Robert Hellenga Quotes

She heard melody and harmony and counterpoint; he heard something calling him from far, far away. ~ Robert Hellenga

Death was a lens that would reveal things as they really were: what was important would assume its true importance; what was unimportant would recede into the shadows. ~ Robert Hellenga

All I know is that my life is filled with little pockets of silence. When I put a record on the turntable, for example, there`s a little interval-between the time the needle touches down on the record and the time the music actually starts-during which my heart refuses to beat. All I know is that between the rings of the telephone, between the touch of a button and the sound of the radio coming on, between the dimming of the lights at the cinema and the start of the film, between the lightning and the thunder, between the shout and the echo, between the lifting of a baton and the opening bars of a symphony, between the dropping of a stone and the plunk that comes back from the bottom of a well, between the ringing of the doorbell and the barking of the dogs I sometimes catch myself, involuntarily, listening for the sound of my mother`s voice, still waiting for the tape to begin. ~ Robert Hellenga

Sometimes it takes a little jolt to make us appreciate what we've got. ~ Robert Hellenga

He knew that he'd known her for less than a week, but now that she was gone he was continually probing his feelings for her, the way he might probe a sore tooth with his tongue, engaging her in imaginary conversations, imagining her saying such delightful things. ~ Robert Hellenga

What to do with the past? There was so much of it. ~ Robert Hellenga

He wondered what you had to do to lose your driver's license in Italy. ~ Robert Hellenga

It took him half an hour to reach the little mission chapel. From his position on his back in the river he could see just the tip of the steeple, but for the most part he gazed upward at the constellations. Rudy knew his constellations, because each one of his daughters had done a science project on them and they'd spent hours lying on their backs in the middle of the Edgar Lee Masters campus looking up at the sky. As the river bent to the south, he could see Virgo and Centaurus coming into view. At first they reminded him of true beauty, and he was overwhelmed. He knew that this heart-piercing ache, however painful, was the central experience of his life and that he would have to come to terms with it. No one - not Aristotle, not Epicurus, not Siva Singh - would ever convince him otherwise. But then it occurred to him that Virgo and Centaurus were just as arbitrary as the rudimentary classification system he'd used for his books - Helen's books. There were a lot of stars left out of the constellations, and nothing to stop you from drawing the lines in different ways to create different pictures. He wanted to lift his wings and fly, but he didn't have the power. He could only let the river carry him along. ~ Robert Hellenga

Sometimes pain is God's megaphone, his only way to get our attention. ~ Robert Hellenga

However far back you go you will find all experiences linked by slender threads. ~ Robert Hellenga

He doesn't believe in talking too much about art, especially while you're looking at it. The pressure to appreciate is the great enemy of actual enjoyment. Most people don't know what they like because they feel obligated to like so many different things. They feel they're supposed to be overwhelmed, so instead of looking, they spend their time thinking up something to say, something intelligent, or at least clever. ~ Robert Hellenga

Fussing over food was important. It gave a shape to the day: breakfast, lunch, dinner; beginning, middle, end. ~ Robert Hellenga

The only meaning our lives have is the meaning we give them. ~ Robert Hellenga

Learn about relationship between cancer and diet with Prof. Dr. Robert Hess. Complete info about food, what hurts and what protects or cure against cancer. ~ Prof. Dr. Robert Hess

Even every ray of hope destroyed and not a wish to gild the gloom. ~ Robert Burns

As de Saussure said, risk-taking brings with it its own reward: it keeps a "continual agitation alive" in the heart. Hope, fear. Hope, fear - this is the fundamental rhythm of mountaineering. Life, it frequently seems in the mountains, is more intensely lived the closer one gets to its extinction: we never feel so alive as when we have nearly died. ~ Robert Macfarlane

Writing is an incessant process of discovery. ~ Robert Hass

The thought came back to him, as it often did: To save the culture of your allies is a small thing. To cherish the culture of your enemy, to risk your life and the life of other men to save it, to give it all back to them as soon as the battle was won ... it was unheard of, but that was exactly what Walker Hancock and the other Monuments Men intended to do. ~ Robert M. Edsel

If you stop your creative process every time you think you need to cheer yourself up, or rid yourself of emotional conflicts, your life will be over before you can create anything of any real significance. ~ Robert Fritz

There, then, is the role of the amateur: to look the world back to grace. There, too, is the necessity of his work: His tribe must be in short supply; his job has gone begging. The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of a pack of trolls. Indeed, the whole distinction between art and trash, between food and garbage, depends on the presence or absence of the loving eye. Turn a statue over to a boor, and his boredom will break it to bits - witness the ruined monuments of antiquity. On the other hand, turn a shack over to a lover; for all its poverty, its lights and shadows warm a little and its numbed surfaces prickle with feeling. ~ Robert Farrar Capon

Resignation to misfortune is the only attitude, but not an easy one to adopt. It seems undeserved where plans were well laid and so nearly crowned with a first success. I cannot see that any plan would be altered if it were to do again, the margin for bad weather was ample according to all experience and this stormy December - our finest month - is a thing that the most cautious organiser might not have been prepared to encounter. It is very evil to lie here in a wet sleeping-bag and think of the pity of it all. ~ Robert Falcon Scott

On a windswept hill by a billowing sea, my destiny sits and waits for me. ~ Robert Breault

It was that juxtaposition of how it used to be with how it had turned out that made L.A. so interesting and so sad a place, I thought. ~ Robert B. Parker

It made the kids at camp much more enthusiastic and cooperative when they had ego goals to fulfill, I'm sure, but ultimately that kind of motivation is destructive. Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. Now we're paying the price. When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it's a hollow victory. In order to sustain victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That's never the way. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

Chess, which exists predominantly in two dimensions, is one of the world's most difficult games. Three-dimensional chess is an invitation to insanity. But human relationships, even of the simplest order, are like a kind of four-dimensional chess, a game whose pieces and positions change subtly and inexorably between moves, whose players stare dumbly while their powerful positions deteriorate into hopeless predicaments and while improbable combinations suddenly become inevitable. To make matters worse, some games are open to any number of players, and all sides are expected to win. ~ Robert Grudin

In the ages of faith a very inadequate grasp of religion would pass muster; in these searching days none but the humble and the pure could stand the test for long, unless indeed they were protected by a miracle of ignorance. The alliance of Psychology and Materialism did indeed seem, looked at from one angle, to account for everything; it needed a robust supernatural perception to understand their practical inadequacy. ~ Robert Hugh Benson

We hold many dubious beliefs, in other words, not because they satisfy some important psychological need, but because they seem to be the most sensible conclusions consistent with the available evidence. People hold such beliefs because they seem, in the words of Robert Merton, to be the "irresistible products of their own experience."7 They are the products, not of irrationality, but of flawed rationality. ~ Thomas Gilovich

Science differs from politics or religion, in precisely this one discipline: we agree in advance to simply reject our own findings when they have been shown to be in error. ~ Robert Pollack

The conclusion that many uniformed military came away from Vietnam with was that political interference, dominance of strategy and even tactics were a very bad way to conduct a war, and that indeed, if that was going to be our practice, that we shouldn't wage conflict again. ~ Robert McFarlane

But not gold in commercial quantities, Just enough gold to make the engagement rings And marriage rings of those who owned the farm. What gold more innocent could one have asked for? ~ Robert Frost

To talk about the reality of life here and the work that you do here at the university. ~ Robert Pinsky

The question is not How much may I indulge in and still be saved. God forbid! I must rather ask, What about Christ's will and the example I set for my fellow Christians? ~ Robert A. Cook

A man is not wealthy simply by the contents of his pockets alone, but instead by the richness of his heart. ~ Robert M. Hensel

Just imagine for a day that you do not know anything, that what you believe could be completely false. Let go of your preconceptions and even your most cherished beliefs. Experiment. Force yourself to hold the opposite opinion or see the world through your enemy's eyes. Listen to the people around you with more attentiveness. See everything as a source for education - even the most banal encounters. Imagine that the world is still full of mystery. ~ Robert Greene

What is a blade but a conduit of death?
What is a life but a conduit of death? ~ Robert Jackson Bennett

Too long I've owed you this apology
For the apparently unmeaning sorrow
You were afflicted with in those old days.
But it was of the essence of the trial
You shouldn't understand it at the time. ~ Robert Frost

Imagine a rotating sphere that is 8,000 miles in diameter, with a bumpy surface, surrounded by a 25-mile-deep mixture of different gases whose concentrations vary both spatially and over time, and heated, along with its surrounding gases, by a nuclear reactor 93 million miles away. Imagine also that this sphere is revolving around the nuclear reactor and that some locations are heated more during parts of the revolution. And imagine that this mixture of gases receives continually inputs from the surface below, generally calmly but sometimes through violent and highly localized injections. Then, imagine that after watching the gaseous mixture you are expected to predict its state at one location on the sphere one, two, or more days into the future. This is essentially the task encountered day by day by a weather forecaster. ~ Robert T. Ryan

There are treasures in books that all the money in the world cannot buy, but the poorest laborer can have for nothing. ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

Don't you know that if people could bottle the air they would? Don't you know that there would be an American Air-bottling Association? And don't you know that they would allow thousands and millions to die for want of breath, if they could not pay for air? I am not blaming anybody. I am just telling how it is. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

Jesus taught that the secret life we have with God is one of the true tests of the genuineness of our relationship with him. ~ Robert Whitlow

nakedness is strictly forbidden.") ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Oh, when a mother meets on high The babe she lost in infancy, Hath she not then for pains and fears, The day of woe, the watchful night, For all her sorrow, all her tears, An over-payment of delight? ~ Robert Southey

We now lay in towns, where nobody troubled us with questions; we had floated into civilised life, where people pass without salutation. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Uncomplicated men assumed others to have uncomplicated motivations, ~ Robert Jordan

What would you do if you were me? she said.
If I were you-you, or if I were you-me?
If you were me-me.
If I were you-you, he said, I'd do exactly
what you're doing. ~ Robert Hass

The enemy is not me. The enemy is Barack Obama. ~ Robert Pittenger

I like to make my voice sound like a piece of tin that's been stuck on the side of a chair, lifted up as far as it would go and then let to spring - "doooiiinng." I like to make it into a piece of metal from time to time and I can do it, both with the movements in my throat and with, uh, my little toys ... So I like to take it beyond just a voice, more into the realms of a weapon. ~ Robert Plant

All questions of process require an answer that begins with a very important sentence, and the sentence is: 'Everybody is different.' Whatever way of working you name - methodical, haphazard, gets up early in the morning, sleeps all day, works at night, revises immensely, never revises at all - someone has made great work with that way. ~ Robert Pinsky

At length his lonely cot appears in view,
Beneath the shelter of an aged tree;
Th' expectant wee-things, toddling, stacher thro'
To meet their Dad, wi' flichterin noise an' glee. ~ Robert Burns

I did not take a calculus course until my second year of college. ~ Robert Coleman Richardson

We have enough people who tell it like it is - now we could use a few who tell it like it can be. ~ Robert Orben

The worst thing is to sit and whine and complain and obsess about money as if that were the only sign of your worth as a human. ~ Robert Greene

If all you have is a hammer, everything seems to be a nail. ~ Robert Sedgewick

When there's nothing else you can do, breathe slower. There's no way it can hurt, and it might help. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

There should be more or less of a jumble in your head or on your note paper after the first time and even after the second. Much that you will think of in connection will come to nothing and be wasted. But some of it ought to go together under one idea. That idea is the thing to write on and write into the title at the head of your paper ... One idea and a few subordinate ideas - [the trick is] to have those happen to you as you read and catch them - not let them escape you ... The sidelong glance is what you depend on. You look at your author but you keep the tail of your eye on what is happening over and above your author in your own mind and nature. ~ Robert Frost

Ilsa looked slightly aggrieved at the news that Robin still intended to marry someone other than Strike, but before she could say anything else Strike's mobile buzzed in his pocket. ~ Robert Galbraith

I get just as excited about building a birdhouse as when providing strategic counsel to a client. ~ Robert L. Peters

Innovation is the process of transforming an idea or concept into a functional and marketable value proposition reflecting creative opportunity. ~ Robert E. Davis

There are those who believe something, and therefore will tolerate nothing; and on the other hand, those who tolerate everything, because they believe nothing. ~ Robert Browning

Sometimes in life we blow things out of proportion because proportion is so dull. ~ Robert Breault