Or The Bower Quotes

But for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short. ~ Jane Austen

The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking, or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something. ~ Richard Dawkins

In an industrial society, psychological benefits such as security, fulfilment, status, solidarity and conviviality are all delivered primarily through the jobs that people have or the work that they do. ~ Ernst F. Schumacher

When people don't have a hopeful vision before them or the possible resolution of their difficulties by peaceful means, then they can be attracted to violence and to separatism. ~ Condoleezza Rice

And if you look at society, the way it works, they are creating, from cradle to grave, left-brain prisoners. To advance in this society, you have to be good at passing exams in school, which are taking in left-brain information overwhelmingly. Then you go to the next level, and so on so that by the time you reach any level of significant influence in society or the institutions of society, you are fundamentally locked into your left brain. Or at least the majority of people are. ~ David Icke

Watch for subjects as you go but the city or the country. Keep your eyes and ears open, and you will hear and see angels. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Yes, authority, coercion, and dependence rest on the mass, but never freedom or the free unfoldment of the individual, never the birth of a free society. The Socialist demagogues know that as well as I, but they maintain the myth of the virtues of the majority, because their very scheme of life means the perpetuation of power. ~ Emma Goldman

Be thou of Zen. Remember, in tranquillity, that the Absolute, the Tao, is within thee, that no priest or cult or dogma or book or saying or teaching or teacher stands between Thou and It. Know that Good and Evil are irrelevant, I and Thou irrelevant, Inside and Outside irrelevant as are Life and Death. Enter into the Sphere where there is no fear of death nor hope of afterlife, where thou art free of the impediments of life or the needs of salvation. Thou art thyself the Tao. Be thou, now, a rock against which the waves of life rush in vain. ~ James Clavell

Vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation, who for a short time believe, ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

So, a crash course for the amnesiac," Leo said, in a helpful tone that made Jason think this was not going to be helpful. "We go to the 'Wilderness School'" - Leo made air quotes with his fingers. "Which means we're 'bad kids.' Your family, or the court, or whoever, decided you were too much trouble, so they shipped you off to this lovely prison - sorry, 'boarding school' - in Armpit, Nevada, where you learn valuable nature skills like running ten miles a day through the cacti and weaving daisies into hats! And for a special treat we go on 'educational' field trips with Coach Hedge, who keeps order with a baseball bat. ~ Rick Riordan

One added benefit of making the opponent come to you, as the Japanese discovered with the Russians, is that it forces him to operate in your territory. Being on hostile ground will make him nervous and often he will rush his actions and make mistakes.

For negotiations or meetings, it is always wise to lure others into your territory, or the territory of your choice. You have your bearings, while they see nothing familiar and are subtly placed on the defensive. ~ Robert Greene

When a forty-minute swim in the Hendrix's underground pool failed to dispel either the longing for Miriam Bancroft's torrid company or the Merge Nine hangover, I did the only thing I felt equipped for. I ordered painkillers from room service, and went shopping. ~ Richard K. Morgan

There was a muchacha who lived near my house. La gente del pueblo talked about her being una de las otras, "of the Others." They said that for six months she was a woman who had a vagina that bled once a month, and that for the other six months she was a man, had a penis and she peed standing up. they called her half and half, mita' y mita', neither one nor the other but a strange doubling, a deviation of nature that horrified, a work of nature inverted. But there is a magic aspect in abnormality and so-called deformity. Maimed, mad, and sexually different people were believed to posess supernatural powers by primal cultures' magico-religious thinking. For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his inborn extraordinary gift.

There is something compelling about being both male and female, about having an entry into both worlds. Contrary to some psychiatric tenets, half and halfs are not suffering from a confusion of sexual identity, or even from a confusion of gender. What we are suffering from is an absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other. It claims that human nature is limited and cannot evolve into something better. But I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the embodiment of the heiros gamos: the coming together of opposite qualities within. ~ Gloria E Anzaldua

Until that moment Vetch had watched him with an anxious dread, for he was not sure what had happened there in the dark land. He did not know if this was Ged in the boat with him, and his hand had been for hours ready to the anchor, to stave in the boat's planking and sink her there in midsea, rather than carry back to the harbors of Earthsea the evil thing that he feared might have taken Ged's look and form. Now when he saw his friend and heard him speak, his doubt vanished. And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark. In the Creation of Ea, which is the oldest song, it is said, "Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky." That song Vetch sang aloud now as he held the boat westward, going before the cold wind of the winter night that blew at their backs from the vastness of the Open Sea. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

You're perfect- beautiful, intelligent, intractable in a kind of ... attractive way. Headstrong, but a good strategist. An amazing fighter."
"But that's not enough?"
"It's too much. You think I haven't thought about what it might be like to return to my rooms at the end of the night and find you there- to find you in my bed, to have your body and your laugh and your mind? To look across a room and know that you were mine- that *I'd* claimed you. *Me.* Ethan Sullivan. Not the four-hundred-year-old vampire, not the child of Balthasar or the Novitiate of Peter Cadogan. Me. Just me. Just you and me. ~ Chloe Neill

There is a Japanese word for things made more beautiful by use, that bear the evidence of their own making, or the individuating marks of time's passage: a kind of beauty not immune to time but embedded in it. ~ Mark Doty

I have the ability to create and be in touch with God. I can't change bread and wine into body and blood, but I can take the scum or the slime of the earth and make it into a man or woman. ~ J. F. Powers

In our day everyone wants to appear intelligent, one would prefer to be accused of crime than of naiveté if the accompanying risks could be avoided. But since intelligence cannot be drawn from the void, subterfuge are resorted to, one of the most prevalent being the mania for "demystification", which allows an air of intelligence to be conveyed at small cost, for all one need do is assert that the normal response to a particular phenomenon is "prejudiced" and that it is high time it was cleared of the "legends" surrounding it; if the ocean could be made out to be a pond or the Himalayas a hill, it would be done. Certain writers find it impossible to be content with taking note of the fact that a particular thing or person has a particular character or destiny, as everyone had done before them; they must always begin by remarking that "it has too often been said", and go on to declare that the reality is something quite different and has at last been discovered, and that up till now all the world has been "living a lie". This strategy is applied above all to things that are evident and universally known, it would doubtless be too naive to acknowledge in so many words that a lion is a carnivore and that he is not quite safe to meet. ~ Frithjof Schuon

She wasn't huge or anything, but she wasn't one of the super slim women or the curvy ones who looked lush and beautiful. She was just sort of in between and ... blah.
"Give a mint to know what you're thinking right now," Steele muttered.
"I'm blah," she blurted out. ~ Maya Banks

Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!
What a task
to ask
of anything, or anyone,
yet it is ours,
and not by the century or the year, but by the hours. ~ Mary Oliver

Professional baseball is on the wane. Salaries must come down or the interest of the public must be increased in some way. ~ Albert Goodwill Spalding

I've noticed this about new employees over the years. The women take on all the cumbersome, minor tasks without being asked, while guys never do. Doesn´t matter if they're new or the youngest - they never do anything they're not told to do. But why do women simply take things upon themselves? ~ Cho Nam-Joo

War reporting is still essentially the same - someone has to go there and see what is happening. You can't get that information without going to places where people are being shot at, and others are shooting at you. The real difficulty is having enough faith in humanity to believe that enough people, be they government, military or the man on the street, will care when your file reaches the printed page, the website or the TV screen. ~ Marie Colvin

Above the rustic stone fireplace was a deer's head-but not an everyday deer's head. This mangy thing surveyed the room with a huge toothy grin. Either he had died with a smile on his face or the taxidermist had had a rare sense of humor. But the funniest thing was that, somehow, the ridiculous creature seemed to fit the room perfectly. ~ Charlotte McPherren

Since you cannot control the weather, or the traffic,
or the one you love, or your neighbors, or your boss,
then you must learn to control you ...
the one whose response to the difficulties of life REALLY counts. ~ Jim Rohn

With the glucometer, I always know how much blood sugar I've got, so I can adjust my insulin or the food I eat. ~ Bobby Clarke

Facts are hard things - and either we deal with the facts, or the facts will deal with us ~ Gary A. Haugen

He (Rene Descartes) posited the existence of two parallel yet separate domains of reality: res cogitans, the thinking substance of the subjective mind whose essence is thought, and res extensa, or the extended substance of the material world. Mental stuff and material (including brain) stuff are absolutely distinct, he argued. ~ Jeffrey M. Schwartz

Andreas had been trying to remember the words to a ribald drinking song he had heard a few weeks ago when Saluador rode up next to him. The Spaniard's horse was a hand or so taller than his own, and in keeping with the man himself, much more spirited. Andreas was tall enough to see over most crowds, but Saluador eclipsed him readily. The Spaniard kept his beard and hair short, cropped close to his head, and when he smiled, his cheeks dimpled in a way that was very disarming to the ladies. Unfortunately, Saluador had not managed how to make his ready charm extend to his eyes. The ladies found this contrast exciting and dangerous, but Andreas thought that a man who couldn't smile naturally was a man who harbored a deep and long-standing grudge. Probably against something he could never change, like God or the weather or the color purple. Which made him unpredictable. ~ Neal Stephenson

while a picked body of Toads, known at the Die-hards, or the Death-or-Glory Toads, will storm the orchard and carry everything before ~ Kenneth Grahame

Okay, you know, is it weird to get so depressed watching a children's Christmas special - Oh, wait, I shouldn't say that. I mean, that's not a good word. It's not just "sadness," the way one feels sad at a film or a funeral. It's more of a plummeting quality. Or the way, you know, the way that light gets in winter just before dusk, or the way she is with me.
All right, at the height of lovemaking, you know, the very height, when she's starting to climax, and she's really responding to you now, you know, her eyes widening in that way that's both, you know, surprise and recognition, which not a woman alive could fake or feign if you really look intently at her, really see her. And I don't know, this moment has this piercing sadness to it, of the loss of her in her eyes. And as her eyes, you know, widen to their widest point and as she begins to climax and arch her back, they close. You know, shut, the eyes do. And I can tell that she's closed her eyes to shut me out. You know, I become like an intruder. And behind those closed lids, you know, her eyes are now rolled all the way around and staring intently inward into some void where l, who sent them, can't follow. ~ David Foster Wallace

Work, as we usually think of it, is energy expended for a further end in view; play is energy expended for its own sake, as with children's play, or as manifestation of the end or goal of work, as in "playing" chess or the piano. Play in this sense, then, is the fulfillment of work, the exhibition of what the work has been done for. ~ Northrop Frye

Ever since I was quite young, I was in St. John's Ambulance or the Red Cross; latterly, I've been involved in voluntary work with the mentally handicapped and Abbeyfield Old People's Homes. ~ Nicholas Winton

There have been times when the Federal Reserve has restricted the money supply and raised interest rates to gain an end, which had much better been left to another Government agency or the Congress to attain. The country could have had lower interest rates without sacrificing anything else. ~ Wright Patman

Along some northern coast at sundown a beaten gold light is waterborne, sweeping across lakes and tracing zigzag rivers to the sea, and we know we're in transit again, half numb to the secluded beauty down there, the slate land we're leaving behind, the peneplain, to cross these rainbands in deep night. This is time totally lost to us. We don't remember it. We take no sense impressions with us, no voices, none of the windy blast of the aircraft on the tarmac, or the white noise of flight, or the hours waiting. Nothing sticks to us but smoke in our hair and clothes. It is dead time. It never happened until it happens again. Then it never happened. ~ Don DeLillo

Or the Department of Education and another ministry were worried about duplication of effort, so what did they do? They set up two committees to look into duplication and neither knew what the other was up to. It really is a world beyond parody. ~ Rory Bremner

Believe like every Hindu in God and His oneness, in rebirth and salvation ... I can no more describe my feeling for Hinduism than for my own wife. She moves me as no other woman in the world can. Not that she has no faults; I daresay she has many more than I see myself. But the feeling of an indissoluble bond is there. Even so I feel for and about Hinduism with all its faults and limitations. Nothing delights me so much as the music of the Gita, or the Ramayana by Tulsidas. When I fancied I was taking my last breath, the Gita was my solace. Hinduism is not an exclusive religion. In it there is room for the worship of all the prophets of the world. 11 It is not a missionary religion in the ordinary sense of the term. It has no doubt absorbed many tribes in its fold, ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

Alone with myself and my talent, I chose it in some way I never had before. I chose myself also. The person I was and had been all along, the one who had not belonged to the place where she was born, nor to the places she found along the way, the one always under the mask, here she came out and breathed the air and felt at home. I had always believed that to be this person might destroy me or the world, and so as the world seemed to end, this made the end of the world seem nearly a paradise. ~ Alexander Chee

For some reason, Hollywood seems to have painted me as a gorgeous vixen at times or the sweet girl. ~ Nicollette Sheridan

Defriending in't just unrecognized by some social oversight, it's protected by its own protocol, a code of silence. Demanding an explanation wouldn't just be undignified; it would violate the whole tacit contract on which friendship is founded. The same thing that makes friendship so valuable is what makes it so tenuous: it is purely voluntary. You enter into it freely, without the imperatives of biology or the agenda of desire. [...] Laura Kipnis's book Against Love: A Polemic includes a harrowing eight0page inventory of things people are not allowed to do because they're in romantic relationships, from going out without saying where you're going or when you'll be back to wearing that idiotic hat. But your best friend can move across the country without asking you. ~ Tim Kreider

Some people buried their fears in food, she knew, and some in booze, and some in planning elaborate engagements and weddings and other life events that took up every spare moment of their time, in case unpleasant thoughts intruded. But for Nina, whenever reality, or the grimmer side of reality, threatened to invade, she always turned to a book. Books had been her solace when she was sad; her friends when she was lonely. They had mended her heart when it was broken, and encouraged her to hope when she was down. Yet ~ Jenny Colgan

The new illiteracy is about more than not knowing how to read the book or the word; it is about not knowing how to read the world ... ~ Henry Giroux

Bennie's corner of Brooklyn looked different every time Sierra passed through it. She stopped at the corner of Washington Avenue and St. John's Place to take in the changing scenery. A half block from where she stood, she'd skinned her knee playing hopscotch while juiced up on iceys and sugar drinks. Bennie's brother, Vincent, had been killed by the cops on the adjacent corner, just a few steps from his own front door. Now her best friend's neighborhood felt like another planet. The place Sierra and Bennie used to get their hair done had turned into a fancy bakery of some kind, and yes, the coffee was good, but you couldn't get a cup for less than three dollars. Plus, every time Sierra went in, the hip, young white kid behind the counter gave her either the don't-cause-no-trouble look or the I-want-to-adopt-you look. The Takeover (as Bennie had dubbed it once) had been going on for a few years now, but tonight its pace seemed to have accelerated tenfold. Sierra couldn't find a single brown face on the block. It looked like a late-night frat party had just let out; she was getting funny stares from all sides--as if she was the out-of-place one, she thought. And then, sadly, she realized she was the out-of-place one. ~ Daniel Jose Older

I've always been comfortable with people who run things, whether it was the principal of my high school or the president of the university. ~ Stephen A. Schwarzman

Friends persuaded me to run for the office, and I won. I had been warned, before taking office, that state politics lacks the glamour of its Washington counterpart; one labors largely in obscurity, mostly on topics that mean a great deal to some but that the average man or woman on the street can safely ignore (the regulation of mobile homes, say, or the tax consequences of farm equipment depreciation). Nonetheless, I found the work ~ Barack Obama

Who are we really? Combinations of common chemicals that perform mechanical actions for a few years before crumbling back into the original components? Fresh new souls, drawn at random for some celestial cupboard where God keeps an unending supply?
Or the same soul, immortal and eternal, refurbished and reused through endless lives, by that thrifty Housekeeper? In Her wisdom and benevolence She wipes off the memory slates, as part of the cleaning process, because if we could remember all the things we have experienced in earlier lives, we might object to risking it again. ~ Barbara Michaels

The question is, who ought to make that decision? The Congress or the commanders? And as you know, my position is clear
Im a commander guy. ~ George W. Bush

I just love working with actors, and I love working with writers, working with designers. I feel that I am just a storyteller, and whether I am wearing the director hat or the playwright hat, it doesn't matter. And the rooms I tend to be in are pretty democratic, and the best idea wins. ~ Adam Rapp