No Mans Land Quotes

IT is not impossible that among the English readers of this book there may be one who in 1915 and 1916 was in one of those trenches that were woven like a web among the ruins of Monchy-au-Bois. In that case he had opposite him at that time the 73rd Hanoverian Fusiliers, who wear as their distinctive badge a brassard with ' Gibraltar ' inscribed on it in gold, in memory of the defence of that fortress under General Elliot; for this, besides Waterloo, has its place in the regiment's history.

At the time I refer to I was a nineteen-year-old lieutenant in command of a platoon, and my part of the line was easily recognizable from the English side by a row of tall shell-stripped trees that rose from the ruins of Monchy. My left flank was bounded by the sunken road leading to Berles-au-Bois, which was in the hands of the English ; my right was marked by a sap running out from our lines, one that helped us many a time to make our presence felt by means of bombs and rifle-grenades.

I daresay this reader remembers, too, the white tom-cat, lamed in one foot by a stray bullet, who had his headquarters in No-man's-land. He used often to pay me a visit at night in my dugout. This creature, the sole living being that was on visiting terms with both sides, always made on me an impression of extreme mystery. This charm of mystery which lay over all that belonged to the other side, to that danger zone full of unseen figures, is one of the strongest impressions that the wa ~ Ernst Junger

There is definitely a way in which women are raised to be less proactive, less business-oriented, and less willing to jump into creative no man's land. I think media has more of an influence on how we perceive gender identity than anything else. ~ Felicia Day

She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man's land between life and death, sleeping and waking. ~ Angela Carter

Strange, the impact of History, the grip it had on us, yet it was nothing but words. Accidental accretions for the most part, leaving most of the story out. We have not yet begun to explore the true power of the Word, I thought. What if we broke all the rules, played games with the evidence, manipulated language itself, made History a partisan ally? Of course, the Phantom was already onto this, wasn't he? Ahead of us again. What were his dialectical machinations if not the dissolution of the natural limits of language, the conscious invention of a space, a spooky artificial no-man's land, between logical alternatives. I loved to debate both sides of any issue, but thinking about that strange space in between made me sweat. Paradox was one thing I hated more than psychiatrists and lady journalists. ~ Robert Coover

Emotions bleed where love frowns and despair smiles
My home is within the core
The center of this place, it lays down my heart for love
My love's (in) the Center of War ~ Criss Jami

No treaty but trenches
all quiet
years to years
home in no man's land. ~ David Levithan

Rodwell wandered into No Man's Land and put a bullet through his ears. On Sunday, Robert sat on his bed in the old hotel at Bailleul and read what Rodwell had written.
To my daughter, Laurine;
Love your mother.
Make your prayers against despair.
I am alive in everything I touch. Touch these pages and you have me in your fingertips. We survive in one another. Everything lives forever. Believe it. Nothing dies.
I am your father always. ~ Timothy Findley

Let's not be too harsh where poets are concerned. They have to live in no-man's-land, halfway between dreams and reality. ~ Arthur Gordon

Venice is a place where the past is still hanging around, waiting for an appointment with the future; but the future hasn't shown up. In the meantime it is a kind of no man's land, given up by default and occupied by irregulars and their dogs. ~ Jack Smith

My first novel, 'The Tiger's Daughter,' embodies the loneliness I felt but could not acknowledge, even to myself, as I negotiated the no man's land between the country of my past and the continent of my present. ~ Bharati Mukherjee

No-man's land under snow is like the face of the moon: chaotic, crater ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness. ~ Wilfred Owen

I'll never forgive you for what you did to me. You cheated me, you've driven me out of my home and now I'm in a no-man's-land but good - there's no place for me any more in Maycomb, and I'll never be entirely at home anywhere else. Her ~ Harper Lee

Many people who are going through the early stages of the awakening process are no longer certain what their outer purpose is. What drives the world no longer drives them. Seeing the madness of our civilization so clearly, they feel somewhat alienated from the culture around them. Some feel that they inhabit a no-man's-land between two worlds. They are no longer run by the ego, yet the arising awareness has not yet become fully integrated into their lives. Inner and outer purpose have not merged. ~ Eckhart Tolle

In no man's land, alien is the queen. ~ Toba Beta

Nw a kind of no-man's-land occupied by a neo-Elizabethan hugger-mugger of racketeers, drug dealers, gangsters and abortionists, the shark-toothed area seemed only a rowdier version of the city all around - a freewheeling, free-spending center of free enterprise. ~ Pico Iyer

His hand was a claw, sharp enough to open her. She would be like all the others - Ruta Badowski, in her broken dancing shoes. Tommy Duffy, still with the dirt of his last baseball game under his nails. Gabriel Johnson, taken on the best day of his life. Or even Mary White, holding out for a future that never arrived. She'd be like all those beautiful, shining boys marching off to war, rifles at their hips and promises on their lips to their best girls that they'd be home in time for Christmas, the excitement of the game showing in their bright faces. They'd come home men, heroes with adventures to tell about, how they'd walloped the enemy and put the world right side up again, funneled it into neat lines of yes and no. Black and white. Right and wrong. Here and there. Us and them. Instead, they had died tangled in barbed wire in Flanders, hollowed by influenza along the Western Front, blown apart in no-man's-land, writhing in trenches with those smiles still in place, courtesy of the phosgene, chlorine, or mustard gas. Some had come home shell-shocked and blinking, hands shaking, mumbling to themselves, following orders in some private war still taking place in their minds. Or, like James, they'd simply vanished, relegated to history books no one bothered to read, medals put in cupboards kept closed. Just a bunch of chess pieces moved about by unseen hands in a universe bored with itself. ~ Libba Bray

This is all a tale of an older world and a forgotten countryside. At this moment of time change has come; a screaming line of steel runs through the heather of no-man's-land, and the holiday-maker claims the valleys for his own. But this busyness is but of yesterday, and not ten years ago the fields lay quiet to the gaze of placid beasts and the wandering stars. This story I have culled from the grave of an old fashion, and set down for the love of a great soul and the poetry of life. ~ John Buchan

He dressed quickly in silence, refusing her tissues. He shakily pulled a wad of uncounted notes from his wallet, abandoned them in the no man's land between, and escaped in an indecent haste, leaving the shameful tableau in his wake. ~ Darren White

I was always stuck in a musical no man's land. ~ Ritchie Blackmore

I caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror as we glided p. I looked as eroded as the groaning lift. What had happened to the fresh-faced belle from Boston, Mass.? The woman who stared back at me was at the dreaded age between forty-five and fifty, that no-man's land of sag, oncoming wrinkle, and stealthy approach of menopause.
"I hate this elevator, too," I said grimly.
Zoe grinned and pinched my cheek.
"Mom, even Gwyneth Paltrow would look like hell in that mirror."
I had to smile. That was such a Zoe-like remark. ~ Tatiana De Rosnay

School-leavers unfortunately will come away thinking the First World War consisted simply of 'going over the top' on the Western Front to slaughter in no-man's-land, when the conflict extended so much further, to the collapse of four empires and numerous civil wars. ~ Antony Beevor

One evening when we were sitting out in the garden she wanted to know whether she would be able to see the border between India and East Pakistan from the plane. When my father laughed and said, why, did she really think the border was a long black line with green on one side and scarlet on the other, like it was in a school atlas, she was not so much offended as puzzled.

'No, that wasn't what I meant', she said. Of course not. But surely there's something - trenches perhaps, or soldiers, or guns pointing at each other, or even just barren strips of land. Don't they call it no-man's land?...[I]f there aren't any trenches or anything, how are people to know? I mean, where's the difference then? And if there's no difference, both sides will be the same; it'll be just like it used to be before, when we used to catch a train in Dhaka and get off in Calcutta the next day without anybody stopping us. What was it all for then - Partition and all the killing and everything - if there isn't something in between? ~ Amitav Ghosh

Sometimes parties of men went spud-gathering in no-man's-land. About a mile to the right of us, where the lines were closer together, there was a patch of potatoes that was frequented both by the Fascists and ourselves. We went there in the daytime, they only at night, as it was commanded by our machine-guns. One night to our annoyance they turned out en masse and cleared up the whole patch. We discovered another patch further on, where there was practically no cover and you had to lift the potatoes lying on your belly - a fatiguing job. If their machine-gunners spotted you, you had to flatten yourself out like a rat when it squirms under a door, with the bullets cutting up the clods a few yards behind you. It seemed worth it at the time. Potatoes were getting very scarce. If you got a sackful you could take them down to the cook-house and swap them for a water-bottleful of coffee. And ~ George Orwell

The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man's-land. ~ P.D. James

Over and over in the play my character says, "I'm thirty-two years old," as if that should explain everything that's wrong in her life. I don't know what it's like to be thirty-two, but I can imagine. I imagine she means she's stuck in an in-between time, she's at an age that isn't a milestone but more of a no-man's-land, an age where she's feeling like her hopes are fading. ~ Lauren Graham

Here is the place called Awake. On the other side of this line is the country of Asleep. And you see this shaded area in between? Don't linger there. It is No Man's Land. ~ Ann-Marie MacDonald

In the middle of the cemetery is a grassy plane, strangely vacant. There are no granite tombs or crumbling concrete, just a sun-washed treeless patch of green known as "No Man's Land." Here 1,500 unidentified bodies are buried. At one time, their skin burned with yellow fever; now they lie in a cool, dark place where long ago their arms and legs, hands and feet, were intertwined for eternity. ~ Molly Caldwell Crosby

Translated poetry filled the no-man's-land between my own work and other writers', and I found this fascinating to explore. ~ Edwin Morgan

Oh, not the kind of courage that makes a soldier go across no-man's land. That's the kind that he summons up because he has to. This kind is- well, it is part of one's will to live, part of one's instinct for self-preservation. Sometimes, we have to kill a little so we can live, when we don't-when women don't, they cry themselves to sleep and have their mothers wash out their hose every day. ~ Harper Lee

Competitiveness demands flexibility, choice and openness - or Europe will fetch up in a no-man's land between the rising economies of Asia and market-driven North America. ~ David Cameron

I never had anything before this all started. I've lived in No-Man's-Land for thirty years. ~ Glenda Millard

I am an anomaly - a woman alone, too young to be widowed and too old to be looking for a mate. I occupy that no man's land - no woman's land - between youth and old age. ~ Linda Gillard

Grey Nights
A while we wandered (thus it is I dream!) Through a long, sandy track of No Man's Land, Where only poppies grew among the sand, The which we, plucking, cast with scant esteem, And ever sadlier, into the sad stream, Which followed us, as we went, hand in hand, Under the estranged stars, a road unplanned, Seeing all things in the shadow of a dream.
And ever sadlier, as the stars expired, We found the poppies rarer, till thine eyes Grown all my light, to light me were too tired, And at their darkening, that no surmise Might haunt me of the lost days we desired, After them all I flung those memories! ~ Ernest Dowson

As the yellow dawn comes up behind us, the Andalusian sentry, muffled in his cloak, begins singing. Across no-man's-land, a hundred or two hundred yards away, you can hear the Fascist sentry also singing. On ~ George Orwell

... no one wanted to think about the gangs of no-hope teenagers who already took over the nearby park all day, drinking lager and waiting for something to happen to them, trapped in a forgotten village in no-man's land between a ten-shop town and an amorphous industrial sprawl. ~ Meera Syal

the euro, it seems, is stuck in a political no man's land – trapped between two opposing world views. And the battleground is not economics, but ethics. ~ Martin Cohen

It was an unusual sunset. Having sat behind opaque drapery all day, I had not realized that a storm was pushing in and that much of the sky was the precise shade of old suits of armor one finds in museums. At the same time, patches of brilliance engaged in a territorial dispute with the oncoming onyx of the storm. Light and darkness mingled in strange ways both above and below. Shadows and sunshine washed together, streaking the landscape with an unearthly study of glare and gloom. Bright clouds and black folded into each other in a no-man's land of the sky. The autumn trees took on the appearance of sculptures formed in a dream, their leaden-colored trunks and branches and iron-red leaves all locked in an infinite and unliving moment, unnaturally timeless. The gray lake slowly tossed and tumbled in a dead sleep, nudging unconsciously against its breakwall of numb stone. A scene of contradiction and ambivalence, a tragicomedic haze over all. A land of perfect twilight. ~ Thomas Ligotti

We will not be caught in no man's land, ~ Masai Ujiri

I learned lots of things those first few weeks. First and foremost, I learned what it meant to be a refugee. From the moment I stepped into Kakuma, I became a boy without a country. A refugee camp is a kind of no-man's-land. No one lives there by choice. You end up in places like Kakuma when you have no better option. Everyone who lived there just wanted to go home. ~ Lopez Lomong

Watching her, he saw again how she teetered between adolescence and adulthood, with a raw sensuality that had to deposit her in a kind of no-man's land
too much a woman for boys her own age, too young for fully adult men. ~ Keith Ablow

To be sure, we would not allow the world, if we can help it, to peep into our soul, much less to enter it. Our No-Man's-Land is hedged about with a wire entanglement of insincerities. And often we take refuge in a temperament, a pose, or a mystic mood. ~ Ameen Rihani

Have we even so much as discovered and settled the shores? Let a man travel on foot along the coastand tell me if it looks like a discovered and settled country, and not rather, for the most part, like a desolate island, and No-Man's Land. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Rats may scamper across it and remain rats. Birds may fly above it and remain
birds; they may alight and tear and eat and prick up their heads to stare motionless
and beady for a moment before pecking and eating again, and remain birds. But no
man may venture into this space between the lines and remain a man. That is the
difference. No man may enter, either stealthily on his belly alone, or noisily on two
feet racing through glue with a thousand versions of himself firing, falling, on either
side as far as the eye can see, and remain a man. It is possible to become a man
once more if you make it back behind your line again, but you suspend your
humanity for your sojourn in between. That is why the place is called No Man's Land. ~ Ann-Marie MacDonald

It is night at the front, a shadow, a shot. The Jew who has just fired
hears a moan ...
And then, mother, the hair stands up on his head, for only a few feet from him in the darkness the enemy voice is reciting in Hebrew the prayer of the dying. Ai, God, the soldier has cut down a Jewish brother! Ai, misery! He drops his rifle and runs into no man's land, insane with shame and grief. Insane, you understand? The enemy fires at him, his comrades shout at him to come back. But he refuses; he stays in no man's land and dies. Ai, misery, ai ... ! ~ Andre Schwarz-Bart

Bruno withdrew from the field of history more resolutely than Vigo; that is why I prefer the former's retrospect but the latter's prospect. As an anarch, I am determined to go along with nothing, ultimately take nothing seriously – at least not nihilistically, but rather as a border guard in no man's land, who sharpens his eyes and ears between the tides. ~ Ernst Junger

We weren't a couple, but friends didn't spoon every night. Fate and I were officially in relationship-no-man's-land. ~ Donna Augustine

For me to write, I need to work my way back out of one home, consider another, and find the no-man's-land in between. I need to go to one Andre, unwrite that Andre, choose the other Andre across the way, only then go looking for the middle Andre, whose voice will most likely approximate the voice of an Andre able to camouflage all telltale signs that English is not his mother tongue, but that neither is French, nor Italian, nor Arabic. Writing must almost have to fail - it must almost not succeed. If it goes well from the start, if I am in the groove, if I come home to writing, it's not the writing for me. I need to have lost the key and to find no replacement. Writing is not a homecoming. Writing is an alibi. Writing is a perpetual stammer of alibis. ~ Andre Aciman

I was in a kind of no-man's-land, a place between places. The mind plays all sorts of tricks, gets up to all kinds of things while we ourselves are slumbering in a white zone that looks for all the world like inattention to the onlooker. ~ Diane Setterfield

In our educational institutions applied science may almost be described as a "no-man's land." ~ Edward Teller

Christine taught her that the world you inherited didn't have to be the world you left behind. Nothing was pre-determined. Not even No Man's Land. ~ Geonn Cannon

I try to be personal, but that's not me, either. What seems to work best, and the tweets I enjoy reading the most, are when comedians just give jokes. It's a great joke of the day thing, especially revolving around current events. But that's not my forte either, so I find myself in no man's land with Twitter. I don't particularly enjoy giving me out to everyone. ~ John Cho

Going from a child actor to an adult actor is not an easy thing, and I was sort of lost in a no man's land for a while, trying to figure out who I was as a person, and going from a young actor to an adult actor. ~ C. Thomas Howell

The good needs fear no law, It is his safety and the bad man's awe. ~ Philip Massinger

Having a baby or not having one was not his decision. It was mine. There isn't a single couple where when it comes to having a baby the man's decision counted in any real way. Couples who have babies usually have them because the woman involved is determined to do so. The only time a man's POV counts is if he is a domineering, insecure jackass with no respect for you or your body. Most men think it would be 'nice' and then go along with whatever you want. ~ Radhika Vaz

The more important factors are a man's perseverance, his ability to innovate and think of new ideas, to be willing to adapt to changing conditions, to push almost tirelessly at a task or several at a time, during the difficult seasons as well as the prosperous. Certainly a man may be all these on his own, and succeed, wife or no – but to have a wife who possessed these qualities, who could bring out in her husband such steadiness and strength of character by her example and unyielding affection… The worth of such a wife is immeasurable. - James Laurence to his grandson, Laurie ~ Trix Wilkins

You are already part of a family," Desari reminded him,her body brushing his, her arms circling his waist from behind. She had materialized out of nowhere,her presence filling the healing chamber.
She was there.Completing him. His air. His heart.The part of his soul that really lived and loved and mattered. Without conscious thought he sent up a quick prayer of thanks that he had been granted such a priceless treasure when he felt so undeserving of her.
Julian loved the way she smelled. He inhaled, and her scent washed over him, clean and sexy. "This mess? With all these males?" Julian allowed a low, rumbling growl to escape. "This is no family. This is a man's nightmare."
Desari deliberately moved against him, her body soft and pliant with invitation. "Is that what you think?"
"What I think is"-Julian circled her slender throat with his large hand in mock threat- "you are deliberately tempting me when I have important, pressing business to atttend to. ~ Christine Feehan

Here's another. Kill man's sense of values. Kill his capacity to recognise greatness or to achieve it. Great men can't be ruled. We don't want any great men. Don't deny conception of greatness. Destroy it from within. The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional. Set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept – and you stop the impetus to effort in men, great or small. You stop all incentive to improvement, to excellence, to perfection. Laugh at Roark and hold Peter Keating as a great architect. You've destroyed architecture. Build Lois Cook and you've destroyed literature. Hail Ike and you've destroyed the theatre. Glorify Lancelot Clankey and you've destroyed the press. Don't set out to raze all shrines – you'll frighten men, Enshrine mediocrity - and the shrines are razed.

Then there's another way. Kill by laughter. Laughter is an instrument of human joy. Learn to use it as a weapon of destruction. Turn it into a sneer. It's simple. Tell them to laugh at everything. Tell them that a sense of humour is an unlimited virtue. Don't let anything remain sacred in a man's soul – and his soul won't be sacred to him. Kill reverence and you've killed the hero in man. One doesn't reverence with a giggle. He'll obey and he'll set no limits to obedience – anything goes – nothing is too serious. ~ Ayn Rand

What is Reality, in the last resort," he asked, "but the thing a man's vision brings to him--to believe? There's no other criterion. The criticism of opposite types of mind is merely a confession of their own limitations." Being ~ Algernon Blackwood

They'd managed to make it through the room without waking the maid, and all the way to the top of the stairs before the next problem had arisen in the form of the women returning from the ball and entering the foyer below. In a panic, Daniel and Richard had rushed back along the upper hall, and then ducked into this room to wait for the way to be clear.
"We'd best move while we have the chance," Richard said behind him. "Once they have Christiana in bed, the girls will no doubt seek their own rooms and this could be one of them."
Daniel nodded and eased the door open to check the hall. When a quick glance in both directions showed it to be empty, he pulled the door wide and stepped out of the way for Richard to lead with his burden. He then started to follow, but had barely taken a step when Richard suddenly whirled back toward him. Caught by surprise, Daniel was slow to react. Before he could, Richard cursed, and suddenly thrust George's body on him.
Pure instinct made Daniel grab at the blanket-encased corpse. He then found himself stumbling back under a push from Richard, a very stiff George caught to his chest in some sort of macabre dance as the door closed leaving him alone in the dark room. Regaining his footing, Daniel stood absolutely still in the lightless chamber, simply listening as he tried to figure out why Richard hadn't followed him into the room. He relaxed a little when he heard the other man's voice muffled through the door, saying, "Ladies. ~ Lynsay Sands

One a' them rules is don't go trusting another man's path...People do it, they do what their mommies and daddies did, they make them same mistakes, they have them same joys and hurts, they just repeating. Trees don't grow exactly where their momma is; ain't no room...I weren't following no one up through life. ~ Beth Lewis

A man's life is worth much more than any sacrifice, no matter how great. For the greatest, the most just, the noblest cause on earth is the right to live ... ~ Yasmina Khadra

A face that bore no mark of pain or fear or guilt...The shape of his mouth was pride, and more: it was as if he took pride in being proud. The angular planes of his cheeks made her think of arrogance, of tension, of scorn - yet the face had none of these qualities, it had their final sum: a look of serene determination and of certainty, and the look of a ruthless innocence which would not seek forgiveness or grant it. It was a face that had nothing to hide or to escape, a face with no fear of being seen or of seeing, so that the first thing she grasped about him was the intense perceptiveness of his eyes - he looked as if his faculty of sight were his best-loved tool and its exercise were a limitless, joyous adventure, as if his eyes imparted a superlative value to himself and to the world - to himself for his ability to see, to the world for being a place so eagerly worth seeing. It seemed to her for a moment that she was in the presence of a being who was pure consciousness - yet she had never been so aware of a man's body. ~ Ayn Rand

Even as I wrote my note to Fern, for instance, expressing sentiments and regrets that were real, a part of me was noticing what a fine and sincere note it was, and anticipating the effect on Fern of this or that heartfelt phrase, while yet another part was observing the whole scene of a man in a dress shirt and no tie sitting at his breakfast nook writing a heartfelt note on his last afternoon alive, the blondwood table's surface trembling with sunlight and the man's hand steady and face both haunted by regret and ennobled by resolve, this part of me sort of hovering above and just to the left of myself, evaluating the scene, and thinking what a fine and genuine-seeming performance in a drama it would make if only we all had not already been subject to countless scenes just like it in dramas ever since we first saw a movie or read a book, which somehow entailed that real scenes like the one of my suicide note were now compelling and genuine only to their participants, and to anyone else would come off as banal and even somewhat cheesy or maudlin, which is somewhat paradoxical when you consider – as I did, setting there at the breakfast nook – that the reason scenes like this will seem stale or manipulative to an audience is that we've already seen so many of them in dramas, and yet the reason we've seen so many of them in dramas is that the scenes really are dramatic and compelling and let people communicate very deep, complicated emotional realities that are almost impossibl ~ David Foster Wallace

The socialists are sometimes wont to reproach liberalism with a lack of
consistency, It is, they maintain, illogical to restrict the activity of the state in the economic sphere exclusively to the protection of property. It is difficult to see why, if the state is not to remain completely neutral, its intervention has to be limited to protecting the rights of property owners.
This reproach would be justified only if the opposition of liberalism to all governmental activity in the economic sphere going beyond the protection of property stemmed from an aversion in principle against any activity on the part of the state. But that is by no means the case. The reason why liberalism opposes a further extension of the sphere of governmental activity is precisely that this would, in effect, abolish private ownership of the means of production. And in private property the liberal sees the principle most suitable for the organization of man's life in society.
38
The Foundations of Liberal Policy
Liberalism is therefore far from disputing the necessity of a machinery of state, a system of law, and a government. It is a grave misunderstanding to associate it in any way with the idea of anarchism. For the liberal, the state is an absolute necessity, since the most important tasks are incumbent upon it: the protection not only of private property, but also of peace, for in the absence of the latter the full benefits of private property cannot be reaped. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

The map of America is a map of endlessness, of opening out, of forever and ever. No man's face would make you think of it but his hope might, his courage might. ~ Archibald MacLeish

Hence it is truly said of heaven 'in heaven there is no ownership. If any there took upon him to call anything his own, he would straightway be thrust out into hell and become an evil spirit.'4 But it is also said 'To him that overcometh I will give a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.'5 What can be more a man's own than this new name which even in eternity remains a secret between God and him? And what shall we take this secrecy to mean? Surely, that each of the redeemed shall forever know and praise some one aspect of the Divine beauty better than any other creature can. Why else were individuals created, but that God, loving all infinitely, should love each differently? ~ C.S. Lewis

Antonio stepped into Pax's path and said, in English, "Go back to Lazarus and tell him we'll settle whatever claim he has on Sara. She is Baldoni. Ours. Run tell him that, figlio di puttana."
"He's not from Lazarus," she snapped.
"All the better," Antonio said. "Nothing to stop me from cutting his bollocks off."
"You will leave his bollocks precisely as they are."
"I am your closest male relation - "
"You are my closest male idiot. No-one removes any man's balls on my behalf. I will do whatever castrating is necessary among my acquaintance."
"Children," Uncle Bernadro said midly, "he speaks Italian. ~ Joanna Bourne

His grin split even wider. "I'd love the chance to prove you wrong."

And when he did, she'd know what he was thinking. She'd know how much he despised the woman who claimed to be a Vetter and allowed the Commander's beloved daughter to lifebond with a man who ended up murdering her. Fiona had come to the Wiccan Haus to get away from the public's hatred and scorn, not see it behind this man's beautiful smile and feel it no matter how warm and gentle his hands.

- Psychic Lies ~ Sara Daniel

On another plane, only a brute in a state of irrational fury can imagine that men should be sadistically
tortured in order to obtain their consent. Such an act only accomplishes the subjugation of one man by
another, in an outrageous relationship between persons. The representative of rational totality is content,
on the contrary, to allow the object to subdue the person in the soul of man. The highest mind is first of
all reduced to the level of the lowest by the police technique of joint accusation. Then five, ten, twenty
nights of insomnia will culminate an illusory conviction and will bring yet another dead soul into the
world. From this point of view, the only psychological revolution known to our times since Freud's has
been brought about by the NKVD and the political police in general. Guided by a determinist hypothesis
that calculates the weak points and the degree of elasticity of the soul, these new techniques have once
again thrust aside one of man's limits and have attempted to demonstrate that no individual psychology is
original and that the common measure of all human character is matter. They have literally created the
physics of the soul. ~ Albert Camus

Old Rekohu's claim to singularity, however, lay in its unique pacific creed. Since time immemorial, the Moriori's priestly caste dictated that whosoever spilt a man's blood killed his own mana - his honor, his worth, his standing & his soul. No Moriori would shelter, feed, converse with, or even see the persona non grata. If the ostracized murderer survived his first winter, the desperation of solitude usually drove him to a blowhole on Cape Young, where he took his life.

Consider this, Mr. D'Arnoq urged us. Two thousand savages (Mr. Evans's best guess) enshrine "Thou Shalt Not Kill" in word & in deed & frame an oral "Magna Carta" to create a harmony unknown elsewhere for the sixty centuries since Adam first tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. War was as alien a concept to the Moriori as the telescope is to the Pygmy. Peace, not a hiatus betwixt wars but millennia of imperishable peace, rules these far-flung islands. Who can deny Old Rekohu lay closer to More's Utopia than our States of Progress governed by war-hungry princelings in Versailles & Vienna, Washington & Westminster? "Here," declaimed Mr. D'Arnoq, "and where only, were those elusive phantasms, those noble savages, framed in flesh & blood!" (Henry, as we later made our back to the Musket confessed, "I could never describe a race of savages too backwards to throw a spear as 'noble. ~ David Mitchell

Here's another way. This is most important. Don't allow men to be happy. Happiness is self-contained and self-sufficient. Happy men have no time and no use for you. Happy men are free men. So kill their joy in living. Take away from them what they want. Make them think that the mere thought of a personal desire is evil. Bring them to a state where saying 'I want' is no longer a natural right, but a shameful admission. Altruism is of great help in this. Unhappy men will come to you. They'll need you. They'll come for consolation, for support, for escape. Nature allows no vacuum. Empty man's soul – and the space is yours to fill. ~ Ayn Rand

I have time for only one drink," Jordan said, glancing at the ormolu clock on the opposite wall. "I've promised Alexandra to stand at her side at a ball tonight and beam approvingly at a friend of hers."
Whenever Jordan mentioned his wife's name, Ian noted with amusement, the other man's entire expression softened.
"Care to join us?"
Ian shook his head and accepted his drink from the footman. "It sounds boring as hell."
"I don't think it'll be boring, precisely. My wife has taken it upon herself to defy the entire ton and sponsor the girl back into the ranks. Based on some of the things Alexandra said in her note, that will be no mean feat."
"Why is that?" Ian inquired with more courtesy than interest.
Jordan sighed and leaned his head back, weary from the hours he'd been working for the last several weeks and unexcited at the prospect of dancing attendance on a damsel in distress-one he'd never set eyes on. "The girl fell into the clutches of some man two years ago and an ugly scandal ensued."
Thinking of Elizabeth and himself, Ian said casually, "That's not an uncommon occurrence, evidently."
"From what Alex wrote me, it seems this case is rather extreme."
"In what way?"
"For one thing, there's every chance the young woman will get the cut direct tonight from half the ton-and that's the half that will be willing to acknowledge her. Alex has retaliated by calling in the heavy guns-my grandmother, to be exact, and Tony and mys ~ Judith McNaught

It is obvious that in his day-dreams he is a warrior, not a professor; all of the men he admires were military. His opinion of women, like every man's, is an objectification of his own emotion towards them, which is obviously one of fear. "Forget not thy whip"-- but nine women out of ten would get the whip away from him, and he knew it, so he kept away from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks. [...] [H]e is so full of fear and hatred that spontaneous love of mankind seems to him impossible. He has never conceived of the man who, with all the fearlessness and stubborn pride of the superman, nevertheless does not inflict pain because he has no wish to do so. Does any one suppose that Lincoln acted as he did from fear of hell? Yet to Nietzsche, Lincoln is abject, Napoleon magnificent. [...] I dislike Nietzsche because he likes the contemplation of pain, because he erects conceit into duty, because the men whom he most admires are conquerors, whose glory is cleverness in causing men to die. But I think the ultimate argument against his philosophy, as against any unpleasant but internally self-conscious ethic, lies not in an appeal to facts, but in an appeal to the emotions. Nietzsche despises universal love; I feel it the motive power to all that I desire as regards the world. His followers have had their innings, but we may hope that it is coming rapidly to an end. ~ Bertrand Russell

When we pulled up to Marlboro Man's house, I saw my Camry sitting in his driveway. I didn't expect it to be there; I figured it was still on Marlboro Man's parents' road, sitting all crooked in the ditch where I'd left it the night before. Marlboro Man had already fixed it, fishing it out of the ditch and repairing the mangled tires and probably, knowing him, filling the tank with gas.
"Oh, thank you so much," I said as we walked toward the front door. "I thought maybe I'd killed it."
"Aw, it's fine," he replied. "But you might want to learn to drive before you get in it again." He flashed his mischievous grin.
I slugged him in the arm as he laughed. Then he lunged at me, grabbing my arms and using his leg to sweep my supporting leg right out from under me. Within an instant, he had me on the ground, right on the soft, green grass of his front yard. I shrieked and screamed, trying in vain to wrestle my way out of his playful grasp, but my wimpy upper body was no match for his impossible strength. He tickled me, and being the most ticklish human in the Northern Hemisphere, I screamed bloody murder. Afraid I'd wet my pants (it was a valid concern), I fought back the only way I knew how--by grabbing and untucking his shirt from his Wranglers…and running my hand up his back, poking at his rib cage.
The tickling suddenly stopped. Marlboro Man propped himself on his elbows, holding my face in his hands. He kissed me passionately and seriously, and what started a ~ Ree Drummond

In life," he said, "there are no essentially major or minor characters. To that extent, all fiction and biography, and most historiography, are a lie. Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. Hamlet could be told from Polonius's point of view and called The Tragedy of Polonius, Lord Chamberlain of Denmark. He didn't think he was a minor character in anything, I daresay. Or suppose you're an usher in a wedding. From the groom's viewpoint he's the major character; the others play supporting parts, even the bride. From your viewpoint, though, the wedding is a minor episode in the very interesting history of your life, and the bridge and groom both are minor figures. What you've done is choose to play the part of a minor character: it can be pleasant for you to pretend to be less important you know you are, as Odysseus does when he disguises as a swineherd. And every member of the congregation at the wedding sees himself as the major character, condescending to witness the spectacle. So in this sense fiction isn't a lie at all, but a true representation of the distortion that everyone makes of life.
"Now, not only are we the heroes of our own life stories–we're the ones who conceive the story, and give other people the essences of minor characters. But since no man's life story as a rule is ever one story with a coherent plot, we're always reconceiving just the sort of hero we are, and consequently just the sort of minor roles that other people are supposed to ~ John Barth

A man has no right to occupy another man's time unnecessarily ~ John D. Rockefeller

And because I had been a hustler, I knew better than all whites knew, and better than nearly all of the black 'leaders' knew, that actually the most dangerous black man in America was the ghetto hustler. Why do I say this? The hustler, out there in the ghetto jungles, has less respect for the white power structure than any other Negro in North America. The ghetto hustler is internally restrained by nothing. He has no religion, no concept of morality, no civic responsibility, no fear--nothing. To survive, he is out there constantly preying upon others, probing for any human weakness like a ferret. The ghetto hustler is forever frustrated, restless, and anxious for some 'action'. Whatever he undertakes, he commits himself to it fully, absolutely. What makes the ghetto hustler yet more dangerous is his 'glamour' image to the school-dropout youth in the ghetto.These ghetto teen-agers see the hell caught by their parents struggling to get somewhere, or see that they have given up struggling in the prejudiced, intolerant white man's world. The ghetto teen-agers make up their own minds they would rather be like the hustlers whom they see dressed 'sharp' and flashing money and displaying no respect for anybody or anything. So the ghetto youth become attracted to the hustler worlds of dope, thievery, prostitution, and general crime and immorality. ~ Malcolm X

O Zeus! why hast thou granted unto man clear signs to know the sham in gold, while on man's brow no brand is stamped whereby to gauge the villain's heart? ~ Euripides

So Christiana went to speak to Dicky about taking us out and about, but when she found him in the office, the idiot was dead."
Daniel bit his lip at her vexed tone. There was absolutely no grief in her voice at all, just irritation with the inconvenience of it all. But then George had never been one to inspire the finer feelings in those he encountered. Clearing his throat, he asked, "Did he fall and strike his head, or-"
"No.He was simply sitting in his chair dead," she said with exasperation, and then added with disgust, "He was obviously a victim of his own excess. We suspected his heart gave out. Certainly the glass and decanter of whiskey next to him suggested he didn't take the best care of himself. I ask you,who drinks hard liquor first thing in the morning?"
Daniel shook his head, finding it difficult to speak. She was just so annoyed as she spoke of the man's death, as if he'd deliberately done it to mess up her plans. After a moment, he asked, "Are you sure he is dead?"
Suzette gave him another one of those adorable "Don't be ridiculous" looks. "Well, obviously he isn't. He is here now," she pointed out, and then shook her head and added almost under her breath, "Though I could have sworn...The man didn't even stir when he fell off the chair and slammed his head on the floor. Nor when I dropped him and his head crashed to the hardwood floor again, or when we rolled him in the carpet and dragged him upstairs, or when we dropped him in the hall and ~ Lynsay Sands

Sliced off like a chicken neck and stuck with a hatpin. Reminded me of my husband." Lula leaned forward so she could whisper. "You talking about size? Was your man's part that big?" "Heck no," Grandma said. "His part was that dead. ~ Janet Evanovich

But memories were fragile and not to be trusted. They were a weight that Faolin did not need to carry with him when he set out that morning. Things of the past, like the fragile boy he had been, had no place on a man's journey towards his future. ~ Madeline Claire Franklin

One understands then why woman has no sexual parts, properly speaking. It is because she is herself a sexual part - a sexual part of man, to cumbersome for him to carry around permanently and therefore deposited outside himself for most of the time and taken up when needed. Moreover the quality that distinguishes man from animals is this very power of equipping himself at any moment with an instrument, tool or arm that he needs, but that he can get rid of straight away, whereas the lobster has to drag his two pincers about with him everywhere. And just as mans hand is a sort of grappling hook that enables him to grasp a hammer, sword or fountain pen according to his needs, so his sex is the sort of grappling hook of the sexual parts rather than the sexual part itslef. ~ Michel Tournier

I am disillusioned enough to know that no man's opinion on any subject is worth a damn unless backed up with enough genuine information to make him really know what he's talking about. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

If you can control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one. ~ Carter G. Woodson

If anyone gets intoxicated with his knowledge when he looks beneath him, let him turn his eyes upward toward past ages, and he will lower his horns, finding there so many thousands of minds that trample him underfoot. If he gets into some flattering presumption about his valor, let him remember the lives of the two Scipios, so many armies, so many nations, all of whom leave him so far behind them. No particular quality will make a man proud who balances it against the many weaknesses and imperfections that are also in him, and, in the end, against the nullity of man's estate. ~ Michel De Montaigne