Like Being Killed Quotes

Words were cannibals eating up their own past.

-- Like Being Killed ~ Ellen Miller

He paid me to discover ways to express the unnameable; to get to the bottom of an utterance; to find words for the things for which there were no words yet, thereby bringing them into existence, committing them to paper, projecting them into the future. The work was part drudgery, part deity. ~ Ellen Miller

I was too apathetic to be bored or anxious. Boredom and anxiety were the neurotic cousins of concern; they implied wishes. I had no wishes or wants. I didn't even want dope. I only needed it. ~ Ellen Miller

Her smile was a supernova: blazing, beautiful, short-lived. ~ Ellen Miller

Because there's no such thing as too much water under the bridge. The only problem is a refusal to deal with the water that's already gone pasts. ~ Ellen Miller

Gone is what happens when people stop asking, when all research has ceased, when no one contributes to the archives of a life or its extinction. ~ Ellen Miller

I never saw her a burglar prying my windows open with a jimmy to steal whatever she found inside. ~ Ellen Miller

Your generosity is cosmetic if you don't fully comprehend that the power to give is positively correlated with a concomitant power to deny, and both of these are the privileges of those who live in abundance, and I don't mean money. ~ Ellen Miller

When a person becomes a legend, the very thing that makes them human and knowable is killed off, so it's like being killed over and over and over again, for all eternity. ~ Miriam Toews

I found that female pathfinders generally integrate characteristics commonly associated with being women - like the capacity to be intimate - with 'male' ones like ambition and courage. ~ Gail Sheehy

When you start a new job or a particular journey, you really don't know what to expect. I mean, you hear about your name being on the bestsellers list, but it doesn't really mean anything. Like, really, what does that translate to? ~ Eric Jerome Dickey

We have all experienced times when, instead of being buffeted by anonymous forces, we do feel in control of our actions, masters of our own fate. On the rare occasions that it happens, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like.. moments like these are not the passive, receptive, relaxing timesthe best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Dogs are minor angels, and I don't mean that facetiously. They love unconditionally, forgive immediately, are the truest of friends, willing to do anything that makes us happy, etcetera. If we attributed some of those qualities to a person we would say they are special. If they had ALL of them, we would call them angelic. But because it's "only" a dog, we dismiss them as sweet or funny but little more. However when you think about it, what are the things that we most like in another human being? Many times those qualities are seen in our dogs every single day
we're just so used to them that we pay no attention. ~ Jonathan Carroll

I'm pretty sarcastic, and sometimes that doesn't come across on the Internet. It seems like I'm being rude or stupid. ~ Sky Ferreira

Like I said, it's weird being in love with your best friend.
It'seven weirder when the rest of the world is in love with him, too. ~ Jacqueline E. Smith

I still love Emma more than I ever thought was possible. I love her more every day, and more every time I try to stop. I love her like I'm being ripped in half. ~ Cassandra Clare

You think about, like, [20th-century classical composers] Alban Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern sitting around in some living room in Vienna and being like, "We are the end of music. We are the end of this tradition. Music is done." ~ David Longstreth

Cash

I made it on the bevel.
1. There is more surface for the nails to grip.
2. There is twice the gripping-surface to each seam.
3. The water will have to seep into it on a slant. Water moves easiest up
and down or straight across.
4. In a house people are upright two thirds of the time. So the seams and
joints are made up-and-down. Because the stress is up-and-down.
5. In a bed where people lie down all the time, the joints and seams are
made sideways, because the stress is sideways.
6. Except.
7. A body is not square like a crosstie.
8. Animal magnetism.
9. The animal magnetism of a dead body makes the stress come slanting, so
the seams and joints of a coffin are made on the bevel.
10. You can see by an old grave that the earth sinks down on the bevel.
11. While in a natural hole it sinks by the center, the stress being up-and-
down.
12. So I made it on the bevel.
13. It makes a neater job. ~ William Faulkner

One time, on a pleasure cruise, he saw a young couple, fiancés, sitting and looking at the water--the boy had his right arm around the girl's shoulder and held her right wrist tight and she had put her left hand on his right hand, and they sat like that, pressed close together. The little poet looked at them, it's so lovely to see a nice young couple like that. That these children are excited because they want more, that they are only getting each other worked up for what they can't do and don't dare to do, that they never know where to stop--no one ever notices that or thinks about that. It was very lovely, and maybe the truth was that they had just recently gotten engaged and were still satisfied with being madly in love with each other. ~ Nescio

Ruth and I don't have a perfect marriage, but we have a great one. How can I say two things that seem so contradictory? In a perfect marriage, everything is always the finest and best imaginable; like a Greek statue, the proportions are exact and the finish is unblemished. Who knows any human being lke that? For a marriage couple to expect perfection in each other is unrealistic. ~ Billy Graham

There are worse things, worse than being like us. Look, at least we're alive. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

That's the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don't, but between those who want to know everything and those who don't. This search is a sign of love, I maintain.
It's similar with books. Not quite the same, of course (it never is); but similar. If you quite enjoy a writer's work, if you turn the page approvingly yet
don't mind being interrupted, then you tend to like that author unthinkingly. Good chap, you assume. Sound fellow. They say he strangled an entire pack of Wolf Cubs and fed their bodies to a school of carp? Oh no, I'm sure he didn't; sound fellow, good chap. But if you love a writer, if you depend upon the drip-feed of his intelligence, if you want to pursue him and find him -- despite edicts to the contrary -- then it's impossible to know too much. You seek the vice as well. A pack of Wolf Cubs, eh? Was that twenty-seven or twenty-eight? And did he have their little scarves sewn up into a patchwork quilt? And is it true that as he ascended the scaffold he quoted from the Book of Jonah? And that he bequeathed his carp pond to the local Boy Scouts?
But here's the difference. With a lover, a wife, when you find the worst -- be it infidelity or lack of love, madness or the suicidal spark -- you are almost relieved. Life is as I thought it was; shall we now celebrate this disappointment? With a writer you love, the instinct is to defend. This is what I meant earlier: perhaps love for a writer is the purest ~ Julian Barnes

I clarified that I myself was Colombian.
"What is 'being Colombian'?"
"I'm not sure," I replied. "It's an act of faith."
"Like being Norwegian," she said, nodding.
I can recall nothing further of what was said that night. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

A positive mind is like a powerful stream of water that is gathering volume and force from hundreds of tributaries all along its course. The further on it goes the greater its power, until when it reaches its goal, that power is simply immense. A negative mind, however, would be something like a stream, that the further it flows the more divisions it makes, until, when it reaches its goal, instead of being one powerful stream, it has become a hundred, small, weak, shallow streams. ~ Christian D. Larson

Like most North Americans, I'd been raised on the notion that milk is the first food, and everybody must like it because it's so good and so important for growing up and for being healthy. ~ Marvin Harris

Everything had changed suddenly
the tone, the moral climate; you didn't know what to think, whom to listen to. As if all your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family nor people whose judgment you respected. At such a time you felt the need of committing yourself to something absolute
life or truth or beauty
of being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded. You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life that was now abolished and gone for good. ~ Boris Pasternak

I think that there's not much point to being an actor if you're not enjoying it, so I try to be picky about roles I do like to go out for. ~ Grey Damon

I like being at home and cooking. ~ Shania Twain

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it's a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. ~ Zadie Smith

Get your hopes up

I was talking to a reporter one time, and I could tell he didn't like the fact that my message is so positive and so hopeful. He asked what I would tell a person who lost a job and was about to lose a home and had no place to go and all sorts of other problems. He painted the worst possible situation.
I said, "First of all, I would encourage that person to get up and find something to be grateful for, and secondly, I would encourage the person to expect things to turn around, expect new doors to open, expect breakthroughs."
The scripture says, "When darkness overtakes the righteous, light will come bursting in." When you don't see a way out, and it's dark, you're in prime position for God's favor to come bursting in.
The reporter said, "Wouldn't that be giving them false hope?"
Here's the alternative: I could tell them be negative, bitter, give up, complain, and be depressed. All that would do is make matters worse.
You may be in a difficult situation, but instead of being negative just dig in your heels and say, "I refuse to live with a negative attitude. I'm not giving up on my dreams. I'm not living without passion or zeal. I may not see a way, but I know God has a way. It may be dark, but I'm expecting the light to come bursting in. I'm setting my mind for victory."
That's what allows God to work. It's not just mind over matter. It's not just having a positive attitude. It's your faith being released. When you be ~ Joel Osteen

Afterward we drove out to the Hanford Reservation and ran as a wolf and coyote through the open terrain. He didn't have Samuel's ability to throw off all his humanity and revel in the joy of being a wild thing. Instead, he played with the same intensity he used for everything. Which meant that when I chase him, I wasn't really sure I wanted to catch him - and when he chased me, I felt like a rabbit. ~ Patricia Briggs

When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw "the tree with the lights in it." It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker creek and thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing that like being for the first time see, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I'm still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells un-flamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam. ~ Annie Dillard

In my family, I would never dare to think of being Paris Hilton! And to me, that doesn't look like a happy existence - it's just not who I am. ~ Eve Hewson

The first time I worked with colors was by making these mosaics of Pantone swatches. They end up being very large pictures, and I photographed with a very large camera - an 8x10 camera. So you can see the surface of every single swatch - like in this picture of Chuck Close. And you have to walk very far to be able to see it. ~ Vik Muniz

Gratitude is like a fire that can burn all
your karmas* . What is karma*
? It is an
unfulfilled action on your part that pulls
you again and again to fulfill it. In order to
fulfill and exhaust all such karmas*
that we
have accumulated, we take birth again and
again on this planet. Just by being with the
energy of gratitude, these karmas get burnt!
Such is the power of gratitude.
- HDH Bhagavan Sri Nithyananda Paramishovam, in the book, "Living Enlightement". ~ Paramahamsa Nithyananda

The climb is not for everyone. We all have different gifts, and not everyone is
called to this kind of intellectual climb. I don't mean that the nonclimbers
will see less glory or worship with less passion. There are glories in the valleys. And there are paths into beauties of God that
are less intellectual. I would not dare to claim that those who do this sort of climbing always see or savor more glory than those with wider eyes for the glory that is right there in the meadow. Nevertheless, some of us are wired to make this climb. There
is not much choice in it. We should no more boast about doing it than one should boast about being a morning person. Almost
every time we open our Bibles, we see challenges. Puzzles. Mysteries. Paradoxes. Mountain paths beckon us, but seem to lead in opposite directions. We move toward these paths like bumblebees toward morning glories. ~ John Piper

THE DEATH OF SALADIN
You left ground and sky weeping, mind
and soul full of grief. No one can
take your place in existence or in
absence. Both mourn, the angels, the
prophets, and this sadness I feel has
taken from me the taste of language,
so that I can't say the flavor of my
being apart. The roof of the kingdom
within has collapsed! When I say the
word YOU, I mean a hundred universes.
Pouring grief water, or secret dripping in the heart, eyes in the head or eyes
of the soul, I saw yesterday that all these flow out to find you when you're
not here. That bright fire bird Saladin
went like an arrow, and now the bow
trembles and sobs. If you know how to
weep for human beings, weep for Saladin. ~ Rumi

There was a real sense of comfort but at the same time it felt oddly tense. The feeling that every little things we said, these conversations, at any moment, they could stop being possible, and so they were precious, it was that feeling, and the sense of the miracle of this shared moment, here and now. Why were we so far apart, even when we are together? It was anice loneliness, like th sensation of washing your face with cold water. ~ Banana Yoshimoto

What if all I'd ever known was how it had been for the past three years - me being an unwanted outsider in my own family?
I might have turned out like Aphrodite, and I might still be letting my parents control me because I was hoping desperately that I would be good enough, make them proud, so that some day they would really love me. ~ P.C. Cast

I am not sure how much I would like being married if I wasn't married to him. A man who likes flea markets and isn't gay? I knew I was lucky. ~ Lynda Barry

Look at a guy like Ian McKellen, who is eighty or whatever, and he's just loving his work, and you can see that in the work. That defines what type of actor you are. And what kind of people want to work with you. And whether you can do this job for a long, long time. ~ Jason Clarke

How to explain the sheer tingling joy one experiences when two interesting, complex, and occasionally aggravating characters have at last settled their misunderstandings and will live happily ever after, no matter what travails life might throw in their path, because Jane Austen said they will, and that's that? How to describe the exhilaration of being caught up in an unknown but glamorous world of balls and gowns and rides in open carriages with handsome young men? How to explain that the best part of Jane Austen's world is that sudden recognition that the characters are just like you? ~ Margaret C. Sullivan

To believe with certain "neoyogists" that "evolution" will produce a superman "who will differ from man as much as man differs from the animal or the animal from the vegetable" is not to know what man is: it is one more example of a pseudo-wisdom that deems itself vastly superior to the "separatist" religions but in fact shows itself more ignorant than the most elementary catechism. For the most elementary catechism does know what man is: it knows that by his qualities, and as an autonomous world, he stands opposed to the other kingdoms of nature taken together; that in one particular respect--that of spiritual possibilities and not of animal nature--the difference between a monkey and a man is "infinitely" greater than that between a fly and a monkey. For man alone is able to leave the world; man alone is able to return to God; and this is the reason he cannot be surpassed by a new earthly being in any way. Man is central among the beings of the earth; this is an absolute position; there cannot be a center more central than the center if definitions have any meaning.

This neoyogism, like other similar movements, pretends that it can add an essential value to the wisdom of our ancestors; it believes the religions are partial truths that it is called upon to paste together after centuries or millennia of waiting and then to crown with its own naive little system. ~ Frithjof Schuon

The thing is, being lonely is like walking in the cold without a coat. It's uncomfortable, but eventually you go numb. Once you get used to not being lonely, though, the shock of going back is like having your down comforter yanked off at six o'clock on a Minnesota December morning. ~ Maggie Hall

I was way more nervous on the opening day of the Ryder Cup than the first round of any major. Every Ryder Cup match is like being in the last group on Sunday in a major. ~ Tom Lehman

Is it as bad out there as they say it is?" he asked. "From my six-inch window, it looks like we got hit with one hell of a storm."

"It took me nearly an hour to shovel the sidewalk this morning," Jordan said.

Kyle brushed his neck-length dark blond hair off his face. "See? That's one of the positives of being in prison. No shoveling."

Her brother had long ago set the rules regarding their visits. Jokes about being in prison were expected and encouraged, sympathy was not. Which was good for both of them, considering her family had never done particularly well with the mushy and sentimental stuff.

"You live in a penthouse condo and haven't shoveled snow for years," she pointed out.

"A deliberate choice I made because of the trauma of my youth," Kyle said. "Remember how Dad used to make me shovel the whole block every time it snowed? I was eight when he came up with that plan - barely taller than the shovel."

"And I got to stay inside making hot chocolate with Mom." Jordan waved off the retort she saw coming. "Hey, it was good for you - it built character." She paused for a moment, taking in their steel-barred surroundings. "Maybe Dad should've made you shovel the next block over, too."

"That's cute."

"I thought so. ~ Julie James

One fine day you decide to talk less and less about the things you care most about, and when you have to say something, it costs you an effort . . . You're good and sick of hearing yourself talk . . . you abridge . . . You give up … For thirty years you've been talking . . . You don't care about being right anymore. You even lose your desire to keep hold of the small place you'd reserved yourself among the pleasures of life . . . You're fed up … From that time on you're content to eat a little something, cadge a little warmth, and sleep as much as possible on the road to nowhere. To rekindle your interest, you'd have to think up some new grimaces to put on in the presence of others . . . But you no longer have the strength to renew your repertory. You stammer. Sure, you still look for excuses for hanging around with the boys, but death is there too, stinking, right beside you, it's there the whole time, less mysterious than a game of poker. The only thing you continue to value is petty regrets, like not finding time to run out to Bois-Colombes to see your uncle while he was still alive, the one whose little song died forever one afternoon in February. That horrible little regret is all we have left of life, we've vomited up the rest along the way, with a good deal of effort and misery. We're nothing now but an old lamppost with memories on a street where hardly anyone passes anymore. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

These people weren't Navy SEALs or Army Rangers, weren't trained by the best professional warriors in the world, weren't seasoned by a real war in which they had encountered an enemy who fought back. They lacked the honor of SEALs and Rangers, lacked ideals that stiffened the spine in times of peril. They were fanatics, driven by emotion rather than reason. Their commitment was to destruction instead of to the preservation of what was good, and this
commitment made them feel dangerous, therefore powerful and superior. Being dangerous, however, wasn't the same as being powerful and certainly didn't support a claim to superiority. Like all barbarians, they were vulnerable to panic and confusion when the destruction they wished to wreak was visited instead upon them. ~ Dean Koontz

What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it - like a secret vice! ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh