Remote Quotes

In the life of each of us there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness. ~ Sarah Orne Jewett

Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I think that the chances of finding out what's actually going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, "Hang the sense of it," and keep yourself busy. I'd much rather be happy than right any day. ~ Douglas Adams

Nor is it merely that we can discern in Christ that close union of personality with perfection which forms the real distinction between the classical and romantic movement in life, but the very basis of his nature was the same as that of the nature of the artist - an intense and flamelike imagination. He realised in the entire sphere of human relations that imaginative sympathy which in the sphere of Art is the sole secret of creation. He understood the leprosy of the leper, the darkness of the blind, the fierce misery of those who live for pleasure, the strange poverty of the rich. Someone wrote to me in trouble, 'When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting.' How remote was the writer from what Matthew Arnold calls 'the Secret of Jesus.' Either would have taught him that whatever happens to another happens to oneself, and if you want an inscription to read at dawn and at night-time, and for pleasure or for pain, write up on the walls of your house in letters for the sun to gild and the moon to silver, 'Whatever happens to oneself happens to another. ~ Oscar Wilde

We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places -- retreated to most often when we are most remote from them -- are among the most important landscapes we possess. ~ Robert Macfarlane

Why do we travel to remote locations? To prove our adventurous spirit or to tell stories about incredible things? We do it to be alone amongst friends and to find ourselves in a land without man. ~ George Leigh Mallory

It was always easy, in open and lonely places, to be visited by Panic wilderness fear, but these are the urban fantods here, that come to get you when you are lost or isolate inside the way time is passing, when there is no more History, no time-travelling capsule to find your way back to, only the lateness and the absence that fill a great railway shed after the capital has been evacuated, and the goat-god's city cousins wait for you at the edges of the light, playing the tunes they've always played, but more audible now, because everything else has gone away or fallen silent. . . barn-swallow souls, fasioned of brown twilight, rise toward the white ceilings. . . the are unique to the Zone, they answer to the new Uncertainty. Ghosts used to be either the likeness of the dead or wraiths of the living. But here in the Zone categories have been blurred badly. The status of the name you miss, love, and search for now has grown ambiguous and remote, but this is even more than the bureaucracy of mass absence- some still live, some have died, but many, many have forgotten which they are. Their likenesses will not serve. Down here are only wrappings left in the light, in the dark: images of the Uncertainty. . ." 3:2 ~ Thomas Pynchon

Modern man has been in search of a new language of form to satisfy new longings and aspirations - longings for mental appeasement, aspirations to unity, harmony, serenity - an end to his alienation from nature. All these arts of remote times or strange cultures either give or suggest to the modern artist forms which he can adapt to his needs, the elements of a new iconography. ~ Herbert Read

Aristocracy naturally leads the human mind to the contemplation of the past, and fixes it there. Democracy, on the contrary, gives men a sort of instinctive distaste for what is ancient. In this respect aristocracy is far more favorable to poetry; for things commonly grow larger and more obscure as they are more remote; and, for this two-fold reason, they are better suited to the delineation of the ideal. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The things you're accustomed to are dangerous. In applications intended for use within an organization, a design based on API calls works well and is easy to develop. The API call metaphor assumes away the network boundary and lets a client invoke a method on a remote computer just like it would call the API of a local code library. ~ Leonard Richardson

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin, on the 15th October, 1856, so that he is now about twenty-six years of age, but brief as has been his career, it has been full of promise for the future. The son of highly intellectual parents, he has had an exceptional education, has travelled much in wild and remote, through classic lands, and in the course of these journeys has learnt to appreciate the beauties of the old authors, in whose works whilst at college he attained exceptional proficiency. But his naturally enthusiastic temperament teaches him to hope for better in the future than has been achieved in the past, and to see how vast will be the influence of Art and Literature on the coming democracy of Intellect, when education and culture shall have taught men to pride themselves on what they have done, and not alone on the deeds of their ancestors. ~ Walter Hamilton

I find it difficult now to recall and understand the dreams which then filled my imagination. Even when I can recall them, I find it hard to believe that my dreams were just like that: they were so strange and so remote from life. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Books are remote but reliable friends. ~ Victor Hugo

A few feathery flakes are scattered widely through the air, and hover downward with uncertain flight, now almost alighting on the earth, now whirled again aloft into remote regions of the atmosphere. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Excuse me?' A beaming female face swims into focus. A woman has touched her on the arm and Grace is disconcerted, as though someone on television waved at her. She feels so remote from the world, from normal people, she thought she was invisible. ~ Liane Moriarty

People come to me and say, 'What'll I do if I go in the water and see a shark?' You don't have to do anything. The chances of that shark attacking you in any way is so remote. The sea should be enjoyed, the animals in it. When you see a shark underwater, you should say, 'How lucky I am to see this beautiful animal in his environment!' ~ Eugenie Clark

A person with a universal mind who lives in a remote village knows the world much better than a person with a local mind who lives in a big city! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

No matter how remote we feel we are from the oceans, every act each one of us takes in our everyday lives affects our planet's water cycle and in return affects us. ~ Fabien Cousteau

It so happens that the work which is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge. - MONTGOMERY SCHUYLER IN HARPER'S WEEKLY, MAY 24, 1883 ~ David McCullough

If I'm a director and I read a script and I say yeah I really want to do this, I would never walk away because the deal wasn't very good - that I wasn't getting paid very much or that the chances that I would see anything on the back end were remote because of the financial waterfall and the way it's structured. I would never use that as a reason not to do something. ~ Steven Soderbergh

The nothingth of a second for which the hole existed reverberated backwards and forwards through time in a most improbable fashion. Somewhere in the deeply remote past it seriously traumatized a small random group of atoms drifting through the empty sterility of space and made them cling together in the most extraordinarily unlikely patterns. These patterns quickly learnt to copy themselves (this was part of what was so extraordinary about the patterns) and went on to cause massive trouble on every planet they drifted on to. That was how life began in the Universe. ~ Douglas Adams

There is that in the soul of man which must respond to the highest in virtue. It may not respond at once. Human nature can easily be over-faced by examples too remote and austere. Moreover, human nature can easily deny God because the whole race has long been in rebellion against Him. Yet there is that in human nature which calls out to the supreme examples of virtue: owns, as it were, the intention of God who made it, and feels the unmistakable homesickness of the soul. ~ Bill Vaughan

I'd thought about this for a long time. "That bank loses that much money in bad loans every
month. They make that much money in interest every day. They're a big bank. The money I
took was small change to them. No depositor was hurt."
She shook her head. "I still can't approve of it. I don't think it's right."
I felt my face go remote, still. I crossed my arms and felt cold.
She spread her hands. "It doesn't change the fact that I still love you. I've missed you terribly.
I've missed your phone calls, and I've missed your body in bed next to me. I don't know what
to do about this. My loving you goes way beyond my disapproval of your theft."
I uncrossed my arms and reached across the table for her. She leaned forward and we kissed
until the candle burned a hole in my shirt. Then we laughed and I held an ice cube to the
burn and the food came and everything was all right. ~ Steven Gould

In the past, I've visited remote places - North Korea, Ethiopia, Easter Island - partly as a way to visit remote states of mind: remote parts of myself that I wouldn't ordinarily explore. ~ Pico Iyer

The most remote place I've been to was in Greenland. I remember setting out for a solo hike from a small cabin, itself several hours' boat ride from the nearest settlement. ~ Michelle Paver

They weren't on a yacht that was devoured by a hurricane. Yet they vanished. They weren't in a private plane that dropped off the radar in a remote area. Yet they vanished. They're home wasn't washed away in a flood, they weren't on the run from the law and didn't owe the mafia a bunch of money but they vanished, without reason and without a trace.
The Prophet of Life From The Family That Vanished ~ The Prophet Of Life

There should be a little gap between you and your friends, though you'll miss their companionship and you'll also miss their disrespect. ~ Michael Bassey Johnson

This is what you remember about him: not much, but then you have been assiduous in your forgetting. His red sweater, v-neck, cashmere; the clink of ice-cubes in a glass. He is shadow and voice, but you cannot recall his face. He is behind a closed door, in a forbidden room. He is asleep in his armchair, he is asleep in the driveway, asleep in your sandpit, face down, snoring but not harmless, even then. He is shouting, he is whispering, he is close but also remote as if at the end of a long hallway and you cannot hear him. His words never make any sense, he speaks some other language. His hands sometimes spin away from him like windmills, like pinwheels and Catherine wheels, snapping like firecrackers. There must be pain, but you cannot feel it.
Your skin bruises like apples. ~ Melanie Finn

While, naturally, he has to gauge risk, to read the elements, he still often bemoans the hardships of the past. He constantly puzzles over the role of remote influences, like the after-life. He wants to know why events happen as they do, how control is exercised from beyond understanding. ~ Peter Gray

It may be said of some very old places, as of some very old books, that they are destined to be forever new. The nearer we approach them, the more remote they seem: the more we study them, the more we have yet to learn. Time augments rather than diminishes their everlasting novelty; and to our descendants of a thousand years hence it may safely be predicted that they will be even more fascinating than to ourselves. This is true of many ancient lands, but of no place is it. so true as of Egypt. ~ Amelia B. Edwards

The music could even penetrate his remote world, more distant than the moon itself; it could even perform miracles. ~ Paulo Coelho

It seems to me that all my life before that momentous day is infinitely remote, a fading memory of light-hearted youth, something on the other side of a shadow. ~ Joseph Conrad

My wife, my Mary, goes to her sleep the way you would close the door of a closet. So many times I have watched her with envy. Her lovely body squirms a moment as though she fitted herself into a cocoon. She sighs once and at the end of it her eyes close and her lips, untroubled, fall into that wise and remote smile of the Ancient Greek gods. She smiles all night in her sleep, her breath purrs in her throat, not a snore, a kitten's purr ... She loves to sleep and sleep welcomes her. ~ John Steinbeck

Music is so easy to explain, yet so inexplicable, as it reproduces all the emotions of our inner being without reality, remote from pain. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Interest in alchemy seems to be nowadays on the rise. Whereas the educated public at large remains no doubt skeptical and indeed disdainful of the ancient discipline, there is today a deepening awareness among the better informed that what stands behind many an "exploded superstition" may be in fact a long-forgotten wisdom. Although Carl Jung was obviously exaggerating when ! he suggested that four centuries after being expelled from our universities,- alchemy stands "knocking at the door," a number of factors have conspired; to render the prospect of re-admission less remote, at least, than it had been ; during the heyday of materialism. In any case, no truly solid grounds for rejecting the ancient doctrine have yet been proposed. Take the case of the so-called four elements: earth, water, air and fire. One can be reasonably certain that these terms were not employed alchemically in their ordinary sense, but were used to designate elements, precisely, out of which substances, as we know them, are constituted. Somewhat like the quarks of modern physics, these elements are not found empirically in isolation, but occur in their multiple combinations, that is to say, as the perceptible substances that constitute what I term the corporeal domain. Now, as I have argued at length in The Quantum Enigma (Peru, Illinois: Sherwood Sugden, 1995), corporeal objects are not in fact mere aggregates of quantum particles; and this clearly suggests that there may indeed be elements of the afo ~ Wolfgang Smith

Deep, solemn optimism, it seems to me, should spring from this firm belief in the presence of God in the individual; not a remote, unapproachable governor of the universe, but a God who is very near every one of us, who is present not only in earth, sea and sky, but also in every pure and noble impulse of our hearts. ~ Helen Keller

You want to see how devoted we are to comfort? Walk into the average American home and hide the remote control, and watch what happens. Life without the remote control is an unbearable burden for the average American family. Then someone invented a TV with a beeper so that when you clap your hands, the remote control will beep until you find it. ~ John Ortberg Jr.

I am like a wounded animal in a remote isolated place - How wonderful! - How happy! ~ Dalai Lama

Magnetism is one of the Six Fundamental Forces of the Universe, with the other five being Gravity, Duct Tape, Whining, Remote Control, and The Force That Pulls Dogs Toward The Groins Of Strangers. ~ Dave Barry

Coordinating there Events and objects with remote events And vanished objects. Making ornaments Of accidents and possibilities. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

It's easy to underestimate how profound and holistic Roddenberry's vision of the techscape of the future was. By today's standards, the available technology of 1964 was downright primitive. Doors did not open automatically when we approached them. The first handheld calculator was still in the future, as were microwave ovens and cell phones. 1964 was a year before most Americans had even heard of a place called Vietnam, five years before man walked on the moon, 25 years before anyone ever surfed the Internet. Your phone had a curly cord, and the new innovation of "touchtone" dialing was merely a year old. Even the television sets that viewers watched would be considered positively prehistoric today. Most TVs were black-and-white models, and the majority of those sets had no remote control. There was no cable or satellite; rabbit ears and roof-top antennas were the norm. The world looked, and was, different. ~ Marc Cushman

But I think you have to - whatever the environment looks like, it does enter into people's art work one way or another; it's very remote or it isn't. It's remote in my work but it has to have a certain degree of ordinariness. ~ Donald Judd

my story is that more than sex or death or the remote possibility of God, there was one thing more fundamental to my way of being in the world than any other, and that was the all-pervading influence of a mother; and not just her influence, but her presence and her love. ~ Michael Harding

missions. A moment later she heard the sound of the television start up. The clever little thing had worked out how to use the remote control. 'Not till August,' said Lauren. 'We've got lots to sort out. Visas and so on. We'll have to find an apartment, a nanny for Jacob.' A nanny for Jacob. 'Job for me.' Rob sounded a little nervous. 'Oh, yes, darling,' said Rachel. She did try to take her son seriously. She really did. 'A job for you. In real estate, do you think?' 'Not sure yet,' said Rob. 'We'll have to see. I might end up being a house husband.' 'So sorry I never taught him how to cook,' said Rachel to Lauren, not especially sorry. Rachel had never been much interested in cooking or that good at it; it was just another chore that had to be done, like the laundry. The way people went on these days about cooking. 'That's okay,' beamed Lauren. 'We'll probably eat out a lot in New York. The city that never sleeps, ~ Liane Moriarty

I like being outdoors a lot, and I come from a small village that's fairly remote. ~ Jeremy Irvine

I found myself daydreaming of homesteading in the wilderness on a remote mountain somewhere. ~ Gordon Blaine

Arizona faces unique healthcare challenges including uncompensated care for illegal immigrants, and the large number of Native Americans who live in remote and isolated areas of the state. ~ Rick Renzi

It could not have been easy for Mother, an only child, to grow up without a father and with a mother who was remote. Photos of her as a child show her extremely dressed up
Cornie's beautiful little doll. But a daughter, unlike a doll, grows up, and might fall in love with and marry someone her mother does not like; she becomes an individual with her own ideas. ~ Cornelia Maude Spelman

In what way will our remote posterity be able to cope with the enormous accumulation of historical records which a few centuries will bequeath to them? ~ Immanuel Kant

Since 1978 the record pretty well shows that no start-up airline ... has really been successful, so the odds of JetBlue having long-term success are remote. I'm not going to say it can't happen because stranger things have happened, but I personally believe P.T. Barnum was, in that respect, correct. ~ Gordon Bethune

If the present be compared with the remote past, it is easily seen that in all cities and in all peoples there are the same desires and the same passions as there always were. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

My hand is entirely the implement of a distant sphere. It is not my head that functions but something else, something higher, something somewhere remote. I must have great friends there, dark as well as bright. They are all very kind to me. ~ Paul Klee

Canada's a huge country, so to be able to unite the country through communication satellite technology or to be able to observe it through remote sensing technology from space is a natural fit for a country like Canada. ~ Marc Garneau

No, he didn't win, Great-Uncle Merry said, and even in the clear afternoon sunshine he seemed with every word to become more remote, as ancient as the rock behind him and the old world of which he spoke. ~ Susan Cooper

The Gunner's Dream (From The Final Cut)

Floating down through the clouds
Memories come rushing up to meet me now.
In the space between the heavens
and in the corner of some foreign field
I had a dream.
I had a dream.
Good-bye Max.
Good-bye Ma.
After the service when you're walking slowly to the car
And the silver in her hair shines in the cold November air
You hear the tolling bell
And touch the silk in your lapel
And as the tear drops rise to meet the comfort of the band
You take her frail hand
And hold on to the dream.
A place to stay
Enough to eat
Somewhere old heroes shuffle safely down the street
Where you can speak out loud
About your doubts and fears
And what's more no-one ever disappears
You never hear their standard issue kicking in your door.
You can relax on both sides of the tracks
And maniacs don't blow holes in bandsmen by remote control
And everyone has recourse to the law
And no-one kills the children anymore.
And no one kills the children anymore.

Night after night
Going round and round my brain
His dream is driving me insane.
In the corner of some foreign field
The gunner sleeps tonight.
What's done is done.
We cannot just write off his final scene.
Take heed of his dream. ~ Roger Waters

I am very fond of the modest manner of life of those solitary owners of remote villages, who in Little Russia are commonly called "old-fashioned," who are like tumbledown picturesque little houses, delightful in their simplicity and complete unlikeness to the new smooth buildings whose walls have not yet been discolored by the rain, whose roofs are not yet covered with green lichen, and whose porch does not display its bricks through the peeling stucco. ~ Nikolai Gogol

This is only a record of broken and apparently unrelated memories, some of them as distinct and sequent as brilliant beads upon a thread, others remote and strange, having the character of crimson dreams with interspaces blank and black
witch-fires glowing still and red in a great desolation. ~ Ambrose Bierce

Secondly, these missionaries would gradually, and without creating suspicion or exciting alarm, introduce a rudimentary cleanliness among the nobility, and from them it would work down to the people, if the priests could be kept quiet. This would undermine the Church. I mean would be a step toward that. Next, education - next, freedom - and then she would begin to crumble. It being my conviction that any Established Church is an established crime, an established slave-pen, I had no scruples, but was willing to assail it in any way or with any weapon that promised to hurt it. Why, in my own former day - in remote centuries not yet stirring in the womb of time - there were old Englishmen who imagined that they had been born in a free country: a "free" country with the Corporation Act and the Test still in force in it - timbers propped against men's liberties and dishonored consciences to shore up an Established Anachronism with. ~ Mark Twain

I've been to Japan but I've never been to China, I'd love to go to China. I don't know, I like to go to places that are remote. So, I think I'd like to do that more. And just sort of also explore not having a structured work life someday, to have more free time to sort of see what happens. ~ Ben Stiller

The sad engineer would never go back to England; he would become one of these elderly expatriates who hide out in remote countries, with odd sympathies, a weakness for the local religion, an unreasonable anger, and the kind of total recall that drives curious strangers away. ~ Paul Theroux

Lured by the wilderness, and by the chance of spotting rare desert elephants, a few intrepid tourists make their way to the Skeleton Coast each year. It's just about as remote as any tourist destination on earth, but one that pays fabulous dividends. ~ Tahir Shah

The warlock's gaze, on the flames, was remote and distant, as if he were looking back into the past. Simon couldn't help but remember what Magnus had said to him once, about living forever:
Someday you and I will be the only two left. ~ Cassandra Clare

Ignorance is less remote from the truth than prejudice. ~ Denis Diderot

This emphasis on the difference between intentions and ultimate results constituted an implicit critique of the Christian and civic republican traditions, and continues to make moralists queasy. Both traditions had stressed the importance of good and benevolent intentions. By unlinking consequences from intentions, Smith called into question the necessity and possibility of elevating the economic behavior of individuals through preaching and propaganda.
Yet just as he transmuted the Christian virtue of charity into the secular virtue of benevolence, on another level Smith preserved the classic republican concern for the common good. Those who could be motivated to devote themselves to promoting the public interest were in need of superior reason and understanding, by which we are capable of discerning the remote consequences of all our actions, and of foreseeing the advantage or detriment which is likely to result from them. ~ Jerry Z. Muller

Archaeology, I found, comprehended all manner of excitement and achievement. Adventure is coupled with bookish toil. Romantic excursions go hand in hand with scholarly self-discipline and moderation. Explorations among the ruins of the remote past have carried curious men all over the face of the earth ... Yet in truth, no science is more adventurous than archaeology, if adventure is thought of as a mixture of spirit and deed. ~ C. W. Ceram

I would be content with any job, however thankless, in any quarter, however remote, if I had the chance of making a corner of the desert blossom and a solitary place glad. ~ John Buchan

You may ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have witnesses for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads. ~ Ford Madox Ford

The path of duty lies in what is near, and men seek for it in what is remote; the work of duty lies in what is easy, and men seek for it in what is difficult. ~ Mencius

Nothing is so remote from us as the thing which is not old enough to be history and not new enough to be news. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

Digital presentation is just television in public; we're all just getting together and watching TV without pointing the remote control at the screen. ~ Quentin Tarantino

This girl wasn't tapping her fingers restlessly, though. Her movements were methodical. Synchronized. Sitting far enough to the left of her to study her profile, I watched her chin bob, so subtly it was almost undetectable – and at some point, I realized that when her expression was remote and her fingers were moving, she was hearing music. She was playing music.
It was the most magical thing I'd ever seen anyone do. ~ Tammara Webber

There are even some stars so remote that their light will reach the Earth only when Earth itself is a dead planet, as they themselves are dead, so that the living Earth will never be visited by that forlorn ray of light, without a living source, without a living destination. Often on fine nights when the park of this establishment is vacant, I amuse myself with this marvelous instrument (telescope). I go upstairs, walk across the grass, sit on a bench in the Avenue of Oaks – and there, in my solitude, I enjoy the pleasure of weighing the rays of dead stars. ~ Villiers De L'Isle-Adam

How remote we were too from the crazy musicians who arrived on a blustery fall day with the idea that, since this was a financial center, there would be a rain of coins from the tall buildings in response to their trumpet, guitar, and bass fiddle. The wind swirled their jazz among the canyons. I saw that no one was paying them the slightest attention. Feeling guilty, I threw them a quarter, but they didn't see it. They danced and made jazz in the cold, while upstairs we went on with our work, and they didn't exist, and it was nobody's fault. ~ Alan Harrington

Until I became a parent, I thought children just naturally knew how to catch a ball, that catching was an instinctive biological reflex that all children are born with, like knowing how to operate a remote control or getting high fevers in distant airports. ~ Dave Barry

So shaken as we are, so wan with care,
Find we a time for frighted peace to pant
And breathe short-winded accents of new broils
To be commenced in stronds afar remote. ~ William Shakespeare

The desert lay in wait, more infinite than God, no less remote. ~ Debora Greger

The causes which have been specified produced at first only unequal and disproportionate degrees of compliance with the requisitions of the Union. The greater deficiencies of some States furnished the pretext of example and the temptation of interest to the complying, or to the least delinquent States. Why should we do more in proportion than those who are embarked with us in the same political voyage? Why should we consent to bear more than our proper share of the common burden? These were suggestions which human selfishness could not withstand, and which even speculative men, who looked forward to remote consequences, could not, without hesitation, combat. Each State, yielding to the persuasive voice of immediate interest or convenience, has successively withdrawn its support, till the frail and tottering edifice seems ready to fall upon our heads, and to crush us beneath its ruins. ~ Alexander Hamilton

I wanted peace and quiet, tranquillity, but was too much aboil inside. Somewhere beneath the load of the emotion-freezing ice which my life had conditioned my brain to produce, a spot of black anger glowed and threw off a hot red light of such intensity that had Lord Kelvin known of its existence, he would have had to revise his measurements. A remote explosion had occurred somewhere, perhaps back at Emerson's or that night in Bledsoe's office, and it had caused the ice cap to melt and shift the slightest bit. But that bit, that fraction, was irrevocable. Coming to New York had perhaps been an unconscious attempt to keep the old freezing unit going, but it hadn't worked; hot water had gotten into its coils. Only a drop, perhaps, but that drop was the first wave of the deluge. One moment I believed, I was dedicated, willing to lie on the blazing coals, do anything to attain a position on the campus -- then snap! It was done with, finished, through. Now there was only the problem of forgetting it. If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care as long as they sang without dissonance; yes, and avoided the uncertain extremes of the scale. But there was no relief. I was wild with resentment but too much under "self-control," that frozen virtue, that freezing vice. And the more resentful I became, the more my old urge to make speeches returned. While walking along the streets words would spill ~ Ralph Ellison

Maybe, like Tony Amsterdam, you have seen a vision of God that is gone only temporarily; withdrawn, she thought, rather than ended. Maybe inside the terribly burned and burning circuits of your head that char more and more, even as I hold you, a spark of color and light in some disguised form manifested itself, unrecognized, to lead you, by its memory, through the years to come, the dreadful years ahead. A word not fully understood, some small thing seen but not understood; some fragment of a star mixed with the trash of this world, to guide you by reflex until the day...but it was so remote. She could not herself truly imagine it. Mingled with the commonplace, something from another world perhaps had appeared to Bob Arctor before it was over. All she could do now was hold him and hope. ~ Philip K. Dick

And I shall see it again... in dreams, when I sleep by the Ganges; and again, in a more remote hour - when another slumber overcomes me, on the shore of a darker stream! ~ Charlotte Bronte

You intellectuals are always so surprised to discover how fragile your body is. The mind is so robust, so remote. But muscles and bones are as simple as tied-up straw. They unravel and snap. And the more they break, the more the mind shrinks. In the moments before the cascade into death, the great intellect is reduced to a silent kernel. The mind is nothing more than a door into the dark. ~ Josiah Bancroft

But I will say this: In my humble opinion, knowing nothing about it, I do believe that they have remote viewers working on where Osama Bin Laden is. I absolutely, 100%, convinced of that. ~ Aaron Eckhart

I'd love to be in another film, but they haven't asked me. I think it's a shame but the prospects of me doing another one now are remote. Please do campaign on my behalf. ~ Julie Walters

I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as 'God on the cross.' In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in Godforsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross that symbolizes divine suffering. 'The cross of Christ ... is God's only self-justification in such a world" as ours....' 'The other gods were strong; but thou wast weak; they rode, but thou didst stumble to a throne; But to our wounds only God's wounds can speak, And not a god has wounds, but thou alone. ~ John R.W. Stott

He acts like he's in one of those Hollywood movies where after spending a couple of weeks with the natives in a remote Amazonian village, the white explorer is already debating the nature of the universe with the Chief in passable lingo. Except that in the movie, he ends up shagging the prize virgin whose body looks as if the jungle is really just a spa. What he doesn't know is that ten years down the road, she will wind up looking like all the other women in the village: saggy tits, rotten teeth, and about as supple as a mother of eight can be. ~ Sorin Suciu

The cart slowed as they came to a place so dark and quiet that it seemed as if they had entered some remote forest. Peeking beneath the hem of the cart's canvas covering, Garrett saw towering gates covered with ivy, and ghostly sculptures of angels, and solemn figures of men, women, and children with their arms crossed in resignation upon their breasts. Graveyard sculptures. A stab of horror went through her, and she crawled to the front of the cart to where West Ravenel was sitting with the driver.
"Where the devil are you taking us, Mr. Ravenel?"
He glanced at her over his shoulder, his brows raised. "I told you before- a private railway station."
"It looks like a cemetery."
"It's a cemetery station," he admitted. "With a dedicated line that runs funeral trains out to the burial grounds. It also happens to connect to the main lines and branches of the London Ironstone Railroad, owned by our mutual friend Tom Severin."
"You told Mr. Severin about all this? Dear God. Can we trust him?"
West grimaced slightly. "One never wants to be in the position of having to trust Severin," he admitted. "But he's the only one who could obtain clearances for a special train so quickly."
They approached a massive brick and stone building housing a railway platform. A ponderous stone sign adorned the top of the carriage entrance: Silent Gardens. Just below it, the shape of an open book emblazoned with words had been carved in the stone. Ad Meliora. "Toward be ~ Lisa Kleypas

You may claim no affiliation with them, but perhaps some have crossed your path.And perhaps you'd like to help us find them."
"Oh,sure.You killed my mother. You can imagine I'm dying to help you out."
Thomas manages to ignore me again. He glances at the first photo projected on the wall. "Know this person?"
I shake my head. "Never seen him before."
Thomas clicks the remote. Another photo pops up. "How about this one?"
"Nope."
Another photo. "How about this?"
"Nope."
Yet another stranger pops up on the wall. "Seen this girl before?"
"Never seen her in my life."
More unfamiliar faces. Thomas goes through them without blinking an eye or questioning my responses. What a stupid puppet of the state. I watch him as we continue, wishing I weren't chained so I could beat this man to the ground. ~ Marie Lu

In just two years, CSAS ignited the flame Grandmother lit years before. Carl would never succeed in his attempts to extinguish it. But his parental authority was able to keep it dormant and unthreatening for several years. At Ooltewah High School, I was like a lion forced into captivity after a liberating romp in the jungle. Nothing challenged me. Nothing motivated me. Nothing moved me. My claustrophobia itched to the point where clawing at my own skin seemed to be my only method of relief. With no social outlets and no intellectual nourishment, I caved into self-destruction. My bulimia amplified from throwing up obligatory family dinners to driving to grocery stores, Dollar Generals, and gas stations, shoving junk food into my purse in between security camera reach, devouring the calories in the corners of desolate parking lots, and scurrying into remote public restrooms in the outskirts of town. My knees would rest on the cold, sticky tile floors as I wrapped my arms around bleach-scented toilets as if embracing an old friend. ~ Maggie Georgiana Young

A happy disposition is largely a disposition to make others happy. One life permeates all things, and there is no corner of the cosmos too remote to feel its heart throb. ~ Henry Wood

But I didn't know that then. I washed my hands in the cold, uncaring sea, and my conscience was as silent and remote as the mute, unreachable stars. ~ Gregory David Roberts

Thom pulled nervously at his 'Kings' t-shirt. The Kings are a brutal West African gang that he follows onscreen. Such 'tourist shows', as I understand they are called, have become wildly popular in recent years, as global unrest makes actual travel less popular.

Armoured imaging teams, using tiny remote drone cameras known as 'flies', take the viewer inside the violent, gang-controlled regions of Nigeria and Cameroon. Using a touch screen, viewers (or 'zoners' as they are sometimes called) can follow the action from multiple angles while cheering on their favourite gang. ~ Paul Christensen

I'm an Egyptologist. I'm a remote sensing specialist, and I'm a space archaeologist. ~ Sarah Parcak

When I met my designs in the market of a remote village in the West Indies, or in the airport restaurant in Zurich, I felt like the mother of many well-behaved children. ~ Eva Zeisel

It is strange how intricately life hangs in the scales, and how unrelated events and single decisions alter the outcomes. Some remote land ten thousand miles from me, some land unfamiliar to me, held the key to my future. ~ Sara Niles

From when she was young, Molly had learned that the fence was an important landmark for the Mardudjara people of the Western Desert who migrated south from the remote regions. They knew that once they reached Billanooka Station, it was simply a matter of following the rabbit-proof fence to their final destination, the Jigalong government depot; the desert outpost of the white man. The fence cut through the country from south to north. It was a typical response by the white people to a problem of their own making. Building a fence to keep the rabbits out proved to be a futile attempt by the government of the day.

For the three runaways, the fence was a symbol of love, home and security. ~ Doris Pilkington

Like you, I grew up in a remote animist village. But then I went to a strict Catholic education in France. I was perfectly content to accept the grand Shee Yee of the Otherworld and the Lord B, and Jesus and his mother as my spiritual icons as long as I didn't have to spend too long on my knees. I would have settled for a committee. I just wanted order. But once I started to see my own ghosts I understood what these religions were all about. They were clubs set up by people like me to stop themselves from going mad. You know what I really think happens? You die. You wait for your number. There's a bit of time to take care of unfinished business. And you pass on. And, as you don't come back, nobody actually knows what you pass on to. But that description has never been acceptable. People want an ending. They don't want to vanish into thin air. So these great religious gurus made some endings up. The more comfortable and happy your ending, the more members signed up and paid their fees. And the kings and emperors started to add rules and regulations to subjugate the commoners and keep them in line. As so they invented hell and told you if you coveted your neighbor's mule you wouldn't even get into the clubhouse at the end of it all. ~ Colin Cotterill

In recent years my understanding of God had evolved into increasingly remote abstractions. I'd come to think of God in terms like Divine Reality, the Absolute, or the One who holds us in being. I do believe that God is beyond any form and image, but it has grown clear to me that I need an image in order to relate. I need an image in order to carry on an intimate conversation with what is so vast, amorphous, mysterious, and holy that it becomes ungraspable. I mean, really, how to you become intimate with Divine Reality? Or the Absolute? ~ Sue Monk Kidd

For one week, all I could think about was drinking margaritas
well, that and running my tongue along Reyes's teeth
but I didn't have salt
or Reyes's teeth. I'd also lacked the energy to leave my apartment to get some
or the desire to stoop low enough to beg Reyes to let me lick his teeth after what he did
so I could only wish for a margarita. And dream of Reyes's teeth.
I'd secretly hoped a margarita would magically appear in my hand, but that would mean I would have to put down the remote, and God knew that was not going to happen. ~ Darynda Jones

Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time: a small red flame
a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones. ~ Evelyn Waugh

One time I listened to Farmer give a talk on HIV to a class at the Harvard School of Public Health, and in the midst of reciting data, he mentioned the Haitian phrase "looking for life, destroying life," Then he explained, "It's an expression Haitians use if a poor woman selling mangoes falls off a truck and dies." I felt as if for that moment I could see a little way into his mind, It seemed like a place of hyperconnectivity, At moments like that, I thought that what he wanted was to erase both time and geography, connecting all parts of his life and tying them instrumentally to a world in which he saw intimate, inescapable connections between the gleaming corporate offices of Paris and New York and a legless man lying on the mud floor of a hut in the remotest part of remote Haiti. Of all the world's errors, he seemed to feel, the most fundamental was the "erasing" of people, the "hiding away" of suffering. "My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember. ~ Tracy Kidder

Do you know where you were on Thursday evening at about eight o'clock last week, and who you were with, and what you were doing? Are you absolutely certain beyond any shadow of a doubt? Would you bet your life on it? If there is any possibility - no matter how slim or remote - that you could possibly be mistaken about such a thing, you are the kind of person who should never agree to talk to the police under just about any circumstances for as long as you live. And that includes practically everybody. ~ James Duane