No Longer At Ease Quotes

Who ever planted an iroko tree - the greatest tree in the forest? You may collect all the iroko seeds in the world, open the soil and put them there. It will be in vain. The great tree chooses where to grow and we find it there, so it is with greatness in men. ~ Chinua Achebe

We returned to our palaces, these Kingdoms, but no longer at ease here in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death. ~ T. S. Eliot

MY BLACK ME

My father fed me
Invisible Man,
Native Son,
No Longer at Ease,
Black Man's Burden,
and the more I read,
the madder I got,
and I already
had reason
to scream,
but my father
kept me dreaming
of what words
I might bring
to the world. ~ Nikki Grimes

The sawdust flew. A slightly sweet fragrance floated in the immediate area. It was a sweet but subtle aroma, neither the scent of pine nor willow, but one from the past that had been forgotten, only to reappear now after all these years, fresher than ever. The workmen occasionally scooped up a handful of sawdust, which they put into their mouths and swallowed. Before that they had chewed on pieces of green bark that they had stripped from the cut wood. It had the same fragrance and it freshened their mouths, so at first that was what they had used. Now even though they were no longer chewing the bark with which they felt such a bond, the stack of corded wood was a very appealing sight. From time to time they gave the logs a friendly slap or kick. Each time they sawed off a section, which rolled to the ground from the sawhorse, they would say:

'Off with you - go over there and lie down where you belong.'

What they were thinking was that big pieces of lumber like this should be used to make tables or chairs or to repair a house or make window frames; wood like this was hard to find.

But now they were cutting it into kindling to be burned in stoves, a sad ending for good wood like this. They could see a comparison with their own lives, and this was a saddening thought. ("North China") ~ Xiao Hong

It was at a performance art space that's no longer around, Gusto House ... All of these great performers from all over the country lived on the Lower East Side, and they would take somebody's living room that opened right onto the street, open the door and charge tickets and put up chairs. ~ John Leguizamo

But at the time I didn't know that it would take more to escape black-and-white thinking than just no longer attending your parents' church. The church had provided me a sorting system, which was now ingrained. It had containers into which every person and idea and event was to be placed. ~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

Baseball is about homecoming. It is a journey by theft and strength, guile and speed, out around first to the far island of second, where foes lurk in the reefs and the green sea suddenly grows deeper, then to turn sharply, skimming the shallows, making for a shore that will show a friendly face, a color, a familiar language and, at third, to proceed, no longer by paths indirect but straight, to home. ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

It really so in your souls? Are you now henceforth dead to the world, and dead to sin, and quickened into the life of Christ? If you are so, then the text will bear to you a third and practical meaning, for it will not merely be true that your old man is condemned to die and a new nature is bestowed, but in your common actions you will try to show this by newness of actual conduct. Evils which tempted you at one time will be unable to beguile you now because you are dead to them: the charms of the painted face of the world will no longer attract your attention, for your eyes are blind to such deceitful beauties. You have obtained a new life which can only be satisfied by new delights, which can only be motivated by new purposes and constrained by new principles suitable to its own nature. This ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The fear of death is that you are dying too soon. Nobody wants to, but at the point that you die you can pray that you are no longer the same person. I pray that when I am about to die I will not be the same person that I am now. ~ Audre Lorde

And these trajectories all have one thing in common: we no longer have to obey what the New Testament teaches. We can devise our own ideas about the direction things were heading at the end of the New Testament, even ideas that contradict direct New Testament commands. This method has no controls on it. It is subjective, and the final authority is not the Bible but anyone's guess as to where the trajectory was heading. ~ Wayne A. Grudem

Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea. ~ Susan Sontag

I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women. I rather wonder now at your knowing any. ~ Jane Austen

When it comes to politics, we have an internal glass ceiling. We stand as good a chance as a man to win a political race, but women don't want to run at the same rate as men do. People point to the work-family balance issue, but I think it's much more than that. Many women don't have children, or have children who are no longer at home. There are some deeper psychological and emotional issues in play, like the fact that many of us feel like the embarrassment, humiliation and personal demonization in politics are simply more than our hearts can take. What stops us is fear. ~ Marianne Williamson

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun ... there are millions of suns left,
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand ... nor look through the eyes of the dead ... nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself. ~ Walt Whitman

The history of the two halves of post-war Europe cannot be told in isolation from one another. The legacy of the Second World War - and the pre-war decades and the war before that - forced upon the governments and peoples of east and west Europe alike some hard choices about how best to order their affairs so as to avoid any return to the past. One option - to pursue the radical agenda of the popular front movements of the 1930s - was initially very popular in both parts of Europe (a reminder that 1945 was never quite the fresh start that it sometimes appears). In eastern Europe some sort of radical transformation was unavoidable. There could be no possibility of returning to the discredited past. What, then, would replace it? Communism may have been the wrong solution, but the dilemma to which it was responding was real enough.
In the West the prospect of radical change was smoothed away, not least thanks to American aid (and pressure). The appeal of the popular-front agenda - and of Communism - faded: both were prescriptions for hard times and in the West, at least after 1952, the times were no longer so hard. And so, in the decades that followed, the uncertainties of the immediate post-war years were forgotten. But the possibility that things might take a different turn - indeed, the likelihood that they would take a different turn - had seemed very real in 1945; it was to head off a return of the old demons (unemployment, Fascism, German militarism, war, revolution) ~ Tony Judt

Trotsky's assault on Kronstadt in March 1921 marked a point of no return. There was no longer even a whiff of pretense that the Communist government had the support of the people over whom it ruled. The Red Terror had been aimed at "class enemies"; the Civil War was a struggle against "imperialists and White Guards." Even the peasant wars had pitted, in theory at least, proletarians against "capitalist farmers." But now the world's first "proletarian" government had begun slaughtering urban proletarians, too. It is no wonder that "Kronstadt" became, in addition to a black mark on Trotsky's record, a byword of Bolshevik betrayal for European socialists who refused to bow to Moscow. ~ Sean McMeekin

I once heard my mother tell my sister love only comes at a price, there's no way around it. You give up parts of yourself for love, she said. If that's true, I thought, the cost of our love had risen. And despite wanting to be as real to you as you were to me, I couldn't afford us any longer. We were beyond my means. ~ Christopher Barzak

For several years, while I searched for, found, and studied black women writers, I deliberately shut O'Connor out, feeling almost ashamed that she had reached me first. And yet, even when I no longer read her, I missed her, and realized that though the rest of America might not mind, having endured it so long, I would never be satisfied with a segregated literature. I would have to read Zora Hurston and Flannery O'Connor, Nella Larsen and Carson McCullers, Jean Toomer and William Faulkner, before I could begin to feel well read at all. ~ Alice Walker

He no longer wished to be dead. At the same time, it cannot be said that he was glad to be alive. But at least he did not resent it. He was alive, and the stubbornness of this fact had little by little begun to fascinate him - as if he had managed to outlive himself, as if he were somehow living a posthumous life. ~ Paul Auster

Perhaps our task in this shaky, fast-changing, bewildering world in which we live is to make music, at first with all that we have, and then, when that is no longer possible, to make music with what we have left. ~ Itzhak Perlman

But in our time women are no longer subject to the will of men. Quite the contrary. They have been given every opportunity to win their independence and if, after all this time, they still have not liberated themselves and thrown off their shackles, we can only arrive at one conclusion: there are no shackles to throw off. ~ Esther Vilar

He said that death marks places like a dog marking its territory. Some people can sense it right away, while others simply start to feel uncomfortable after a time. Every stay in any place betrays the quiet ubiquitousness of the dead. As he said:
'At first you always see what's alive and vibrant. You're delighted by nature, by the local church painted in different colours, by the smells and all that. But the longer you're in a place, the more the charm of those things fades. You wonder who lived here before you came to this home and this room, whose things these are, who scratched the wall above the bed and what tree the sills were cut from. Whose hands built the elaborately decorated fireplace, paved the courtyard? And where are they now? In what form? Whose idea led to these paths around the pond and who had the idea of planting a willow out the window? All the houses, avenues, parks, gardens and streets are permeated with the deaths of others. Once you start feeling this, something starts to pull you elsewhere, you start to think it's time to move on.'
He added that when we are in motion, there's no time for such idle meditations. Which is why to people on trips everything seems new and clean, virginal, and, in some sense, immortal. ~ Olga Tokarczuk

I used to float along in all of this, like a leaf on a coursing stream, but i am heavier now, less easily moved, more resolute and steadfast. I am no longer in pursuit of happiness. As I stand here at my front door, key in hand, I think it is just possible that happiness, at least for now, today, this hour, may be in pursuit of me. ~ Anne Giardini

From the moment that man submits God to moral judgment, he kills Him in his own heart. And then what
is the basis of morality? God is denied in the name of justice, but can the idea of justice be understood
without the idea of God? At this point are we not in the realm of absurdity? Absurdity is the concept that
Nietzsche meets face to face. In order to be able to dismiss it, he pushes it to extremes: morality is the
ultimate aspect of God, which must be destroyed before reconstruction can begin. Then God no longer
exists and is no longer responsible for our existence; man must resolve to act, in order to exist. ~ Albert Camus

The American house has been TV-centered for three generations. It is the focus of family life, and the life of the house correspondingly turns inward, away from whatever corresponds beyond its four walls.At the same time, the television if the families chief connection to the world. The physical envelope of the house itself no longer connects their lives to the outside in any active way; rather it seals them from it.The outside world has become an abstraction filtered through television, just as the weather is an abstraction filtered through air conditioning. ~ James Howard Kunstler

You're being a bloody fool." "As if you haven't been a time or two. Jericho, I'm holding your hand right up till the last. We'll sit up high on Dani's water tower, watch the world blink out and blink out with it. I'll be staring into your eyes at the end. And we'll smile. And I'm okay with that." I was more than okay with that. It felt right somehow. I'd found my soul mate. And whatever adventure was coming next, I was meeting it with him. Or drinking deeply of oblivion without him. I couldn't leave him. It was no longer possible. I wasn't sure it had ever been. ~ Karen Marie Moning

We are all inclined to ... direct our inquiry not by the matter itself, but by the views of our opponents; and, even when interrogating oneself, one pushes the inquiry only to the point at which one can no longer offer any opposition. Hence a good inquirer will be one who is ready in bringing forward the objections proper to the genus, and that he will be when he has gained an understanding of the differences. ~ Aristotle.

When I am no longer desperate, when I have got all this sorted out, I promise you here and now that I will never ever complain again about how the shop is doing, or about the soullessness of modern pop music, or the stingy fillings you get in the sandwich bar up the road (£1.60 for egg mayonnaise and crispy bacon, and none of us have ever had more than four pieces of crispy bacon in a whole round yet) or anything at all. I will beam beatifically at all times, just from sheer relief. ~ Nick Hornby

A knock at the door pulled me from my thoughts. I opened it, expecting to see Gupta, but it was Amar. His expression looked carved in stone and his lips were set in a grim line. But the moment we held each other's gaze, something in him relented. His hands tightened at his side.
"I would never want to cause you pain."
I flinched. "I am not in pain."
Lie.
"I am not some animal you wounded," I added.
Truth.
"It is only a night longer," he said.
The warning voice from the halls echoed back to me: You are running out of moon time. Listen to my warning rhyme. What would happen tomorrow?
Amar hesitated, before reaching out to hold my hand. I stared at the circlet of my hair around his wrist. Bitterness rose in my throat. I glanced from my bracelet to the other one on his wrist--black leather and knotted--dull and malevolent.
"Do these past days mean nothing?" he asked, so gently that my weak self curled around his words.
But I would no longer be weak. I tapped into that power in my veins and a shimmering wall of flames sprang up between us. Amar jumped back, shocked and then…amused.
"A little ruthlessness is to be admired, but it's cruel to play with a powerless heart. ~ Roshani Chokshi

You willingly tie yourself to these leashes. And you willingly become utterly socially autistic. You no longer pick up on basic human communication clues. You're at a table with three humans, all of whom are looking at you and trying to talk to you, and you're staring at a screen, ~ Dave Eggers

I ended up living at OJ's because Nicole bought a home that no longer had a guest house. OJ offered his guest house to me. Anybody in LA looking for a place knows the best places to live are guest houses. ~ Kato Kaelin

Nuclear deterrence will remain a vital aspect of security. or Nuclear deterrence will have a smaller role in future security.

Sources are split in their assessment of the importance of nuclear weapons and the validity of traditional nuclear deterrence in the 2001 - 2015 period. On the one hand are those who see nuclear weapons as decreasingly effective tools in deterring war. On the other are those experts who concede that nuclear weapons may have a different role than at the height of the Cold War, but who argue that they remain the ultimate deterrent, with considerable effect on the actions of even rogue states.

Many experts who state a moral opposition to nuclear weapons have translated this into forecasts of a globalized world in which nuclear deterrence no longer makes sense. With greater economic interdependence, this argument runs, even the so-called "rogue states" will be reconciled to the international order, renouncing or reducing their overt or covert nuclear arsenals. ~ Sam J. Tangredi

The exhaustion apparent in his slumped shoulders made her heart twist. He looked so tired she wanted to rub his back and stroke his hair, as a mother would for a child. This was natural compassion, she decided, and walked toward him to give him what comfort she could.
He finally heard her and lifted his head from his arms. Locks of sandy hair fell over his forehead and he looked up at her with deep indigo eyes. Even in the dim light, she could see pain etched across his features. What horrors stalked his dreams? What could she do to help him sleep peacefully?
For a long moment they gazed at one another and then Huiann rested her hand on his shoulder. At the same time, Alan leaned into her body. They came together like two halves of an eggshell carefully broken. He slid a hand around her waist and pulled her closer. His face pressed against her breast. His arms wrapped around her.
She held him, cradling his head, rubbing his back. His body was so warm in her embrace. Her heart beat steadily and her stomach flipped in slow, lazy somersaults. The moment she'd sensed coming for so long was here. What would happen next?
For a long time, they remained locked in perfect union, contented, safe, no longer alone. As she caressed his hair, soft as she'd imagined, he tilted his face to look up at her. His eyes glittered in the lamplight. He wanted more and Huiann realized she did too. ~ Bonnie Dee

Later, while she was sleeping, she woke to the sound of Ray moving through the house. At first she confused. She thought she was still married to Bill. Then, when she had everythbing straight in her head, shame washed over her because she had denied her first husband when she had told Ray that no man had ever been as good to her as he had. But it was true, wasn't it? She lay in bed, listening to him opening cabinets, and she knew it was impossible to say what was between people, and the longer you were with someone, the harder it was to even come close. All she knew was that once she had been with Bill and now she was with Ray. She had come out of her old life and into a new one, and even if she wished for it, which she didn't-not really, she didn't, not even in her heart of hearts-she couldn't go back.
~Clare ~ Lee Martin

Men at the close of the dark Ages may have been rude and unlettered and unlearned in everything but wars with heathen tribes, more barbarous than themselves, but they were clean. They were like children; the first beginnings of their rude arts have all the clean pleasure of children. We have to conceive them in Europe as a whole living under little local governments, feudal in so far as they were a survival of fierce wars with the barbarians, often monastic and carrying a far more friendly and fatherly character, still faintly imperial as far as Rome still ruled as a great legend. But in Italy something had survived more typical of the finer spirit of antiquity; the republic, Italy, was dotted with little states, largely democratic in their ideals, and often filled with real citizens. But the city no longer lay open as under the Roman peace, but was pent in high walls for defence against feudal war and all the citizens had to be soldiers. ~ G.K. Chesterton

When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become! ~ Charles Darwin

There is a part of everything that remains unexplored, for we have fallen into the habit of remembering, whenever we use our eyes, what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the slightest thing contains a little that is unknown. We must find it. To describe a blazing fire or a tree in a plain, we must remain before that fire or that tree until they no longer resemble for us any other tree or any other fire. ~ Gustave Flaubert

There is no longer any anonymity on the Web - unless we mandate it. The most personal information about your online habits is collected, bought and sold, often instantaneously and invisibly. Data collection is a business driven by profits at consumers' expense. ~ Jackie Speier

I no longer have patience for certain things, not because I've become arrogant, but simply because I reached a point in my life where I do not want to waste more time with what displeases me or hurts me. I have no patience for cynicism, excessive criticism and demands of any nature. I lost the will to please those who do not like me, to love those who do not love me and to smile at those who do not want to smile at me. I no longer spend a single minute on those who lie or want to manipulate. I decided not to coexist anymore with pretense, hypocrisy, dishonesty and cheap praise. I do not tolerate selective erudition nor academic arrogance. I do not adjust either to popular gossiping. I hate conflict and comparisons. I believe in a world of opposites and that's why I avoid people with rigid and inflexible personalities. In friendship I dislike the lack of loyalty and betrayal. I do not get along with those who do not know how to give a compliment or a word of encouragement. Exaggerations bore me and I have difficulty accepting those who do not like animals. And on top of everything I have no patience for anyone who does not deserve my patience. ~ Meryl Streep