Middle Distance Quotes

Only the middle distance and what may be called the remoter foreground are strictly human. When we look very near or very far, man either vanishes altogether or loses his primacy. The astronomer looks even further afield than the Sung painter and sees even less of human life. At the other end of the scale the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist pursue the close-up – the cellular close-up, the molecular, the atomic and subatomic. Of that which, at twenty feet, even at arm's length, looked and sounded like a human being no trace remains.
Something analogous happens to the myopic artist and the happy lover. In the nuptial embrace personality is melted down; the individual (it is the recurrent theme of Lawrence's poems and novels) ceases to be himself and becomes a part of the vast impersonal universe.
And so it is with the artist who chooses to use his eyes at the near point. In his work humanity loses its importance, even disappears completely. Instead of men and women playing their fantastic tricks before high heaven, we are asked to consider the lilies, to meditate on the unearthly beauty of 'mere things,' when isolated from their utilitarian context and rendered as they are, in and for themselves. Alternatively (or, at an earlier stage of artistic development, exclusively), the nonhuman world of the near-point is rendered in patterns. These patterns are abstracted for the most part from leaves and flowers – the rose, the lotus, the acanthus, palm, papyrus – an ~ Aldous Huxley

Ideas' can be only in the distant background of a work of art, something like a very low horizon. In the middle distance and foreground ... there shouldn't be any 'ideas' visible. ~ Mu Xin

Though the mules plod in a steady and unflagging hypnosis, the vehicle does not seem to progress. It seems to hang suspended in the middle distance forever and forever, so infinitesimal is its progress, like a shabby bead upon the mild red string of road. So much so is this that in the watching of it the eye loses it as sight and sense drowsily merge and blend, like the road itself, with all the peaceful and monotonous changes between darkness and day, like already measured thread being rewound onto a spool. So that at last, as though out of some trivial and unimportant region beyond even distance, the sound of it seems to come slow and terrific and without meaning, as though it were a ghost traveling a half mile ahead of its own shape. ~ William Faulkner

Your enemies call it comeuppance
and relish the details
of a drug too fine, how long
you must have dangled there beside yourself.
In the middle distance of your
twenty-ninth year, night split open
like a fighter's bruised palm,
a purple ripeness.

Friends shook their heads.
With you it was always
the next attractive trouble,
as if an arranged marriage had been made
in a country of wing walkers, lion tamers,
choirboys leaping from bellpulls
into the high numb glitter, and you,
born with the breath of wild on your tongue
brash as gin.

True, it was charming for a while.
Your devil's balance, your debts.
Then no one was laughing.
Hypodermic needles and cash registers
emptied themselves in your presence.
Cars went head-on.
Sympathy, old motor, ran out
or we grew old, our tongues
wearing little grooves in our mouths
clucking disappointment.

Michael, what pulled you up
by upstart roots
and set you packing,
left the rest of us here, body-heavy
on the edge of our pews.
Over the reverend's lament
we could still hear laughter, your mustache
the angled black wings
of a perfect crow. Later
we taught ourselves the proper method for mourning
haphazard life: salt, tequila, lemon.
Drinking and drifting
in your honor we barely felt a thing. ~ Dorothy Barresi

The twin guardian angels whose eyes and hands and wings had focused protective attention on the souls that lay there no longer faced each other. They stared blindly into a random middle distance. The scroll they held between them proclaiming eternal resurrection was broken in two. ~ Clare Morgan

The crumpled butcherpaper mountains lay in sharp shadowfold under the long blue dusk and in the middle distance the glazed bed of a dry lake lay shimmering like the mare imbrium and herds of deer were moving north in the last of the twilight, harried over the plain by wolves who were themselves the color of the desert floor. Glanton sat his horse and looked long out upon this scene. Sparse on the mesa the dry weeds lashed in the wind like the earth's long echo of lance and spear in old encounters forever unrecorded. All the sky seemed troubled and night came quickly over the evening land and small gray birds flew crying softly after the fled sun. He chucked up the horse. He passed and so passed all into the problematical destruction of darkness. ~ Cormac McCarthy

Men are the softer sex, squeamish about blood in the main. I know it's the same for human men, Luke was extremely disinclined to discuss my first experience of a woman's menses."

Luke stared ferociously into the middle distance, obviously trying to visualize himself somewhere else, having an entirely different conversation. Serene patted him on the back.

"Perfectly all right, I should have had more respect for your delicate masculine sensibilities."

"Thank you," said Luke, sounding very far away. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan

I do feel a wave come over me when I hear those two words, 'Star' and 'Wars,' said together. I feel tense, shut up, and stare into the middle distance. ~ Domhnall Gleeson

Downtime is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, lying on the grass or sitting on the stoop and staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky. I don't believe you can write poetry, or compose music, or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it, a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity. ~ Anna Quindlen

He didn't take her out of the city," she'd said, cheeks glowing with color for the first time since she'd emerged from her battle with parem . "It's obvious he's keeping her there."
But Kaz had simply gazed into the middle distance with that odd look on his face and said, "Too obvious."
"Kaz - "
"How would you like a hundred kruge ?"
"What's the catch?"
"Exactly. Van Eck's making it too easy. He's treating us like marks. But he isn't Barrel born, and we aren't a bunch of dumb culls ready to jump at the first shiny lure he flashes. Van Eck wants us to think she's on that island. Maybe she is. But he'll have plenty of firepower waiting for us too, maybe even a few Grisha using parem ."
"Always hit where the mark isn't looking," Wylan had murmured.
"Sweet Ghezen," said Jesper. "You've been thoroughly corrupted. ~ Leigh Bardugo

The rain began the next morning and showed no signs of letting up. Mud sucked at Arin's boots as he helped Kestrel ready her horse. The rain intensified, dropping down like little stones.
Arin squinted up at it. "Terrible day to ride." He hated to see her go.
She wiped water from her face, glancing over at Risha, whose head was tipped back under the rain, eyes closed. "Not for everyone," Kestrel said, "and the rain will make it less likely a Valorian scout will notice that a small band is riding from camp."
True. The middle distance was a gray fog. Arin raked dripping hair off his brow. He tried to be all right. His nerves sparked the way a blade does against the grinder.
Kestrel touched his cheek. "The rain is good for us."
"Come here."
She tasted like the rain: cool and fresh and sweet. Her mouth warmed as he kissed her. He felt the way her clothes stuck to her skin. He forgot himself.
She murmured, "I have something for you."
"You needn't give me anything."
"It's not a gift. It's for you to keep safe until I return." She placed a speckled yellow feather on his palm.
The rain fell in a veil behind her. ~ Marie Rutkoski

He opened the door and led me through a corridor into a dark green lounge curiously paneled with pale green glass behind which, at cunningly measured distances, lay exquisitely painted panoramas of strange seas and beautiful landfalls. Standing in the center of the room, and slowly turning, a man might imagine that Satan had taken him to the top of a high mountain, and was showing him all the kingdoms of the earth... until he put out his hand to touch the middle distance, and felt a window, and saw through it to the heart of the illusion. ~ Gerald Kersh

And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of colour across the sky - so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

So we must run back and forth between these two suns in our firmament - the presentiment of death and awareness of life - and avoid being transfixed by either of them. If we are lucky in this uncertain middle distance, we may form attachments and projects that enhance the sentiment of life. However, even as we try our luck, death comes to us, and brings our experiment to a end. ~ Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Here is what I have always thought: that people, when they eat, are very dear. The eager lips, the flapping jaws, the trembling release of control-the guilty glances at one's companions or at strangers. The focus, the great focus of eating. The pleasure in it. I remember-when I went out more-I remember watching people in restaurants. People who ate alone, lost in the pleasure of it, O the pleasure of it. Digging for food in the bottoms of their bowls, guarding their fork, bringing the food to their mouths. Staring off into some middle distance while chewing. Thinking of things known only to them. To watch others eat is a thing of joy to me. & it is the only time I can forgive myself for what I have become. ~ Liz Moore

For many of our Greek friends a book is a final desperate attempt to fill the existential void when there is no one to talk to, nothing to do, no television to view, nothing in the street to watch and even the middle distance holds nothing to stare at. To be seen carrying a book in public, let alone reading one, is a mark of eccentricity or foreignness. ~ John Mole

R'bin," he said, giving up and gazing down at her. "R'bin, d'you know wadda kairos mo…" He hiccoughed. "Mo…moment is?"

"A kairos moment?" she repeated, hoping against hope it was not something sexual, something that she would not be able to forget afterwards, especially as the kebab shop owner was listening in and smirking behind them. "No, I don't. Shall we go back to the office?"

"You don't know whadditis?" he asked, peering at her.

"No."

" 'SGreek," he told her. "Kairos. Kairos moment. An' it means," and from somewhere in his soused brain he dredged up words of surprising clarity, "the telling moment. The special moment. The supreme moment."

Oh please, thought Robin, please don't tell me we're having one.

"An' d'you know what ours was, R'bin, mine an' Charlotte's?" he said, staring into the middle distance, his unlit cigarette hanging from his hand. "It was when she walk'd into the ward - I was in hosp'tal f'long time an' I hadn' seen her f'two years - no warning - an' I saw her in the door an' ev'ryone turned an' saw her too, an' she walked down the ward an' she never said a word an," he paused to draw breath, and hiccoughed again, "an' she kissed me aft' two years, an' we were back together. Nobody talkin'. Fuckin' beautiful. Mos' beaut'ful woman I've 'ver seen. Bes' moment of the whole fuckin' - 'fmy whole fuckin' life, prob'bly. I'm sorry, R'bin," he added, "f'r sayin' 'fuckin'.' Sorry 'bout that."
~ Robert Galbraith

I know from the middle distance I give off the look of being prolific, which is a funny compliment to receive. ~ Joseph Epstein

The single biggest change in middle-distance running, from the 1500 metres to 10,000 metres, has been the track surface. ~ Herb Elliott

He was looking into that strange place, the middle distance, the most mysterious, human, and rich of all distances. And from his eyes came slowly tears, immaculate human tears, before the world touches them. River, window and eyes. ~ Sebastian Barry

Without a clear-cut vision and a proper reading of the roadmap we may not reach the buoyant shores of the horizon. If we only keep looking into the middle distance, we might easily walk straight into the wall. ("Change of Vision") ~ Erik Pevernagie

In the middle distance, sails were gliding like butterflies, and farther away, ships dotted the mouth of the bay between Awa and Sagami as if brushed in ink in a single flowing stroke. ~ Haruo Shirane

Karrin smiled faintly and shook her head. "He always said you knew ghosts. You're sure it was really him?"
Mort eyed her. "Me and everyone else, yeah."
Karrin scowled and stared into the middle distance.
Mort frowned and then his expression softened. "You didn't want it to be his ghost. Did you?"
Murphy shook her head slowly, but said nothing.
"You needed everyone to be wrong about it. Because if it really was his ghost," Mort said, "it means that he really is dead."
Murphy's face ... just crumpled. Her eyes overflowed and she bowed her head. Her body shook in silence. ~ Jim Butcher

Help. We can be freed from a damaging insistence on forward thrust, from a commitment to running wildly down a convenient path that might actually be taking us deeper into the dark forest. Praying "Help" means that we ask that Something give us the courage to stop in our tracks, right where we are, and turn our fixation away from the Gordian knot of our problems. We stop the toxic peering and instead turn our eyes to something else: to our feet on the sidewalk, to the middle distance, to the hills, whence our help comes - someplace else, anything else. Maybe this is a shift of only eight degrees, but it can be a miracle. It may be one of those miracles where your heart sinks, because you think it means you have lost. But in surrender you have won. And if it were me, after a moment, I would say, Thanks. ~ Anne Lamott

Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs. ~ Margaret Atwood

The women in the kitchen took turns making a fuss over the baby, acting like it was their job to keep her entertained until the Magi arrived. But the baby wasn't entertained. Her blue eyes were glazed over. She was staring into the middle distance, tired of everything. All this rush to make sandwiches and take in presents for a girl who was not year a year old. ~ Ann Patchett

Sometimes you characters give me a pain in the back of my lap," said Manuel abruptly. "I hang around with you and listen to simple-minded gobbledegook in yard-long language, if it's you talking, Dran, and pink-and-purple sissification from the brat here. Why I do it I'll never know. And it goes that way up to the last gasp. So you're going to leave. Dran has to make a speech, real logical. Vaughn has to blow out a sigh and get misty-eyed." He spat.
"How would you handle it?" Dran asked, amused. Vaughn stared at Manuel whitely.
"Me? You really want to know?"
"This I want to hear," said Vaughn between her teeth.
"I'd wait a while - a long while - until neither of you was talking. Then I'd say, 'I joined the Marines yesterday.' And you'd both look at me a little sad. There's supposed to be something wrong with coming right out and saying something. Let's see. Suppose I do it the way Vaughn would want me to." He tugged at an imaginary braid and thrust out his lower lip in a lampoon of Vaughn's full mouth. He sighed gustily. "I have felt …" He paused to flutter his eyelashes. "I have felt the call to arms," he said in a histrionic whisper. He gazed off into the middle distance. "I have heard the sound of trumpets. The drums stir in my blood." He pounded his temples with his fists. "I can't stand it - I can't! Glory beckons. I will away to foreign strands."
Vaughn turned on her heel, though she made no effort to walk away. Dran roared with laughter.
"A ~ Theodore Sturgeon

Sad things are beautiful only from a distance
therefore you just want to get away from them
from a distance of one hundred and thirty years
... i'm going to distance myself until the world is beautiful ~ Tao Lin

Newton's theory is not 'not right', it just does not cover all distances. Contrary to popular belief, theories in science are not proven wrong, they are just replaced by more complete and convenient theories. To sound provocative, even the geocentric theory was never "proven" wrong, it is just not as convenient as the heliocentric theory, since it requires endless epicycles. ~ Nathan Seiberg

When you see people in middle management dickering with their Fitbits in the elevator, you know the Quantified Self movement is here to stay. The ~ Christian Rudder

We live in this thought web; we identify things and put them away and distance ourselves from them. But to be completely present? That is source, that is art, that is spirituality. And meditation is a way to defy fear and experience that source. ~ Ben Foster

Part of the process of reading is constantly hitting the pause button, and now and then the rewind button, to ponder a word that's been chosen by the author as exquisitely as the filmmaker chooses an image or a sound editor chooses a sonic clue - the tolling of a bell in the distance to evoke memory, for instance. ~ Steve Erickson

Right around the time he hits his middle forties, a man starts giving serious thought to dying well. In his sleep, in his own bed, or in the course of a street fight meant to settle something meaningful. His end doesn't have to be poignant, just devoid of dignity. You wouldn't think that would be too much to ask.

But how a man leaves this world, much like the way he comes into it, is almost never his own call to make, so evil men die on satin sheets in 400-dollar-a-night hotel rooms, while good ones breathe their last lying face down in cold, dark alleyways, their bodies growing stiff and blue on beds of rain-soaked newspaper. ~ Gar Anthony Haywood

I was just stock in the middle, vague and undefined. ~ Sarah Dessen

Will you go on a second date with me?"

"We're still in the middle of our first date, Zach. You can't just ask me that out of the blue."

"I already did, and I refuse to take it back."

"What if I don't like you by the end of this date?" I volley back.

"You honestly think that's possible?" His dimples poke through his smile, and I know right then I'm going to say yes. "Say yes, Delia. Be wild. Do something crazy and fun. ~ Teagan Hunter

You're my beginning, middle, and end. ~ Penny Reid

Under the Assads, Kurds were forbidden from learning their own language at school, or even from speaking it in the military. The result is a generation of Syrian Kurds, many now in late middle age, who can't write their own language. ~ Luke Harding

We have come a long way in America because of Martin Luther King, Jr. He led a disciplined, nonviolent revolution under the rule of law, a revolution of values, a revolution of ideas. We've come a long way, but we still have a distance to go before all of our citizens embrace the idea of a truly interracial democracy, what I like to call the Beloved Community, a nation at peace with itself. ~ John Lewis

The truth a fairly important thing to hold on to when you've been pulled out of the sea after wanting to drown in it. I could've let the sea take me. I could easily be dead now, which is funny when you think of it. When I say funny, what I actually mean is weird and kind of disturbing.
When there's the loud sound of a siren screaming in your head it doesn't take too long before a feeling of not caring what happens washed over you and you become recklessly self- destructive. I used to be full of energy and happiness but I could barely remember those kinds of feelings. The cheerful, childish things I used to think had been replaced. A whole load of new realisations had begun to grow inside me like tangled weeds, and they were starting to kill me. That's why I'd make the decision that involved heading ogg to the pier on my pike in the middle of the night and cycling off it. ~ Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

Never let your work drive you. Master it and keep it in complete control. ~ Booker T. Washington

Americanism in all its forms seemed to be trashy and wasteful and crude, even brutal. There was a metaphor ready to hand in my native Hampshire. Until some time after the war, the squirrels of England had been red. I can still vaguely remember these sweet Beatrix Potter–type creatures, smaller and prettier and more agile and lacking the rat-like features that disclose themselves when you get close to a gray squirrel. These latter riffraff, once imported from America by some kind of regrettable accident, had escaped from captivity and gradually massacred and driven out the more demure and refined English breed. It was said that the gray squirrels didn't fight fair and would with a raking motion of their back paws castrate the luckless red ones. Whatever the truth of that, the sighting of a native English squirrel was soon to be a rarity, confined to the north of Scotland and the Isle of Wight, and this seemed to be emblematic, for the anxious lower middle class, of a more general massification and de-gentrification and, well, Americanization of everything. ~ Christopher Hitchens

When I see a head from a great distance, it ceases to be a sphere and becomes an extreme confusion falling down into the abyss. ~ Alberto Giacometti

My eye is still used to searching for her in a crowd. My breath is still used to catching when I see her and the light is angled just right. My body is still used to hers moving next to mine. So the distance - anything short of contact - is a constant rejection. We were together for six months, and in each of those months my desire found new ways to be fueled by her. It's over can't kill that. All of the songs I wrote in my head were for her, and now I can't stop them from playing. This null soundtrack. I'm tired, she'd said, and I told her that I was tired, too, and that I wanted to take some time for us, too. And then she'd said, No, I'm tired of you, and I slipped into the surreal-but-true universe where we were over and I wasn't over it. She was no longer any kind of here that I could get to ~ David Levithan

Every time I get social with you I end up all by myself, naked, in the middle of the street."
I rolled my eyes. "That only happened once…and you weren't naked. You were wearing socks and a shirt."
"I was speaking figuratively. If you want to get specific, what about the time you locked me in a freezer truck with three corpses? What about the time you ran over me with the Buick?"
I threw my hands into the air. "Oh sure, bring up the Buick. ~ Janet Evanovich

If these Essays were worthy of being judged, it might fall out, in my opinion, that they would not find much favour, either with common and vulgar minds, or with uncommon and eminent ones: the former would not find enough in them, the latter would find too much; they might manage to live somewhere in the middle region. ~ Michel De Montaigne

The movie was Son of Frankenstein, and there was a Gene Autry film along with it. I liked the Frankenstein movie. I liked all Frankenstein movies. But as for Gene Autry, I never liked him very much. He had a bad habit of pulling out his guitar and singing, right in the middle of the movie. ~ Don Lemna

Late December, in Bridgwater, Somerset, Western Province, a middle-aged man named Thomas Wharnton, going home from work shortly after midnight, was set upon by youths. These knifed him, stripped him, spitted him, basted him, carved him, served him - all openly and without shame in one of the squares of the town. A hungry crowd clamoured for hunks and slices, kept back - that the King's Peace might not be broken - by munching and dripping greyboys. ~ Anthony Burgess

So we abdicated, and the predictable followed: one, the world as we know is unraveling, particularly in the Middle East; and, two, most suddenly want more, not less, U.S. engagement. ~ Anonymous

Swimming is my salvation. Ask me in the middle of winter, or at the end of a grueling day, or after a long stretch at the computer, where I'd most like to be, and the answer is always the same: in the water, gliding weightless, slicing a silent trail through whatever patch of blue I can find. ~ Lynn Sherr

A couple of years later, I found out an angry hog is even worse than an angry beaver. My buddy Mike Williams invited me to go hog-hunting with him on a cantaloupe farm. Wild boars were destroying the cantaloupe crop, and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries gave the landowner permission to have hunters kill the hogs. They even let us chase the boars and shoot them from the back of a truck while the game wardens watched the proceedings from a distance! Now, I'd never hunted hogs, but a few of the guys I was hunting with claimed they were experts. We shot one or two hogs apiece and then chased a 360-pound boar into an adjoining cotton field.
My buddies convinced me to go into the overgrown cotton field and attempt to flush the hog out into the open. About a hundred yards into the thick brush, I heard the hog grunt. The hog was so close to me that when I put my scope on it to shoot, I couldn't tell if it was its front end or rear end! I fired my gun. Unfortunately, I shot the hog in the rear, which only made it madder! The hog turned around and charged toward me. I turned and ran out of the cotton field. I felt its tusks clipping at my ankles as I ran. Fortunately, I stayed ahead of the hog until we reached the cantaloupe field, and then to my surprise the hog fell into a heap. It was dead. I looked at my buddies and they were laughing and rolling on the ground. I thought it was a very strange response to my almost getting devoured by a vicious wild hog. I did ~ Jase Robertson

The girls looked good from a distance, the sun shining through their dresses, their hair. But get up close and listen to their minds running out of their mouths, you felt like digging in under a hill and hiding out with a tommy-gun. ~ Charles Bukowski

To the Latin, cynicism and middle age are synonymous. Look at our politicians - they move through their careers from left to center to right, like the hands of a clock. ~ Helen McCloy

If we were to plot the distance between where you are RIGHT NOW and the nearest good idea, it would describe a line too big to fit inside the universe. ~ Brian Clevinger

How one can never truly leave. And never quite return. Do you understand? ~ Emma Richler

On the evening bus, the tense, pinched faces of young file clerks and elderly secretaries tell us more than we care to know. On the expressways, middle management men pose without grace behind their wheels as they flee city and job. ~ Studs Terkel

In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the U.S. has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable. ~ Angela Davis

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age. ~ Sylvia Plath

Aiden smirked. "Wonder what this one is called?"
The hellhound's ears twitched as the massive body lowered preparing for attack. I slid my hand to the middle of the blade, feeling my heart pound and the adrenaline kick my system into overdrive. In the pit of my stomach, the cord started to unravel.
I swallowed. "Let's call this one ... Toto."
Three mouths opened in a growl that sent a cold chill down my spine, and a wave of hot, fetid breath smacked into us. Bile burned the back of my throat.
"I guess it doesn't like the name," I said, moving slowly to the right.
Aiden's powerful body tensed. "Here, Toto ... " One head snapped in his direction. "That's a good Toto."
I slipped around the ancient cross, creeping up on the hellhound from the right. The middle and left head focused on me, snapping and growlying.
Aiden clucked his tongue. "Come on, Toto, I'm pretty tasty. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

I didn't come from a trailer park. I grew up middle class and my dad had money and my mom made my lunch. I got a car when I was sixteen. I'm proud of that. ~ Kid Rock

We took dancehall and hip-hop and mixed it in the middle. I knew we had something. I thought, 'This sound is Puerto Rican sound.' ~ Daddy Yankee

In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn't puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated. Fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings, and people are morally ambiguous. The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity. ~ Margaret Atwood

Oh Distance You Are The Lover Killer
I Never Forgive You.. ~ Distance Thubron

Mrs. Winterson didn't want her body resurrected because she had never, ever loved it, not even for a single minute of a single day But although she believed in End Time, she felt that the bodily resurrection was unscientific. When I asked her about this she told me she had seen Pathé newsreels of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and she knew all about Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. She had lived through the war. Her brother had been in the air force, my dad had been in the army -- it was their life, not their history. She said that after the atomic bomb you couldn't believe in mass any more, it was all about energy. 'This life is all mass. When we go, we'll be all energy, that's all there is to it.'

I have thought about this a lot over the years. She had understood something infinitely complex and absolutely simple. For her, in the Book of Revelation, the 'things of the world' that would pass away, 'heaven and earth rolled up like a scroll,' were demonstrations of the inevitable movement from mass to energy. Her uncle, her beloved mother's beloved brother, had been a scientist. She was an intelligent woman, and somewhere in the middle of the insane theology and the brutal politics, the flamboyant depression and the refusal of books, of knowledge, of life, she had watched the atomic bomb go off and realised that the true nature of the world is energy not mass.

But she never understood that energy could have been her own true nature while she was ali ~ Jeanette Winterson

I live in the past. I take everything that has happened to me and arrange it. From a distance like that, it doesn't do any harm, you'd almost let yourself be caught in it. Our whole story is fairly beautiful. I give it a few prods and it makes a whole string of perfect moments. Then I close my eyes and try to imagine that I'm still living inside it. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

We might do better, instead, to distance ourselves, both practically and emotionally, from those whom we consider to be our equals and yet who have grown richer than us. ~ Alain De Botton

Until the Second World War, it was unthinkable for a married woman of the working or middle class to disgrace her husband by working after marriage, because her employment indicated that he was a poor provider ~ Sandra Scarr

As we stood there, chest high in water, I felt like I was in the middle of my own romance novel. ~ Em Bailey

I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus With tigery stripes, and a face on it Round as the moon, to stare up. I want to be looking at them when they come Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots. I see them already-the pale, star-distance faces. Now they are nothing, they are not even babies. I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods. They will wonder if I was important. ~ Sylvia Plath

Because sometimes it's better to believe in the impossible. To believe you are a secret agent or a private detective or a superhero and not just a kid with freckled cheeks and gangly arms who is too clumsy to leap a tipped-over garbage can in a single bound.
Until you are lying in the middle of the sidewalk, with a throbbing ankle and bloody chin, wishing you hadn't even tried. ~ John David Anderson

Is his eyesight really that bad?"
"Worse," Liam said. "So right after we got the hell out of Caledonia, we broke into this house to spend, right? I woke up in the middle of the night hearing the most awful noise, like a cow dying or something. I followed the wailing, clutching some kid's baseball bat, thinking I was going to have to bad someone's head in for us to make a clean getaway. Then I saw what was sitting at the bottom of the drained pool."
"No way," I said.
"Way," he confirmed. "Hawkeye had gone out to relieve himself and had somehow missed the giant gaping hole in the ground. Twisted his ankle and couldn't climb out of the deep end. ~ Alexandra Bracken

I grab a snap pea and bite off the end of it, and then I pick up my glass of milk. I'm overwhelmed by the emptiness in my middle that food won't fill. ~ Janet Gurtler