Open Spaces Quotes

Golf has an ambivalent relationship with the environment. On one hand, it's a great preserver of open spaces. Golf doesn't pave the world - it helps to green the world. But the downside is, it uses a lot of fertilizer, pesticides and water. ~ Thomas Friedman

The wealth-income ratio in the United States has always been lower than in Europe. The main reason in the early years was that land values bulked less in the wide open spaces of North America. There was, of course, much more land, but it was very cheap. ~ Robert Solow

I really did go back to Dresden with Guggenheim money (God love it) in 1967. It looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Growing Greener doesn't produce money for farmland preservation or open space preservation. ~ Ed Rendell

Loft living is the antithesis of suburban domesticity, if only because the open spaces don't easily accommodate family life. Lofts also offer residents the opportunity - and responsibility - to structure their own space to reflect what's important to them. ~ Virginia Postrel

San Francisco lags behind other communities in providing a vital, vibrant and ecologically sustainable urban canopy, as well as open space in the city. ~ Gavin Newsom

I enjoy a four-seasonal climate and wide-open spaces, so being on an island 2,500 miles into the South Pacific made me feel a little claustrophobic. ~ Matthew Fox

You can get claustrophobia and agoraphobia - a fear of wide, open spaces - simultaneously on a spacewalk. ~ Chris Hadfield

It (urban peacekeeping) was quite a task, requiring a permanent balancing act between communities, each with their own interests, festivals, traditions and historical rivalries imported from the wide-open spaces of the countryside into close quarters. ~ Charles Emmerson

Christians walk as strangers in the world: They are untamed. They are free. To persevere with love, yet untamed by man, is often what leaves that open space for divine revelation when God so wills. ~ Criss Jami

As children, we had access to all the open space imaginable. We would set up camps in rural Utah where the Tempest Company was at work laying pipe. We spent time around the West in Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, and Colorado. Wild beautiful places. Now, many of these natural places have disappeared under the press of development. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

Fire What makes a fire burn is space between the logs, a breathing space. Too much of a good thing, too many logs packed in too tight can douse the flames almost as surely as a pail of water would. So building fires requires attention to the spaces in between, as much as the wood. When we are able to build open spaces in the same way we have learned to pile on the logs, then we can come to see how it is fuel, and absence of the fuel together, that make fire possible. We only need lay a log lightly from time to time. A fire grows simply because the space is there, with openings in which the flame that knows just how it wants to burn can find its way. 12 Judy Brown ~ Peter Scazzero

As our cities and suburbs relentlessly expand, those priceless open spaces needed for recreation areas accessible to their people are swallowed up-often forever. Unless we preserve these spaces while they are still available, we will have none to preserve. ~ Richard M. Nixon

Though it's not as bad until we get up in the air."
"How come?" he asks. "Plenty of wide open spaces up there."
"But no escape route."
"Ah," he says. "So you're looking for an escape route."
Hadley nods. "Always."
"Figures," he says, sighing dramatically. "I get that from girls a lot. ~ Jennifer E. Smith

I see in many places little barberry bushes just come up densely in the cow-dung, like young apple trees, the berries having been eaten by the cows. Here they find manure and an open space for the first year at least, when they are not choked by grass or weeds. In this way, evidently, many of these clumps of barberries are commenced. ~ Henry David Thoreau

He was distrustful of happiness as some people fear heights or open spaces. ~ Graham Swift

One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent. ~ Justin Cronin

I sing my heart out to the wide open spaces
I sing my heart out to the infinite sea
I sing my vision to the sky-high mountains
I sing my song to the free. ~ Pete Townshend

We can have wilderness without freedom; we can have wilderness without human life at all, but we cannot have freedom without wilderness, we cannot have freedom without leagues of open space beyond the cities, where boys and girls, men and women, can live at least part of their lives under no control but their own desires and abilities, free from any and all direct administration by their fellow men. ~ Edward Abbey

In all cultures, it is the task of a religion to close the field of contingency ... and to set up havens of the absolute where it is possible to be led from acting to listening, from having to being, from planning to hoping, from judging to forgiving from the finite into the infinite. A society in which such open spaces of eternity do not exist or are only insufficiently developed dies of itself due to lack of air to breathe. ~ Eugen Drewermann

A Texas upbringing - and living now in Brooklyn, too - have surely helped my appreciation for open spaces and skies, but beyond that, it's not easy to find words for what it feels like to be up in the Rockies or out on the Great Basin - such silences and spaces! - or to be heading up into the Sierra Nevada Mountains. ~ Brian Floca

I'll make love to you in all good places, under black mountains and open spaces. ~ Jethro Tull

I think a current understanding about urban behavior tells us that it's important that people get out and be able to get away from the concrete jungles and the dense environment where they live for their own mental well-being. If they don't do this, the costs in human loss and human sickness will be far greater than what we would be expending for these kinds of releases and open spaces. ~ Barry Goldwater

Unfortunately the hostility that the European displayed toward the native cultures he encountered he carried even further into his relations with the land. The immense open spaces of the American continents, with all their unexploited or thinly utilized resources, were treated as a challenge to unrelenting war, destruction, and conquest. The forests were there to be cut down, the prairie to be plowed up, the marshes to be filled, the wildlife to be killed for empty sport, even if not utilized for food or clothing.

In the act of 'conquering nature' our ancestors too often treated the earth as contemptuously and as brutally as they treated its original inhabitants, wiping out great animal species like the bison and the passenger pigeon, mining the soils instead of annually replenishing them, and even, in the present day, invading the last wilderness areas, precious just because they are still wildernesses, homes for wildlife and solitary human souls. Instead we are surrendering them to six-lane highways, gas stations, amusement parks, and the lumber interests, as in the redwood groves, or Yosemite, and Lake Tahoe-though these primeval areas, once desecrated, can never be fully restored or replaced. ~ Lewis Mumford

Our past is bleak. Our future dim. But I am not reasonable. A reasonable man adjusts to his environment. And unreasonable man does not. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of "I" and choose the open spaces of "we". ~ Toni Morrison

The great seats of power tend to be wide and open, not vertical and soaring. Red Square, Tiananmen Square, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin - all massive but with large open spaces that project an image of might. ~ Gary Ross

Have you ever thought about the grid of Manhattan?' It's like ... a metaphor for life. You think you have the freedom to walk anywhere. But in fact ... you are strictly controlled. Up or down. Left or right. Nothing in between. No other options.' Life should be like an open space ... you should be able to walk in whatever direction you choose. ~ Sophie Kinsella

There is a foundation for our lives, a place in which our life rests. That place is nothing but the present moment, as we see, hear, experience what is. If we do not return to that place, we live our lives out of our heads. We blame others; we complain; we feel sorry for ourselves. All of these symptoms show that we're stuck in our thoughts. We're out of touch with the open space that is always right here. ~ Charlotte Joko Beck

Know how to wait. It shows a great heart with deep reserves of patience. Never hurry and never give way to your emotions. Master yourself and you will master others. Stroll through the open spaces of time to the center of opportunity. Wise hesitation ripens success and brings secrets to maturity.

The crutch of Time can do more than the steely club of Hercules. (...) A wonderful saying: "Time and I can take on any two." Fortune gives larger rewards to those who wait. ~ Baltasar Gracian

I wrote MARCH FARM because I fell in love with the farms of Bethlehem when I moved here in 2000. I became passionate about preserving farms for many reasons: to secure the open spaces vital for wildlife habitat, to support my community by maintaining its rural beauty, and to honor a way of life that has deep roots in our cultural psyche. ~ Nancy McMillan

I grew up in wide-open spaces, but they didn't have the romantic history of the West. ~ Robert Taylor

Unless action is taken soon - unless we can display the same vision of that earlier period - we will lose the treasure of California's open space and environmental beauty. ~ Adam Schiff

Everybody was hoping for something, talking about our new life to come and all that they hoped from it. Fresh air, whatever that's supposed to mean. Real gravity, instead of the fake kind that broke every now and then (even though no one over fifteen would admit that it was actually really fun when it did). All the wide open spaces we'd have, all the new people we'd meet when we woke them up, ignoring completely what happened to the original settlers, super- confident that we were so much better equipped that nothing bad could possibly happen to us.
All this hope, and here I was, right at the very edge of it, looking out into the darkness, the first to see it coming, the first to greet it when we found out what it really looked like. ~ Patrick Ness

Death was the Earth. Having sprung from her, the budding forms of life attempted to liberate themselves from her embrace. They set their sights on the free and open spaces. Death let them do as they wished, because she was very partial to the idea of life. She contented herself with keeping a watchful eye on her flock, and when she felt that they were fully ripe she devoured them up as if they were so many morsels of sugar. The she lay back and slowly digested the nourishment that would replenish her womb, happy and satiated as a pampered cat. ~ Roland Topor

A clue to the building's original identity was painted on the eastern side of the building: MONMOUTH MANUFACTURING. But for all their research, neither Gansey nor Adam had been able to figure out precisely what Monmouth had manufactured. Something that had required twenty-five-foot ceilings and wide open spaces; something that had left moisture stains on the floor and gouges in the brick walls. Something that the world no longer needed. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

A luxury meal was prairie sandwiches - two slices of bread with wide-open spaces between them. ~ Chic Murray

High buildings have no genuine advantages, except in speculative gains for banks and land owners. They are not cheaper, they do not help create open space, they destroy the townscape, they destroy social life, they promote crime, they make life difficult for children, they are expensive to maintain, they wreck the open spaces near them, and they damage light and air and view. ~ Christopher Alexander

If you choose to believe me, good. Now I will tell you how Octavia, the spider-web city, is made. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks. You walk on the little wooden ties, careful not to set your foot in the open spaces, or you cling to the hempen strands. Below there is nothing for hundreds and hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past; farther down you can glimpse the chasm's bed.
This is the foundation of the city: a net which serves as passage and as support. All the rest, instead of rising up, is hung below: rope ladders, hammocks, houses made like sacks, clothes hangers, terraces like gondolas, skins of water, gas jets, spits, baskets on strings, dumb-waiters, showers, trapezes and rings for children's games, cable cars, chandeliers, pots with trailing plants.
Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia's inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will only last so long. ~ Italo Calvino

(E)very soul requires secret places for contemplation as well as open spaces for celebration. ~ M.J. Rose

In blue Light nature space the whole world, wide grazing land, the open spaces wind across the land and the sky, blue, high ~ Nils Aslak Valkeapaa

Besides, it is doubtful that incest was a real obstacle to the establishment of society, as the partisans of an exchangist conception claim ... The real danger is elsewhere. If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire ... is capable of calling into question the established order of society ... it is revolutionary in its essence ... It is therefore of vital importance for a society to repress desire, and even to find something more efficient than repression, so that repression, hierarchy, exploitation, and servitude are themselves desired ... that does not at all mean that desire is something other than sexuality, but that sexuality and love do not live in the bedroom of Oedipus, they dream instead of wide-open spaces, and ... do not let themselves be stocked within an established order. ~ Gilles Deleuze

Instead of making others right or wrong, or bottling up right and wrong in ourselves, there's a middle way, a very powerful middle way ... Could we have no agenda when we walk into a room with another person, not know what to say, not make that person wrong or right? Could we see, hear, feel other people as they really are? It is powerful to practice this way ... true communication can happen only in that open space. ~ Pema Chodron

If you are not from a particular place the history of that particular place will dwell inside you differently to how it dwells within those people who are from that particular place. Your connection to certain events that define the history of a particular place is not straightforward because none of your ancestors were in any way involved or affected by those events. You have no stories to relate and compare, you have no narrative to inherit and run with, and all the names are strange one that mean nothing to you at all. And it's as if the history of a particular place knows all about this blankness you contain. Consequently if you are not from a particular place you will always be vulnerable for the reason that it doesn't matter how many years you have lived there you will never have a side of the story; nothing with which you can hold the full force of the history of a particular place at bay.
And so it comes at you directly, right through the softly padding soles of your feet, battering up throughout your body, before unpacking its clamouring store of images in the clear open spaces of your mind.
Opening out at last; out, out, out
And shimmered across the pale expanse of a flat defenceless sky.

All the names mean nothing to you, and your name means nothing to them. ~ Claire-Louise Bennett

I would use the same word to describe both my joy and the rain: torrential. This - this - this is all I ever wanted from the world: wide-open spaces and cooling rain and the chance to run. ~ Beth Revis

When it all comes crashing down
Try to understand your meanings
No one said it would be easy
This living, it ain't easy, oh

You were sewn together
with a tapestry of molecules
A billion baby galaxies
and wide open spaces

And everything you need is here
Everything you fear is here
And it's holding you up
It just keeps holding you up

When you came up from the ground
From a million little pieces
You're a pretty human being ~ Cloud Cult

America is still a frontier country of wide open spaces. Our closeness to nature is one reason why our problem is not repression but regression; our notorious violence is the constant eruption of primi-tiveness, of anarchic individualism. ~ Camille Paglia

When I spoke to her, I had the feeling that her thoughts had been nourished in wide-open spaces where talk was sparse and silence ruled. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Due to the failure of politics, which has become a process of middle-management, art has become one of the last open spaces to question core beliefs and to design a viable future. Art becomes an open space where we can ask fundamental questions about ourselves. ~ Antony Gormley

Where you need to make fast decisions, people have to work in an open space where I can just walk to somebody's cube, so we don't need to schedule meetings for absolutely everything. ~ Marcelo Claure

Let's be honest; it's rather easy to be busy. We all can think up a list of tasks that will overwhelm our schedules. Some might even think that their self-worth depends on the length of their to-do list. They flood the open spaces in their time with lists of meetings and minutia - even during times of stress and fatigue. ~ Dieter F. Uchtdorf

My parents wanted me to grow up around horses and open spaces. ~ Schuyler Fisk

I met my husband, Jacob, in medical school. We married and went to live in Hawaii where his family lived. It was very beautiful, but I wasn't used to being on an island and needed wide open spaces. Eventually we moved to Maine, New England. ~ Tess Gerritsen

Every time I see open space I see a mat on the floor ~ Renzo Gracie

Many of the green places and open spaces that need protecting most today are in our own neighborhoods. In too many places, the beauty of local vistas has been degraded by decades of ill-planned and ill-coordinated development. ~ Al Gore

The most powerful argument of all for saving open space is economics; in most states, tourism is the number two industry. ~ Jim Fowler

Air is the element most needed by fire. This is why you need open spaces, the wind, and to fly. Because you have fire in you. This is why you look into the sky, why you make wishes, why you tread lightly. You, too, are the air, because inside you there is fire. Why do you think we breathe? Because we are kindling our fires. ~ C. JoyBell C.

I'd never really experienced the West before moving to Colorado. The East Coast, where I grew up, has a lot of big cities, like Boston and New York, and is more densely populated, and I instantly fell in love with the big open spaces of the West, where you can see not just for a few miles but for a few hundred miles. ~ Tyler Hamilton

When I was young I once found a book in a Dutch translation, 'The leaves of Grass'. It was the first time a book touched me by its feeling of freedom and open spaces, the way the poet spoke of the ocean by describing a drop of water in his hand. Walt Whitman was offering the world an open hand (now we call it democracy) and my 'Monument for Walt Whitman' became this open hand with mirrors, so you can see inside yourself. ~ Karel Appel

The government should, as a matter of policy, forbid the building of any more places of worship. We have more than enough of them. The government should never permit the use of public parks or open spaces for religious gathering, and if a place of worship becomes a bone of contention or happens to be misused by undesirable elements, it should simply take it over. ~ Khushwant Singh

There's something rather wonderful about the fact that Oxford is a very small city that contains most of the cultural and metropolitan facilities you could want, in terms of bookshops, theatre, cinema, conversation. But it's near enough to London to get here in an hour, and it's near enough to huge open spaces without which I would go insane. ~ Mark Haddon

Most old cities are now sclerotic machines that dispense known qualities in ever-greater quantities, instead of laboratories of the uncertain. Only the skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky. ~ Rem Koolhaas

The trouble with America is that there are far too many wide open spaces surrounded by teeth. ~ Charles Luckman

The government only makes restrictive rules, they don't show you what to do so you know, OK, here's where we need this many apartments, with open space, playgrounds, kindergartens. ~ Harry Seidler

My two primary areas of focus have been open-space conservation and education, and I expect those to remain my priorities in the future. The Irvine open space and parklands provide serenity and balance to our unique Orange County lifestyle. ~ Donald Bren

Take the emptiness you hold in your arms
And scatter it into the open spaces we breathe.
Maybe the birds will feel how the air is thinner,
And fly with more affection. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it. ~ Annie Proulx

He was indulgent toward the open spaces of other men's futures, but he was impatient with the shuttered quarters of their pasts. ~ Eleanor Catton

Who had persuaded me that God preferred four walls and a roof to wide-open spaces? When had I made the subtle switch myself, becoming convinced that church bodies and buildings were the safest and most reliable places to encounter the living God? ~ Barbara Brown Taylor

An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows ... We're reaching the point where a lot of the English countryside looks just like Iowa - just kind of open space. ~ Bill Bryson

And the beautiful open spaces, the forests of Pennsylvania, the recreational uses that come from having these green open spaces and forests, they contribute dramatically to the level of our tourism, dramatically. ~ Ed Rendell

Struggling with frozen expressions and tightly compressed lips. Everyone wore black padded jackets in a kind of mournful uniformity, and battled the same bladed wind that swept across the open spaces, their fists jammed into pockets, their heads resolutely down. ~ Gail Jones

And preserving our open spaces or having them there for recreational purposes is one of the things that contributes to the high level of quality of life that we offer in Pennsylvania, and that also translates into economic benefits. ~ Ed Rendell

All around the Lady Jessica - piled in corners of the Arrakeen great hall, mounded in the open spaces - stood the packaged freight of their lives: boxes, trunks, cartons, cases - some partly unpacked. ~ Frank Herbert

Having spent a long time in open spaces, whether sea or desert, it is a luxury to be able to take refuge in towns with narrow streets which provide a fragile fortress against the assaults of the infinite. There is such a sense of security against the boundless there, even if the murmur of the wave or the silence of the sands still pursue one through tortuous corridors. The winds, despite their subtle spirits, are themselves lost in the vestibules of this labyrinth and, unable to find a way through, whistle and turn in turbulence like demented dervishes. They will not break through the walls of this den in which life still pulsates in the shadows of humanity's black sun. ~ Georges Limbour

A song of mine called 'I'll Take Care of You' was on that 'Wide Open Spaces' Dixie Chicks album. ~ J. D. Souther

The logical extension of a burgeoning population and urbanization is the conversion of open spaces into paved ground. This has resulted in flooding of cities as well as water scarcity due to groundwater depletion and the lack of rainwater harvesting. ~ Anonymous

I walked down the empty Broad to breakfast, as I often did on Sundays, at a tea-shop opposite Balliol. The air was full of bells from the surrounding spires and the sun, casting long shadows across the open spaces, dispelled the fears of night. The tea-shop was hushed as a library; a few solitary men in bedroom slippers from Balliol and Trinity looked up as I entered, then turned back to their Sunday newspapers. I ate my scrambled eggs and bitter marmalade with the zest which in youth follows a restless night. I lit a cigarette and sat on, while one by one the Balliol and Trinity men paid their bills and shuffled away, slip-slop, across the street to their colleges. It was nearly eleven when I left, and during my walk I heard the change-ringing cease and, all over the town, give place to the single chime which warned the city that service was about to start. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Change is a journey and the journey is always about change. And if there is no change, why bother with the journey? And the best journeys require lots of space of one sort or another. So for great journeys - just open space. ~ Harrison Owen

I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the spaces I myself first found in the desert and then in the western grasslands. ~ Rebecca Solnit

By now the moon was well down. Over the tree tops they had seen her cruise across the heavens to strike on a reef of jagged clouds, and now she foundered among them in the semblance of a ruined galleon, the sails lost overboard, the belly-shaped hull punctured; and just above her there swung a single red star, like a riding light set on an invisible spar to mark the wreck.

But the moon had come up, not as a ship but as a tipsy tile-layer. First, across her contract, she flung a long stepladder of celestial gold; then so wrought that the waves all turned to silver scallops with a separate bright rime for each separate tessellation. But the job was done only to be undone. As the wind went down with her, the water was smoothing out; the checkers were vanishing, the paved surface, between the shores, changing and tarnishing to a duller metal. Catching tone from this, the woodland grew denser and darker. Open spaces which ten minutes before had been glades for the fairies to dance in were mysteries for witchcraft now. ~ Irvin S. Cobb

He couldn't believe that you could look up anyone and seek them out, that all you had to do to prove you weren't an orphan was to open a book and point to your parents. It was unfathomable that a permanent link existed to mothers and fathers and lost mates, that they were forever fixed in type. He flipped through the pages. Donaldson, Jimenez, Smith - all it took was a book, a little book could save you a lifetime of uncertainty and guesswork. Suddenly he hated his small, backward homeland, a land of mysteries and ghosts and mistaken identities. He tore a page from the back of the book and wrote across the top: Alive and Well in North Korea. Below this he wrote the names of all the people he'd helped kidnap. Next to Mayumi Nota, the girl from the pier, he placed a star of exception. ~ Adam Johnson

On the far side of the bay was the command station that controlled the door, which was currently semi-open. Rather than the normal closed maw of steel, there was a network of pulsing gold veins crisscrossing the gaping mouth of black - a nitrogen membrane keeping the molecular air contained and pressurized while allowing aircraft to pass through. ~ April Adams

Most of us are living in a prison of our fixed, false beliefs and never try to find the door to get out to see and feel the beauty of life, even when the door is wide open and welcoming. ~ Debasish Mridha

The smell of grease in the Horseshoe Diner was strong, like the residuals of every meal that had ever been cooked over its open griddle. I lingered in a corner booth near the window, speaking to my wife Ava on the cell phone. With as much free time as a corpse, I pondered past mistakes, but I kept the call short before she asked too many questions and revived the dying thoughts in my mind. A man was a sharp and useful tool, I thought, as long as he never paused to consider it. ~ Christopher Klim

Some instantaneous connection had occurred between them. The very air in the room seemed to crackle with the awareness of it. A wave of heat suffused her body to centre between her legs, suddenly she felt breathless and hyper aware of him. There was no way this man could remain unaffected by the sheer magnitude of the invisible bonds that had just linked them irretrievably together. She wondered what he was thinking behind those beautiful navy blue eyes. Okay so she didn't really expect him to open his mouth and spout poetry or declare his undying love but she certainly wasn't prepared for his next words.
"You aren't going to throw up are you? This is one of my favourite suits. ~ Jane Cousins

Instead of trying to make toxic people happy or satisfied (which is a waste of time, since they can't and won't be mollified), live to help reliable people serve and worship God. Our job is to open up new avenues of worship with people who want to reverence God. Rather than living to make toxic people feel good about us, let's live to make reliable people excited about God. ~ Gary L. Thomas

We can see the child moving rather serenely in the uterus. The child senses aggression in its sanctuary. We see the child's mouth wide open in a silent scream. ~ Bernard Nathanson

A traveller with an open mind grows richer with each journey, with each encounter, with each conversation. ~ Jane Wilson-Howarth

It would presently be his task to take the bandage from this young woman's eyes, and bid her look forth upon the world. But how many generations of the women of had gone to her making had descended bandaged to the family vault? He shivered a little, remembering some of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance of the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because they had no use for them. What if, when he had bidden May Welland to open hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness? ~ Edith Wharton

All those thing women are made to believe they are strange for harboring in their hearts. And I want to surround myself with those same strange, wicked women who throw themselves open to all the wondrous things the world has to offer. ~ Mackenzi Lee

The Jacobin leaders were beset on many sides by enemies, both open and covert. But in the end the most dangerous and unforgiving enemies they faced were themselves. In choosing terror, they chose a path that led to self-destruction. ~ Marisa Linton

When I first accepted my own death, the world was intantly changed. It was a completely new sensation. It took something like this to finally open my eyes. Before, I had simply shut myself off so that I could not see, could not hear. What had I been doing all this time? ~ Mohiro Kitoh

Anais Nin writes that anxiety can kill love. "It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic."
Ain't that the truth. I see that look on others' faces when I'm drowning in one of my spirals. I know that many of the loved ones I've turned to, or allowed in to witness me in this state, have had to swim away from me and look after themselves, leaving me to drown. I've always feared that they think I'm going to strangle them emotionally with my complexity. So I usually send them on myself.
Sometimes, though, when I put in the work, my anxiety has seen love grow, not die. And so, anxiety can be the very thing that pushes us to become our best person. When worked through, dug through, sat through, anxiety can get us vulnerable and raw and open. And oh so real. ~ Sarah Wilson

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

On July 29, six days after I had arrived in Paris, Fin and I moved into the new lodgings on the top floor of the hotel next door, where, beyond the pigeons who occupied the window ledge, you could see the turrets of Notre Dame. The concierge told us not to feed the birds, but we gave them our stale bread just the same, and so our flock became a feathered multitude, pushing and shoving one another behind the cracked glass. In the afternoons the light seemed to have feathers in it. ~ Rebecca Stott

There was a girl who used to hide behind the moon with her legs bent against it like tiny fishhooks, as if she were the only thing keeping all that grey from tilting on it's orbit and grazing against the skin of the Earth. The stars left tiny burn marks on her skin that sizzled when she touched them so that she sounded like raindrops in summer when she walked. The stars fell on her back so often it wore away in the shape of a fin. She bathed in the white moonlight and it made her skin more pale so her eyes looked wider. Her eyes were so wide that she could take much more in as she watched earth like the clouds over it were stage curtains being drawn back. Ta-da-do-rah! And then at the end the people cried and their tears fell from the earth and into the craters making pools for her fishhook legs to catch their stories in. One letter at a time falling away into the velvet black backdrop curtain before she could hold them. And the people sighed, mouths all open wide, people always cry at endings. ~ KI

Did you really think I'd steer you wrong?" Then William pointed to the wide-open country beyond the next ridge. "New York's that way. My compass is unerring. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

USE SELECTIVE HONESTY AND GENEROSITY TO DISARM YOUR VICTIM JUDGMENT One sincere and honest move will cover over dozens of dishonest ones. Open-hearted gestures of honesty and generosity bring down the guard of even the most suspicious people. Once your selective honesty opens a hole in their armor, you can deceive and manipulate them at will. A timely gift - a Trojan horse - will serve the same purpose. ~ Robert Greene

Human evolution is essentially the progression of information gathering (knowledge) and consciousness, or the advancement in wisdom. A wise person is willing to learn at all stages of life by using their cognitive abilities open-mindedly to examine contradictory beliefs, and rationally meld various schools of thought into a living philosophy, developing over time a logical and systematic method to maintain and evaluate oneself in order to assist a person not merely survive but thrive. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

What bug crawled up your ass?" I demanded.
"If you mean, why I am upset? I should think that would be obvious!"
It took me a second, but I got it. "Oh, come on. You're not still pissed about–you did the same damn thing to me!"
He had the utter gall to look offended. "I did nothing of the sort–"
I stared at him. "And just how do you figure that? You stripped me butt naked, diddled me over a desk and stole my duffel bag. And my clothes!"
Somebody made a choking sound. I glanced up to find the door to the study open, and the old vamp looking scandalized. "Diddled?" Anthony asked, apparently delighted. Mircea closed his eyes. ~ Karen Chance