for scientific examination of evidence? Be skeptical of the skeptics. ~ Bernard Haisch

New York City is finished," he said. "They can't keep order there, and you can't have business without order. It'll take a hundred years to sort things out and get it all going again."
"What do you hear of the U.S. government? I said. "We don't have electricity an hour a month anymore and there's nothing on the air but the preachers anyway."
"Well, I hear that this Harvey Albright pretends to be running things out of Minneapolis now. It was Chicago, but that may have gone by the boards. Congress hasn't met since twelve twenty-one." Ricketts said, using a common shorthand for the destruction of Washington a few days before Christmas some years back. "We're still fighting skirmishes with Mexico. The Everglades are drowning. Trade is becoming next to impossible, from everything I can tell, and business here is drying up. It all seems like a bad dream. The future sure isn't what it used to be, is it?"
"We believe in the future, sir. Only it's not like the world we've left behind," Joseph said.
"How's that?"
"We're building our own New Jerusalem up the river. it's a world made by hand, now, one stone at a time, one board at a time, one hope at a time, one soul at a time. . . ~ James Howard Kunstler

And it took cutting back the prettiest parts of myself to finally realize that this shell does not define me. For I am so much more than flesh and bone that case the beautiful tragedies of my heart and mind. ~ Becca Lee

I'm very cute, you know. And I'm not sure you've heard, but I have five thousand pounds a year. I've taken a place in Boulder for the season. Miss Dashwood and her sister will vouch for my parentage. ~ Danika Stone

I've wanted to be an actor since I was 6 years old. I was literally picked off the streets of Paris ... while I was modeling there. I was asked to audition for Oliver Stone's 'Alexander.' I didn't get the part, but that led to commercials and roles in South Africa. ~ Tanit Phoenix

Yesterday, when I took the stage for the sixth time, I read a poem about unreliable friends, people you love and feel bonded to but can never truly trust. It was about feeling alone and vulnerable, and never being able to fully let your guard down. ~ Tamara Ireland Stone

She tried to think about what lay ahead, but soon gave up. 'Words turn into stone,' Nimit had told her. She settled deep into her seat and closed her eyes. All at once the image came to her of the sky she had seen while swimming on her back. And Erroll Garner's 'I'll Remember April.' Let me sleep, she thought. Just let me sleep. And wait for the dream to come. ~ Haruki Murakami

Of course his name would be Dominic. It meant "gift from God." AKA a life-support system for an ego. Still, that didn't mean he wasn't fun to stare at. Dominic Rossi looked like a dream, the kind of dream no woman in her right mind would want to wake from.
She had always been susceptible to male beauty, ever since the age of ten, when her mother had taken her to see Michelangelo's David in Florence. She recalled staring at that huge stone behemoth, all lithe muscles and gorgeous symmetry, indifferent about his nudity, his member inspiring a dozen questions her mother brushed aside. ~ Susan Wiggs

It's not unusual for a would-be entrepreneur to get turned down half a dozen times before finding a willing investor - yet in most companies, it takes only one 'nyet' to kill a project stone dead. ~ Gary Hamel

If she'd thought cutting ties with Galen would help her get on with her life, Harper knew that after today, she'd never, ever get him out of her system. He was a drug she couldn't kick, an addiction she was willing to die for. And as he drew her clit into his mouth and sucked gently, Harper reasoned that there were much, much worse ways to die. ~ Mandy Baxter

There are movies that I've made where I thought I was going to be good, but when it was cut it together it wasn't. And there are a lot of movies that, for one reason or another, just don't become popular. So to me it's always been a little bit of a roll of the dice. That's the way it goes. ~ Christopher Walken

We're not allowed in the cutting room - and that's extraordinary. So, when a director is asking for certain nuances and colours and we feel that they're phoney, but we do it because the director asks for it, that's the one that they pick in the cutting room. And I contend that when you see a movie with bad acting, don't blame the actor ... blame those guys in the cutting room because they like that take. ~ Dustin Hoffman

Thinking about something is like picking up a stone when taking a walk, either while skipping rocks on the beach, for example, or looking for a way to shatter the glass doors of a museum. When you think about something, it adds a bit of weight to your walk, and as you think about more and more things you are liable to feel heavier and heavier, until you are so burdened you cannot take any further steps, and can only sit and stare at the gentle movements of the ocean waves or security guards, thinking too hard bout too many things to do anything else. ~ Lemony Snicket

Your father lies beneath a stone,' old Aedwen mumbles, dozing at her wheel, and Godric thinks how it's a stone as well they're all beneath. The stone is need and hurt and gall and tongue-tied longing, for that's the stone that kinship always bears, yet the loss of it would press more grievous still. ~ Frederick Buechner

For a moment Ethan simply stares. Before him is the monster of his nightmares: his sister's murderer, the beast who robbed him of his greatest love. How easy, how fulfilling would it be to take Marduk's life? But the arrow in Ethan's fingers slips to the ground.
"No. even revenge is too great an honor for you."
As the night falls and brings an end to this long day of darkness, Marduk inhales his last staggered breath and his body turns to stone. ~ Marianne Curley

[Donald] Trump and all the Republicans believe in the theory of trickle down economics which is a theory discredited even by the author himself David Stockton. The theory suggests that if we take care of the people at the top, if we cut taxes for the wealthy, if we make sure they are doing really well, then the investments that they make in the economy and the jobs that will create, will make everything grow and it will have a trickle down effect on the rest of us. ~ Debbie Wasserman Schultz

Over the slow pass of winters and summers, Amanda had grown to understand the cycles that made up small-town life. She knew that fewer tourists meant easier work for the staff, but fewer tips for the servers, and less chance of picking up extra hours. A busy summer kept everyone hopping and the tills full, but it also shifted the steady pace of life, tugging it into a frenetic rate. ~ Danika Stone

We must endure, Alyosha. That was the only thing she could say in response to my accounts of the ugliness and dreariness of life, of the suffering of the people - of everything against which I protested so vehemently. I was not made for endurance, and if occasionally I exhibited this virtue of cattle, wood, and stone, I did so only to test myself, to try my strength and my stability. Sometimes young people, in the foolishness of immaturity, or in envy of the strength of their elders, strive, even successfully, to lift weights that overtax their bones and muscles; in their vanity they attempt to cross themselves with two-pood weights, like mature athletes. I too did this, in the literal and figurative sense, physically and spiritually, and only good fortune kept me from injuring myself fatally or crippling myself for life.
For nothing cripples a person so dreadfully as endurance, as a humble submission to the forces of circumstance. ~ Maxim Gorky

It is important to have a reliable and substantive publication such as World Screen available as a source for information. The magazine's reporting is always on the cutting edge of the global television business. ~ Jeffrey Bewkes

We kept our fingers crossed and eagerly scanned the newspapers and magazines for news of an engagement between Diana and Charles.
Then, late in the morning of February 24, I answered the telephone in my bedroom and heard the voice of a friend in London… "Mary, it's Dena. Your girl made it!" I knew she meant that Diana's engagement to Prince Charles had just been announced. I gave a big shout and literally jumped for joy, banging my head on the low dormer ceiling. I couldn't have been prouder of Diana if I'd been her mother. I was so happy for her I could have burst! I knew how desperately she had wished for this outcome. The past fall, she had told me that she would "simply die" if the romance didn't work out. How wonderful that her dream had come true.
Almost immediately, a mischievous picture popped into my mind of the future and royal Diana, scheduled for an official day of handshaking, ribbon cutting, or tree planting and wishing she could have a friend call to cancel those tedious engagements. As Princess of Wales, she would not be able to cancel on short notice, if at all, as she had when she was baby-sitting for me. I wondered how the lively, spontaneous, and very young Diana would adjust to her official duties. I felt a bit sorry for her as I dimly realized how rigid and structured her new life might be. ~ Mary Robertson

In fact, among the people I met, the term soviet served essentially as a synonym for 'fucked up'. I'd been in the country about three days when a car that was sent to take me to an interview failed to start. After several attempts to get it going, the driver turned to me, smiled wearily and explained: 'Soviet car'. By that time, that was all the explanation I needed. ~ Anthony DeCurtis

The third gentleman now stepped forth. A mighty man at cutting and drying, he was; a government officer; in his way (and in most other people's too), a professed pugilist; always in training, always with a system to force down the general throat like a bolus, always to be heard of at the bar of his little Public-office, ready to fight all England. To continue in fistic phraseology, he had a genius for coming up to the scratch, wherever and whatever it was, and proving himself an ugly customer. He would go in and damage any subject whatever with his right, follow up with his left, stop, exchange, counter, bore his opponent (he always fought All England) to the ropes, and fall upon him neatly. He was certain to knock the wind out of common sense, and render that unlucky adversary deaf to the call of time. And he had it in charge from high authority to bring about the great public-office Millennium, when Commissioners should reign upon earth. 'Very ~ Charles Dickens

Some say Christianity is just a crutch. But let's turn the question on its edge for a moment. Is atheism an emotional crutch, wishful thinking? The ax cuts both ways. Perhaps atheists are rejecting God because they've had a bad relationship with their father. Instead of inventing God, have atheists invented non-God? Have they invented atheism to escape some of the frightening implications of God's existence? Think about it. ~ Greg Koukl

Turn over that stone" - she pointed to a flint nearby - "and you will find a charlatan who will dazzle you with the favorable conjunction of Mercury and Venus, flatter your future, and sell you colored water for a gold piece. I can't be bothered with it. From me you get the actuality. ~ Ariana Franklin

Don't tell me that [broken heartstrings] hurt less than a broken bone, that an ingrown life is something surgeons can cut away, that there's no way for it to metastasize - it does. ~ Shane Koyczan

If Bush had gone into Iraq for cynical reasons, we could cut our losses now. What's frightening is that he did it for ideological reasons, and therefore he's not going to get out. So it isn't ultimately about oil or about Israel, it's about a belief. ~ Seymour Hersh

The Singapore Media Festival brings together the most important Film and TV events in Singapore under one umbrella. With media convergence, I foresee that the SMF will encompass even more content formats in future, and will keep Singapore on the cutting-edge of media development. I am confident the SMF will be a signature media event for Singapore and the world for many years to come. ~ Calvin Cheng

Just because you're an adult doesn't mean you're grown up. Growing up means being patient, holding your temper, cutting out the self-pity, and quitting with the righteous indignation.'
'Why do so many people seem to love righteous indignation?'
'Because if you can prove you're a victim, all rules are off. You can lash out at people. You don't have to be accountable for anything. ~ Brandon Stanton

Maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)
and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles, and
milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were
and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles and
may come home with a smooth rounded stone
as small as a world and as big as alone.
for whatever we loose (like a you or a me)
it is always ourselves we find in the sea. ~ E. E. Cummings