Sequestered Quotes

When the inhabitants of some sequestered island first descry the "big canoe" of the European rolling through the blue waters towards their shores, they rush down to the beach in crowds, and with open arms stand ready to embrace the strangers. Fatal embrace! They fold to their bosoms the vipers whose sting is destined to poison all their joys; and the instinctive feeling of love within their breasts is soon converted into the bitterest hate. ~ Herman Melville

The great British Library
an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read: one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or pure English, undefiled wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought. ~ Washington Irving

So inscrutable is the arrangement of causes and consequences in this world, that a two-penny duty on tea, unjustly imposed in a sequestered part of it, changes the condition of all its inhabitants. ~ Thomas Jefferson

She scarcely knew what to think except that she was in the presence of a woman who was as close to legendary as any being could get.What stories were told of her! That she had been sequestered in her own manor to prevent men from fighting over her, that she possessed strange powers, that the Wolf had kidnapped her for vengeance but married her for love, that her own brother, mistaking what had happened, had returned her to England by stealth and that Norse and Saxon had come perilously close to war over her. ~ Josie Litton

If to "aestheticize" is to glide across brutality and cruelty, treat them merely as dramatic occasions for the artist rather than structures of power to be revealed and dismantled - much hangs on the words "merely" and "rather than." Opportunism isn't the same as committed attention. But we can also define the "aesthetic" not as a privileged and sequestered rendering of human suffering, but as news of an awareness, a resistance, that totalizing systems want to quell: art reaching into us for what's still passionate, still unintimidated, still unquenched. ~ Adrienne Rich

It neither is reason nor in any wise to be suffered that the young king, our master and kinsman, should be in the hands of custody of his mother's kindred, sequestered in great measure from our company and attendance, the which is neither honorable to his majesty nor unto us. ~ Richard III Of England

He not only fumbled badly in his attempts at impromptu oratory en route to the capital, but worst of all, ended his journey in the dead of night, embarrassingly fearful for his safety, after encouraging unseemly partisan demonstrations in friendly Northern cities. He was too conspicuous. He was too sequestered. He was too careless. He was too calculating. He was too conciliatory. He was too coercive. He was too sloppy. ~ Harold Holzer

Was it because a lot of the heat went into melting Arctic sea ice or parts of Greenland and Antarctica, and other glaciers? Was it because the heat was buried in the ocean and sequestered, perhaps well below the surface? ... Perhaps all of these things are going on? ~ Kevin E. Trenberth

Getting sequestered and not really knowing what to do with your time and then discovering, 'Oh, I can watch a bunch of horror movies' has probably played out in a lot of people's discovery of horror. ~ Kirk Hammett

By burning through coal and oil deposits, humans are putting carbon back into the air that has been sequestered for tens - in most cases hundreds - of millions of years. In the process, we are running geologic history not only in reverse but at warp speed. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert

In this sequestered nook how sweet To sit upon my orchard seat And birds and flowers once more to greet ... ~ William Wordsworth

The writer of this legend then records
Its ghostly application in these words:
The image is the Adversary old,
Whose beckoning finger points to realms of gold;
Our lusts and passions are the downward stair
That leads the soul from a diviner air;
The archer, Death; the flaming jewel, Life;
Terrestrial goods, the goblet and the knife;
The knights and ladies all whose flesh and bone
By avarice have been hardened into stone;
The clerk, the scholar whom the love of pelf
Tempts from his books and from his nobler self.
The scholar and the world! The endless strife,
The discord in the harmonies of life!
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books;
The market-place, the eager love of gain,
Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is pain! ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I should have moved to the forest long ago, I would think to myself, perhaps to the Black Forest although the place probably wasn't half as sequestered as I imagined, though no doubt there would be far fewer faces and voices, only the imperceptible cries of ants, the footsteps of spiders and the sound of trees growing. But the madness that remote places cultivate is not to be taken lightly and I've always found something particularly disquieting in madness left to quietly ferment on its own; the social functions required of us help us maintain, at the very last, an illusion of normality, and for that reason alone I had, until that point in my life, remained in the city. ~ Chloe Aridjis

If sequestered pain made a sound, the atmosphere would be humming all the time. ~ Stephen Levine

I had to wonder whether this interval had any more spread and breadth than just another sequestered moment, bordered by closed doors. We ~ Don DeLillo

What were they thinking?' we ask about our ancestors, but we know that, a century hence, our descendents will ask the same thing about us. Who knows what will strike them as strangest? The United States incarcerates 1 percent of its population and subjects many thousands of inmates to years of solitary confinement. In Saudi Arabia, women are forbidden to drive. There are countries today in which homosexuality is punishable by life in prison or by death. Then there's the sequestered reality of factory farming, in which hundreds of millions of mammals, and billions of birds, live a squalid brief existence. Or the toleration of extreme poverty, inside and outside the developed world. One day, people will find themselves thinking not just that an old practice was wrong and a new one right but that there was something shameful in the old ways. In the course of the transition, many will change what they do because they are shamed out of an old way of doing things. So it is perhaps not too much to hope that if we can find the proper place for honor now, we can make the world better. ~ Kwame Anthony Appiah

She couldn't quite see herself in it. When they were done, I read the Shakespeare sonnet that begins "Fear no more the heat o' the Sun," partly because it was appropriate to the occasion and one of the most beautiful poems in the language, but also because I hoped it might hide from my loved ones the fact that I myself had nothing to say, that while part of me was here with them on this beloved shore, another part was wandering, as it had been for months, in a barren, uninhabited landscape not unlike the one in my dream. I realized I'd felt like this for a while. Though life had gone on since my mother's death - Kate had gotten married, I'd finally published another book and gone on tour with it - some sort of internal-pause button had been pushed, allowing another part of me, one I'd specifically kept sequestered to deal with my mother, to fall silent. Since her death, Barbara and I had gone through all her things and settled her affairs, but we'd barely spoken of her. ~ Richard Russo

Woman too commonly commits the sin of self-sacrifice whereby she consents to be sequestered in the home, without intellectual stimulus, so that the tranquil flame of her unspoiled soul should radiate purity and nobility upon an indefinitely extended family. ~ Rebecca West

Count Chojnicki was curious. No other passion than curiosity sent him out into the world, drew him to the tables of the great gaming halls, sequestered him behind the walls of his old hunting pavilion, sat him down on the parliamentarians' benches, determined that he would return home every spring, compelled him to throw his regular parties, and prevented him from cutting his own throat. It was curiosity that kept him alive. ~ Joseph Roth

I longed to seek the retirement of my own room, or some sequestered nook in the grounds, that I might deliver myself up to my feelings - to weep my last farewell, and lament my false hopes and vain delusions. Only this once, and then adieu to fruitless dreaming - thenceforth, only sober, solid, sad reality should occupy my mind. ~ Anne Bronte

Miriam will never know what kind of dog attacked her, will imagine a Doberman or a German shepherd with snarling, angry teeth despite the fact she bears neither bite marks nor broken skin. It will never cross her mind that the dog was a beagle and that she was knocked over from a surprise more than force. The children of the house she fled will use the incident to convince their parents to keep the dog, which had been on the verge of being given away for its propensity to shit at the slightest hint of thunder it having been sequestered in the garage that night because of a stormy forecast. The family will never know what manner of burglar their fog deflected, will imagine a scruffy, heavy-set man with scars and a limp groping the family jewelery. It will never cross their minds that their intruder was am upper middle-class wife and mother of two who would have had eyes only for their Chinese teakettle. ~ Myla Goldberg

Pitt the Elder, had been prime minister a generation before (1766-68). He was a manic-depressive, had had a mental breakdown in 1751 while a Cabinet minister (Paymaster General) and had withdrawn from public office for three years. While serving in the highest office, clear signs of mental instability were evident. He spent most of his prime ministership sequestered away in a small room in his house at Hampstead, trying to avoid his ministers and the pressures of governing. During his time, his Chancellor was doing his own thing, unwisely levying the taxes on the North American colonies that would eventually ignite the War of Independence. ~ Phil Mason

I enjoy the company of my fellow man and woman, and I do not wish to be sequestered away in any type of bubble. ~ Pierce Brosnan

As I look back on it, I understand that the jury was sequestered and it was a long trial, but they were a rather high-maintenance bunch. There seemed to be a lot of thought and discussion about what entertainment they wanted, which movies they wanted to watch, and which restaurants they wanted to go to. Yet, as we would learn later, when it came time to deliberate, they never asked a single question about the evidence. ~ Jeff Ashton

I do not know where Viktor and Rudolf were taken. I cannot find the records. I never Elisabeth or Iggie.

It is possible that they were taken to the Hotel Metropole, which has been sequestered as the headquarters of the Gestapo. There are many other lock-ups for this flood of Jews. They are beaten, of course; but they are also forbidden to shave or wash so that they look even more degenerate. This because it is important to address the old affront of Jews not looking like Jews. This processing of stripping away your respectability, taking away your watch-chain, or your shoes or your belt, so that you stumble to hold up your trousers with one hand, is a way of returning everyone to the shtetl, stripping you back to your essential character - wandering, unshaven, bowed with your possessions on your back. You are supposed to end up looking like a cartoon from Der Stuermer, Streicher's tabloid that is now sold on the streets of Vienna. They take away your reading glasses. ~ Edmund De Waal

Beneath these fruit-tree boughs that shed
Their snow-white blossoms on my head,
With brightest sunshine round me spread
Of spring's unclouded weather,
In this sequestered nook how sweet
To sit upon my orchard-seat!
And birds and flowers once more to greet,
My last year's friends together. ~ William Wordsworth

What it mainly revealed was that one of the most insidious of the "hidden injuries of class" in North American society was the denial of the right to do good, to be noble, to pursue any form of value other than money – or, at least, to do it and to gain any financial security or rewards for having done. The passionate hatred of the "liberal elite" among right-wing populists came down, in practice, to the utterly justified resentment towards a class that had sequestered, for its own children, every opportunity to pursue love, truth, beauty, honor, decency, and to be afforded the means to exist while doing so. The endless identification with soldiers ("support our troops!) – that is, with individuals who have, over the years, been reduced to little more than high tech mercenaries enforcing of a global regime of financial capital – lay in the fact that these are almost the only individuals of working class origin in the US who have figured out a way to get paid for pursuing some kind of higher ideal, or at least being able to imagine that's what they're doing. Obviously most would prefer to pursue higher ideals in way that did not involve the risk of having their legs blown off. The sense of rage, in fact, stems above all from the knowledge that all such jobs are taken by children of the rich. ~ David Graeber

I went to Europe to live in 1961. I'd never have written Julian if it hadn't been for the sequestered life that I led in Rome and the classical library at the America Academy. ~ Gore Vidal

Not for the first time, Peter thought about how much of our lives we spend sequestered inside small patches of electric brightness, blind to everything beyond the reach of those fragile bulbs. ~ Michel Faber

I believe that there lives a burning desire in the most sequestered private heart of every American, a desire to belong to a great country. I believe that every citizen wants to stand on the world stage and represent a noble country where the mighty do not always crush the weak and the dream of a democracy is not the sole possession of the strong. ~ Maya Angelou

Oddly, when I started to make the record, I wasn't aware I was making a record. I just was sort of disgusted with the whole thing and sequestered myself in the basement and started playing the piano just for something to do. ~ Paul Westerberg

The langour of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth - all save this come and go with us through life ... These things are a part of life itself; but languor - the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse - that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it. ~ Evelyn Waugh

William the Testy. On the contrary, he conceived that the true wisdom of legislation consisted in the multiplicity of laws. He accordingly had great punishments for great crimes, and little punishments for little offences. By degrees the whole surface of society was cut up by ditches and fences, and quickset hedges of the law, and even the sequestered paths of private life so beset by petty rules and ordinances, too numerous to be remembered, that one could scarce walk at large without the risk of letting off a spring-gun or falling into a man-trap. In a little while the blessings of innumerable laws became apparent; a class of men arose to expound and confound them. Petty courts were instituted to take cognizance of petty offences, pettifoggers began to abound, and the community was soon set together by the ears. ~ Washington Irving

What was most surprising, she was giving him the hardest thing to do first, but by failure at the great one he was learning the easier tasks with infallible power and skill. How different that is from our human way of training people, with the easiest always first. In nature animals cannot afford such long drawn-out step-by-step training. Animal children cannot be segregated in the schoolroom from the sharp experiences of life. They have to be educated in the heart of life itself. The easy and the difficult befall them without any sequence. It is a pity that in civilisation man has made the business of education so sequestered and slow. ~ Dhan Gopal Mukerji

Sequestered in the depths of the average pacifist - as one will invariably discover - resides a killer. That is why the person has become a pacifist in the first place. ~ Norman Mailer

Along the cool sequestered vale of life,
They kept the noiseless tenour of their way. ~ Thomas Gray

Beginning in the 1980s, electronic trading detached the buyer from the seller, complex derivatives insulated the investor from the company, CDOs sequestered the lender from the borrower - in other words, the decade constructed a system that allowed us to rip each other off without fear of having to look at the ramifications of our actions. ~ David Sirota