Foreign Places Quotes

One important thing was not to forget what he hoped to achieve in life. Another important thing was not to confuse a romantic picture of himself - as a doctor in Africa, for example - with a real possibility. And he tried not to lose sight of the fact that he was an adult in an adult world, with responsibilities. This was not easy: he would find himself sitting in the sun cutting out paper stars for a Christmas tree at the very moment other men were working to support large families or representing their countries in foreign places. When in moments of difficult truth-seeking he saw this incongruity, he felt sick that he should be saddled with himself, as though he were his own unwanted guest. ~ Lydia Davis

A traveler's chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad-as well as good example of what they deliver concerning foreign places. ~ Jonathan Swift

Later that day I went back to the old turf-house door and drew back the ivy. There between the stones was the dried-out bird's nest that was no longer in use because its owner was on her foreign holidays. I eased my letter to Santa out of my pocket and tucked it into the nest. I considered this the ideal resting place because the owner and Santa both belonged to foreign places and came here across the sky. There was the mystery of the unknown about the worlds they both came from; they belonged in the sky and my letter was destined to join them there when the time was right. ~ Alice Taylor

When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier. That does not mean it IS brighter and lovelier; it just means that sweet, kindly home suffers in comparison to tarted-up foreign places with all their jewels on. ~ Catherynne M Valente

This was a troublesome supplication, because at the dawn of July, Ukraine was to celebrate the first birthday of its ultramodern constitution, which makes
us feel very nationalistic, and so many people would be on vacation in foreign places. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Foreign places yield more to one who is himself worth meeting. ~ Unknown

Canoes, too, are unobtrusive; they don't storm the natural world or ride over it, but drift in upon it as a part of its own silence. As you either care about what the land is or not, so do you like or dislike quiet things
sailboats, or rainy green mornings in foreign places, or a grazing herd, or the ruins of old monasteries in the mountains ... Chances for being quiet nowadays are limited. ~ John Graves

Aside from my cockeyed internal compass, I also have a shortage of personal coolness, which can be a liability in travel. I have never learned how to arrange my face into that blank expression of competent invisibility that is so useful when traveling in dangerous, foreign places. You know - that super-relaxed, totally-in-charge expression which makes you look like you belong there, anywhere, everywhere, even in the middle of riot in Jakarta. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

After lunch they were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travellers in quiet foreign places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of their own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others, and missing the clamor of Empire they felt that life was not continuing here. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Painting keeps me occupied in those moments when travel can be aimless and even disorienting. Mainly it is a way to register at least some of the new impressions of a foreign place, when its thrilling barrage can sometimes overwhelm you. ~ Susan Minot

If there's a major foreign policy event, the President gets on TV, the Congress doesn't. ~ Nate Silver

Patty knew that feeling, a dream hangover, like when she jumped up from a panicky sleep at 2 in the morning and tried to talk herself into thinking the farm was OK, that this year would pick up, and then felt all the sicker when she woke up to the alarm a few hours later, guilty and duped. It was suprising that you could spend hours in the middle of the night pretending things were OK, and know in thirty seconds of daylight that that simply wasn't so.' -Dark Places ~ Gillian Flynn

Their sacrifice was great, but not in vain. All Americans and every free nation on earth can trace their liberty to the white markers of places like Arlington National Cemetery. And may God keep us ever grateful. ~ George W. Bush

Dad diagnoses me as having a stomach bug, claiming that there's a nasty one going around, but I'm fairly certain it's the chicken he cooked last night, which was a bit squishy and pink in places. I'd barely eaten any and Dad had scoffed a whole plate of it down, which is why he says it can't have been the cause, but he has a cast iron stomach, probably from years of inadvertently poisoning himself. ~ Kate Lattey

It is a good plan to have a book with you in all places and at all times. If you are presently without, hurry without delay to the nearest shop and buy one of mine. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

I'm not supposed to know anything about foreign policy. Just thought I'd throw that out. ~ Herman Cain

European languages and a Google app can now turn your words into a foreign language, either in text form or as an electronic voice. Skype, an internet-telephony service, said recently that it would offer much the same (in English and Spanish only). But claims that such technological marvels will spell the end of old-fashioned translation businesses are premature. Software can give the gist of a foreign tongue, but for business use (if executives are sensible), rough is not enough. And polyglot programs are a pinprick in a vast industry. The business of translation, interpreting and software localisation (revising websites, apps and the like for use in a foreign language) generates revenues of $37 billion a year, reckons Common Sense Advisory (CSA), a consulting firm. ~ Anonymous

And that's the terrible myth of organized society. That everything that's done through the established system is legal. And that word has a powerful psychological impact. It makes people believe that there is an order to life and an order to a system. And that a person who goes through this order and is convicted has gotten all that is due him and therefore society can turn its conscious off and look to other things and other times. And that's the terrible thing about these past trials that they have this aura of legitimacy an aura of legality. I suspect that better men than the world has known and more of them have gone to their deaths through a legal system then through all the illegalities in the history of man. Six million people in Europe during the Third Reich, legal, Sacco and Vanzetti, quite legal, the Haymarket defendants, legal, the hundreds of rape trials throughout the south where black men were condemned to death all legal, Jesus legal, Socrates legal and that is the kaleidoscopic nature of what we live through here and in other places because all tyrants learn that it is far better to do this thing through some semblance of legality than to do it without that pretext. ~ William M. Kunstler

I don't remember any snow in all of the Torah. The Lord probably doesn't even go to places where it snows. ~ Christopher Moore

Feed your soul; books, places, people, anything. That helps it grow. ~ M.L. Shanahan

I do think it's strange that I get associated with Iraq more than the people who were Foreign Secretary or Defence Secretary. It's because of my closeness to Tony [Blair], which I don't regret at all. I think that was a privilege. ~ Alastair Campbell

I wanted everything to freeze, it was finally where I wanted it, and I whispered to my empty dining room, "Nobody move." Timothy was healthy, my dad was still sober, I had good friends, I was in love, my work as a counselor was so rewarding, but above all of that, I had a drag queen who strutted through my life, always at just the right time, teaching me that there is glitter in the darkness if only you remember to look in the right places. (265) ~ Wendy Blackburn

There is a close tie of affection between sovereigns and their subjects; and as chaste wives should have no eyes but for their husbands, so faithful liegemen should keep their regards at home and not look after foreign crowns. For my part I like not for my sheep to wear a stranger's mark nor to dance after a foreigner's whistle. ~ Elizabeth I

Aladdin rates high for fuckability and marriage material. I mean, imagine the possibilities for sex in public places with that magic carpet. ~ Keeley Bates

the Essenes sought to keep Moses' laws from being corrupted by foreign influences. ~ Bill Thompson

Sometimes Scarlett felt all of Trisda was under a dome, a large piece of glass that trapped everyone inside while her father looked down, moving - or removing - people if they weren't in the right places. ~ Stephanie Garber

The bath is one of the places I prefer, certainly not a place I leave readily, a place where one can close the door and remove oneself, put oneself in parentheses, as it were, from the rest of humanity. It is a place for reading and thinking, where one's mind wanders easily, where time seems temporarily suspended. ~ Sheila Kohler

Writing fantasy lets me imagine a great deal more than, say, writing about alligators, and lets me write about places more distant than Florida, but I can tell you things about Florida and alligators, let you make the connection all on your own. ~ Terry Brooks

We stand for the dismantling of foreign military bases. We stand for a reduction of armed forces and armaments in areas where military confrontation is especially dangerous, above all in central Europe. ~ Leonid Brezhnev

Chaston wrote that a great many fairies harboured a vague sense of having been treated badly by the English. Though it was a mystery to Chaston - as it is to me - why they should have thought so. In the houses of the great English magicians fairies were the first among the servants and sat in the best places after the magician and his lady. ~ Susanna Clarke

[I]t is useful at times to admit to yourself that you don't know your way and to be open to help from unexpected places. Doing that makes available to you inner and outer energies and allies that arise out of your own soulfulness and selflessness. [...] [G]etting caught up in the normal human tendencies of self-cherishing and arrogance, and ignoring the larger order of things, will ultimately lead to ans impasse in your life in which you are unable to go forward, unable to go back, and unable to turn around. ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

If I could live again my life,
In the next - I'll try,
- to make more mistakes,
I won't try to be so perfect,
I'll be more relaxed ...
I'll take fewer things seriously..
I'll take more risks,
I'll take more trips,
I'll watch more sunsets,
I'll climb more mountains,
I'll swim more rivers,
I'll go to more places I've never been
I'll eat more ice ... I'll have more real problems and less imaginary ones
If I could live again - I will travel light
If I could live again - I'll try to work bare feet at the beginning of spring till the end of autumn,
I'll watch more sunrises ... If I have the life to live ~ Jorge Luis Borges

And everyone knows the job market is crap, so you probably won't be able to find another job."

"Actually, I'm really good at what I--"

"And then you'll start missing your rent payments, and the collection agencies will start calling, and you'll start robbing check-cashing places to get money for drugs, and the next thing you know, you're wearing a set of gold fang dentures. ~ Nina Post

In the horrible places, the battle for control escalates until you get tied down or locked into your Geri-chair or chemically subdued with psychotropic medications. In the nice ones, a staff member cracks a joke, wags an affectionate finger, and takes your brownie stash away. In almost none does anyone sit down with you and try to figure out what living a life really means to you under the circumstances, let alone help you make a home where that life becomes possible. This is the consequence of a society that faces the final phase of the human life cycle by trying not to think about it. We end up with institutions that address any number of societal goals - from freeing up hospital beds to taking burdens off families' hands to coping with poverty among the elderly - but never the goal that matters to the people who reside in them: how to make life worth living when we're weak and frail and can't fend for ourselves anymore. ~ Atul Gawande

The retaining membrane that held Dutch culture together for more than a century was a marvel of elasticity. Responding to appropriate external stimuli, it could expand or contract as the conditions of its survival altered. Under pressure, it could tighten to compress the Dutch into a sense of their indissoluble unity. In more expansive times it could relax and swell, allowing for internal differentiation and the absorption of a whole gamut of beliefs, faiths and even tongues. An omniscient kind of social filter swallowed up those foreign bodies and spat them out again as burghers: civically salubrious and residentially reliable. ~ Simon Schama

The world, this palpable world, which we were wont to treat with the boredom and disrespect with which we habitually regard places with no sacred association for us, is in truth a holy place, and we did not know it. Venite, adoremus. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

First, the desert is the country of madness. Second, it is the refuge of the devil, thrown out into the "wilderness of upper Egypt" to "wander in dry places." Thirst drives man mad, and the devil himself is mad with a kind of thirst for his own lost excellence
lost because he has immured himself in it and closed out everything else. So the man who wanders into the desert to be himself must take care that he does not go mad and become the servant of the one who dwells there in a sterile paradise of emptiness and rage. ~ Thomas Merton

Great emotional singing isn't a destination, it's a journey, one to be taken time and again to different places with different moods and different audiences. ~ Deke Sharon

Being an outsider to some extent, someone who does not "fit in" with others or is rejected by them for whatever reason, makes life difficult, but it also places you at an advantage as far as enlightenment is concerned. It takes you out of unconsciousness almost by force. ~ Eckhart Tolle

The combination of a brand like Cartier and the immense heritage that India holds can go places. ~ Mark Shand