Shapes Quotes

He was beautiful.
Whatever else he was, Sage was by far the most magnetic man I had ever seen. I had felt it in my dreams, and it was even more true in real life. I welcomed the chance to study him without his knowledge.
He glanced up, and I quickly closed my eyes, feigning sleep. Had he seen me? The scratching stopped. He was looking at me, I knew it. I held my breath and willed my eyes not to pop open and see if he was staring.
Finally the scratching started up again. I forced myself to slowly count to ten before I opened my eyelids the tiniest bit and peeked through my lashes.
Good-he wasn't looking at me.
I opened my eyes a little wider. What was he doing? Moving only my eyes, I glanced down at the dirt floor in front of him…
…and saw a picture of me, fast asleep.
It was incredible. I could see his tools laid out beside the picture: rocks in several sizes and shapes, a couple of twigs…the most rudimentary materials, and yet what he was etching into the floor wouldn't look out of place on an art gallery wall. It was beautiful…far more beautiful than I thought I actually looked in my sleep. Is that how he saw me?
Sage lifted his head again, and I shut my eyes. I imagined him studying me, taking careful note of my features and filtering them through his own senses. My heartbeat quickened, and it took all my willpower to remain still.
"You can keep pretending to be asleep if you'd like, but I don't see a career for you as an actres ~ Hilary Duff

The capacity of a human community to shape it's future. ~ Peter Senge

A constellation of Utopians is a group which only seems a group to us because we seek familiar institutions in their government, as we use the shapes of beasts and heroes to make false sense of the sea of stars. ~ Ada Palmer

Monsters came in all shapes and sizes, and very few of them were actually supernatural. She ~ Gail Carriger

While there are many who would say that the race to the moon was hardly green, many others have noted that the photographs brought back from Apollo 8 created the environmental movement. "They fuelled an awareness of the vulnerability of the Earth which still resonates with us today and shapes our behaviour." It was Kennedy who started it all with his pledge: ~ John F. Kennedy

The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves. ~ Paulo Freire

Early in my career, I decided I never wanted to get out of shape. ~ Cal Ripken, Jr.

They hate people and their stories; they have hated for so long and with such intensity that in the end the darkness enveloped their whole bodies until their shapes were no longer discernible. That is also why they are so difficult to defeat, because they can disappear into walls or into the ground or float up. They're ferocious and bloodthirsty, and if you're bitten by one you don't just die; a far more serious and terrible fate lies in store: you lose your imagination. (talking about shadows) ~ Fredrik Backman

As the water shapes itself to the vessel that contains it, so a wise man adapts himself to circumstances. ~ Confucius

And slowly the snow began to melt. First, doing a number on children's constructions; Then retreating to the foundations of barns and other buildings. Mangy grass poked through the receding snow. Patches of white were swallowed up in the till of the fields. New shapes emerged. Areas of the forest became INACCESSIBLE now that the snow no longer weighed down the weeds and brier ... Nothing fits together anymore. ~ Craig Thompson

We must look at the lens through we see the world, as well as the world we see, and that the lens itself shapes how we interpret the world. ~ Stephen R. Covey

Wheels will always turn full circle. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

A porpoise sounded twenty yards away from us in an explosion of breath, startling us. . . . Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and a fourth porpoise neared the board and we could feel great secret shapes eyeing us from below. I reached out to touch the back of one, its skin the color of jade, but as I reached the porpoise dove and my hand touched moonlight where the dorsal fin had been cutting through the silken waters. The dolphins had obviously smelled the flood tide of boyhood in the sea and heard the hormones singing in the boy0scented water. None of us spoke as the porpoises circled us. The visitation was something so rare and perfect that we knew by instinct not to speak – and then, as quickly as they had come, the porpoises moved away from us, moved south where there were fish to be hunted.
"Each of us would remember that night floating on the waves all during our lives. It was the year before we went to high school when we were poised on the slippery brink between childhood and adulthood, admiring our own daring as we floated free from the vigilance and approval of adult eyes, ruled only by the indifference of stars and fate. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set among us the night of the porpoises. ~ Pat Conroy

The camera machine cannot evade the objects which are in front of it. When the photographer selects this movement, the light, the objects, he must be true to them. If he includes in his space a strip of grass, it must be felt as the living differentiated thing it is and so recorded. It must take its proper but no less important place as a shape and a texture in relationship to the mountain tree or what not, which are included. ~ Paul Strand

But when you walk through yonder gate," Churchill said, pointing toward the Middle Tower at the end of the causeway, which was visible only as a crenellated cutout in the orange sky, "you'll find yourself in a London you no longer know. The changes wrought by the Fire were nothing. In that London, loyalty and allegiance are subtle and fluxional. 'Tis a chessboard with not only black and white pieces, but others as well, in diverse shades. You're a Bishop, and I'm a Knight, I can tell that much by our shapes, and the changes we have wrought on the board; but by fire-light 'Tis difficult to make out your true shade. ~ Neal Stephenson

I think love can come fairly easily and grow - but really liking the core essence of someone is a much harder thing to bottle. If you have both, you're in pretty good shape. ~ Eric Bana

Already it is twilight down in the Laredito. Bats fly forth from their roostings in courthouse and tower and circle the quarter. The air is full of the smell of burning charcoal. Children and dogs squat by the mud stoops and gamecocks flap and settle in the branches of the fruit trees. They go afoot, these comrades, down along a bare adobe wall. Band music carries dimly from the square. They pass a watercart in the street and they pass a hole in the wall where by the light of a small forgefire an old man beats out shapes of metal. They pass in a doorway a young girl whose beauty becomes the flowers about.

They arrive at last before a wooden door. It is hinged into a larger door or gate and all must step over the foot-high sill where a thousand boots have scuffled away the wood, where fools in their hundreds have tripped or fallen or tottered drunkenly into the street. They pass along a ramada in a courtyard by an old grape arbor where small fowl nod in the dusk among the gnarled and barren vines and they enter a cantina where the lamps are lit and they cross stooping under a low beam to a bar and belly up one two three.

There is an old disordered Mennonite in this place and he turns to study them. A thin man in a leather weskit, a black and straightbrim hat set square on his head, a thin rim of whiskers. The recruits order glasses of whiskey and drink them down and order more. There are monte games at tables by the wall and there are whores at another ~ Cormac McCarthy

With poetry and writing, the question isn't "do you know the right words?".
The real question is, "can you make words from the unwordable, chisel blocks of raw silence into shapes and touch our souls? ~ Jacob Nordby

Egalitarianism, in every form and shape, is incompatible with the idea of private property. ~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe

That turned-up collar. The jacket that zipped all the way down the front into a nice fitted shape. The white denim that made my untanned skin look like a color. ~ Tina Fey

The trick was not simply to write the code that turned information into pictures but to find the best pictures to draw - shapes and colors that led the mind to meaning. ~ Michael Lewis

My brain scrambled to make room for the existene of these people. Grandparents I'd never known. They went from hypothetical, empty memories to blurry, unformed shapes in my head. Dead one second, alive the next.
Kind of like me. ~ Megan Miranda

It's kind of like trying to make straight lines from curves, but involving shapes that sort of dictate what the curves are, if you like, and the difference between two separate pieces creates a third transitional piece if you like. ~ Sean Booth

I have had nothing to do in any way, shape or form with the mailing of these anthrax letters, and it is extremely wrong for anyone to contend or suggest that I have. ~ Steven Hatfill

Your ribcage never meant to hurt you.
Your windpipe doesn't know how to be pretty,
but she knows how to howl -
and here, I'd like to take a moment
to submit a formal apology to my soft parts
because they kept me warm
when I was trying to freeze to death,
and I hated them for it. An apology
for a starvation that went deeper than my skin.
One for the strongest skeleton I will ever own
and how I kept using the word girl against it.
Or how I turned words like beautiful into shapes
I could contort myself into. I didn't mean
to compare myself to faces I can't have.
Or spend years trying to carve myself,
like Michelangelo's angels, from the marble -
forgetting what it is to be skin instead of stone.
I let myself be afraid. I was taught to be.
When you learn you are only as good
as your beauty routine, you forget
how to define yourself by anything else. ~ Ashe Vernon

Given the brevity of our time here, it does seem likely that our species, too, must have at best a blinkered understanding of the shape of things, the import of certain events and what distinguishes 'good' from 'bad' luck. ~ Karen Russell

But monsters, I now know, come in all shapes and sizes, and only their appetite for human flesh defines them. ~ Rick Yancey

Find the story, Granny Weatherwax always said. She believed that the world was full of story shapes. If you let them, they controlled you. But if you studied them, if you found out about them ... you could use them, you could change them. ~ Terry Pratchett

To me, football is so much about mental toughness, it's digging deep, it's doing whatever you need to do to help a team win and that comes in a lot of shapes and forms. ~ Tom Brady

When we're kids," Dancer said, "we're made of steel. And we think we're invincible but stuff happens and that steel gets stretched and pulled and twisted into impossible shapes. Most people are torn apart by the time they're married and have kids of their own. But some people, the few, figure out how to let that steel heat and bend. And in all the places other people break, they get stronger. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Like Godard, Tati is also remarkably appreciative of the odd beauty that can be revealed in the shapes, patterns and colors created by the technology of planned obsolescence. ~ Vincent Canby

The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite's innocent gusto. Candy. ~ John Updike

the counters and center island were crammed with mason jars and novelty saltshakers and cookie jars in the shapes of cats, blimps, pumpkins, frogs, robots, potbellied demons, and other things. ~ Tim Pratt

Give your real being a chance to shape your life. You will not regret it. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Ordinary psyches often react to bad news with a momentary thrill, seeing the world, for once, in jagged clarity, as if lightning has just struck. But then darkness and dysfunction rush in. A mind such as Beethoven's remains illumined, or sees in the darkness shapes it never saw before, which inspire rather than terrify. This altered shape (raptus, he would say) makes art of the shapes, while holding in counterpoise such dualities as intellect and intuition, the conscious and the unconscious, mental health and mental disorder, the conventional and the unconventional, complexity and simplicity. ~ Edmund Morris

God gives us the vision, then he takes us down to the valley to batter us into the shape of the vision, and it is in the valley that so many of us faint and give way. Every vision will be made real if we will have patience. ~ Oswald Chambers

In many ways, the felt sense is like a stream moving through an ever-changing landscape. It alters its character in resonance with its surroundings. When the land is rugged and steep, the stream moves with vigor and energy, swirling and bubbling as it crashes over rocks and debris. Out on the plains, the stream meanders so slowly that one might wonder whether it is moving at all. Rains and spring thaw can rapidly increase its volume, possibly even flood nearby land. In the same way, once the setting has been interpreted and defined by the felt sense, we will blend into whatever conditions we find ourselves. This amazing sense encompasses both the content and climate of our internal and external environments. Like the stream, it shapes itself to fit those environments. ~ Peter A. Levine

I wish I could," laughed the vampire. "How positively delightful. I should like to pass through all manner of different keyholes and feel the tickle of their peculiar shapes. No." He shook his head. "That is, how would you say today ... bullshit? ~ Anne Rice

When I was in top shape I'd go to the ring and show my conditioning. ~ Alexis Arguello

If I want to achieve the goals I've set, I've got to be in tip-top shape. ~ Michael Phelps

Rage is really only for the good days. The truth is there's little of that left. the truth is that the forms I see have been slowly emptied out. They no longer have any content. They are shapes only. A train, a wall, a world. Or a man. A thing dangling in senseless articulation in a howling void. No meaning to its life. Its words. Why would I seek the company of such a thing? Why? ~ Cormac McCarthy

The teacher not only shapes the expectations and ambitions of her pupils, but she also influences their attitudes toward their future and themselves. If she is unskilled, she leaves scars on the lives of youth, cuts deeply into their self-esteem, and distorts their image of themselves as human beings. But if she loves her students and has high expectations of them, their self-confidence will grow, their capabilities will develop, and their future will be assured. ~ Thomas S. Monson

I felt that if others can overcome incredible challenges to be in shape, why would my story be any different? ~ Maria Kang

There's no one who's ever been significantly in my life for whom I don't have a sort of tenderness because they helped to shape who I am. ~ Rachel McAdams

Don't make the mistake of believing it's enough to reproduce the realities of life ... The object of art is to give life a shape, and to do it by every conceivable artifice. ~ Jean Anouilh

Your perspective on the facts - the context in which you place them and the meaning you give them - really shapes your experience of them. In particular, finding positive meaning in negative events, which is called reframing, is helpful for coping and recovery. This is not to suggest that a tough experience is any less painful, or that it is all right for people to mistreat you. My point is that even a horrible event or situation may have some opportunities in it for a positive experience. ~ Rick Hanson

The rower need to know technique and has to be in shape. He won't wrong by using strategy. Yet what it takes to win races is the ability to reach inside and pull out something to keep you going - no, to go faster - when you have nothing left to give. There's a word for what that takes and the word is not magic, the word is guts. ~ Barry S. Strauss

Use your senses fully. Be where you are. Look around. Just look, don't interpret. See the light, shapes, colors, textures. Be aware of the silent presence of each thing. Be aware of the space that allows everything to be. Listen to the sounds; don't judge them. Listen to the silence underneath the sounds. Touch something - anything - and feel and acknowledge its Being. Observe the rhythm of your breathing; feel the air flowing in and out, feel the life energy inside your body. Allow everything to be, within and without. Allow the "isness" of all things. Move deeply into the Now. ~ Eckhart Tolle

This twinned twinkle was delightful but not completely satisfying; or rather it only sharpened my appetite for other tidbits of light and shade, and I walked on in a state of raw awareness that seemed to transform the whole of my being into one big eyeball rolling in the world's socket.

Through peacocked lashes I saw the dazzling diamond reflection of the low sun on the round back of a parked automobile. To all kinds of things a vivid pictorial sense had been restored by the sponge of the thaw. Water in overlapping festoons flowed down one sloping street and turned gracefully into another. With ever so slight a note of meretricious appeal, narrow passages between buildings revealed treasures of brick and purple. I remarked for the first time the humble fluting - last echoes of grooves on the shafts of columns - ornamenting a garbage can, and I also saw the rippling upon its lid - circles diverging from a fantastically ancient center. Erect, dark-headed shapes of dead snow (left by the blades of a bulldozer last Friday) were lined up like rudimentary penguins along the curbs, above the brilliant vibration of live gutters.

I walked up, and I walked down, and I walked straight into a delicately dying sky, and finally the sequence of observed and observant things brought me, at my usual eating time, to a street so distant from my usual eating place that I decided to try a restaurant which stood on the fringe of the town. Night had fallen without sound or ce ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The greed manifests us in many shapes,
The high rise building,
a big house ,
deforestation,
no land to grow and
no land to feed our own,
Our very own People !

The money was deadly than any plague,
People bought and sold people
like a commodity !
and then ,
They divided us ,
according to our flawed faith.....
The stench of ignorance fills the air,
nestling at the base of our cortex .

I refuse to be conquered !

The agenda was all clear from the start,
Prospect of the land;
they would rather see us disappear,
Sold for seventy five lac a 100 years back,
It's seventy five million wounds and every day to cry !!

We are a " numb nation "
We are a " slave nation "
&
I refuse to be conquered !!! ~ BinYamin Gulzar

Usually, we think that "good" loneliness is what we call "solitude," the choice of some alone-time. But I want to press on with the negative dimension, to look at ways in which a fundamental sense of being separated from others shapes who we are and why. ~ Thomas L. Dumm

I hang out with models, the biggest pop stars and, you know, really and honestly, I hate saying this, but none of them are achieving those body shapes by being healthy. ~ Lily Allen

By the time they passed Malindi in the early-afternoon hours, Munroe could feel the syntax, the grammar, the resonance of patterns of the country's lingua franca beginning to form, could feel the tension relaxing now that the key to the aural lock had been handed over, and soon enough, over time and of its own accord, her ability to speak would grow and she would rapidly become more and more fluent.

This same poisonous gift - this savant like ability to visualize the way the words configured into shapes - had defined her life and turned her into what she was now. Without language, there would have been no gunrunning, without gunrunning no nights in the jungle fighting off the worst of human predators, without the nights, no instinct of self-preservation and the speed and the need to kill that had marked her every moment, waking and sleeping, since. ~ Taylor Stevens

Knowing your history can give you the tools to shape your future. ~ Gloria Feldt

We both see the same world, but in a different way. Ty feels the same joy I do, the joy of creation. We feel all the same things, only the shapes of our feelings are different. ~ Cassandra Clare

But any Time is with us. And if we take control to shape our attitude and reshape our memories, that time is always now, - our time for the best possible uses of our lives. ~ Keorapetse Kgositsile

Words have a universe of qualities other than those of descriptive relation: Hardness, Density, Sound-Shape, Vector-Force, & Degrees of Transparency/Opacity. ~ Clark Coolidge

Don't allow the opinions of other people to shape your concept of him. Get to know him yourself, and let the goodness of God change you from the inside out. ~ Judah Smith

The question is, How can you see the divine intersection of all that shapes and marks your existence, whether it be the heart-wrenching tragedies that wound you or the ecstasy of a great delight that brings laughter to your soul? How can you meet God in all your appointments and your disappointments? How can you recognize that he has a purpose, even when all around seems senseless, if not hopeless? Will there be a last gasp that whispers in one word a conclusion that redefines everything? If so, is it possible to borrow from that word to enrich the now? Can we really see, even a little, the patterned convergence of everything into some grand design? ~ Ravi Zacharias

Nothing good seems easy. That is how life shapes our perception. ~ Aishah Madadiy

It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story. ~ Haruki Murakami

Volunteer sentences are the relics of your education And the desire to emulate the grown-up, workaday prose that surrounds you, Which is made overwhelmingly of sentences that are banal and structurally thoughtless. A volunteer sentence is almost always a perfunctory sentence. That can change. But only after years of questioning the shapes of sentences you read, And every sentence you write. Don't let the word "years" alarm you. Think of it as months and months and months and months. You may think a volunteer sentence is an inspired one Simply because it volunteers. This is one reason to abandon the idea of inspiration. All the idea of inspiration will do Is stop you from revising a volunteer sentence. Only revision will tell you whether a sentence that offers itself is worth keeping. ~ Verlyn Klinkenborg

Self-similarity is a dull subject because you are used to very familiar shapes. But that is not the case. Now many shapes which are self-similar again, the same seen from close by and far away, and which are far from being straight or plane or solid. ~ Benoit Mandelbrot

The various parts of the body cannot be perceived as simple units and have no clear relationship to one another. In almost every detail the body is not the shape that art has led us to believe it should be. ~ Kenneth Clark

Life batters and shapes us in all sorts of ways before it's done, but those original selves which we were born with, and which I believe we continue in some measure to be no matter what, are selves which still echo with the holiness of their origin. I believe that what Genesis suggests is that this original self, with the print of God's thumb still upon it, is the most essential part of who we are and is buried deep in all of us as a source of wisdom and strength and healing which we can draw upon or, with our terrible freedom, not draw upon as we choose. I think that among other things all real art comes from that deepest self – painting, writing music, dance, all of it that in some way nourishes the spirit and enriches the understanding. I think that our truest prayers come from there too, the often unspoken, unbidden prayers that can rise out of the lives of unbelievers as well as believers whether they recognize them as prayers or not. And I think that from there also come our best dreams and our times of gladdest playing and taking it easy and all those moments when we find ourselves being better or stronger or braver or wiser than we are. ~ Frederick Buechner

Climate helps to shape the character of peoples, certainly no people more than the English. The uncertainty of their climate has helped to make the English, a long-suffering, phlegmatic, patient people rather insensitive to surprise, stoical against storms,. slightly incredulous at every appearance of the sun, touched by the lyrical gratitude of someone who expects nothing and suddenly receives more than he dreamed. ~ H.E. Bates

We shape our life by deciding to pay attention to it. It is the direction of our attention and its intensity that will determines what we accomplish and how well. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

You don't have to just shop in the maternity section when you are pregnant - you can shop anywhere, just be shape and size savvy! ~ Holly Madison

We are in this period now where we all are trying to be in shape physically and deny ourselves any pleasure. ~ Carly Simon

Most people draw from the mind, not the eye. They draw the idea of a table or a face, not what's in front of them. We don't actually see the line of the jaw as a line and we don't see an eye as a perfectly outlined almond shape. ~ Caio Fonseca

Once you introduce the issue to young people and suggest to them that they have the ability to vote with their forks, either by positively going for certain kinds of foods or rejecting other kinds of foods, they realize that this is a responsibility and an opportunity to shape the world a little bit by their own choices. ~ Michael Pollan

Now you might picture your next story, your second one, but don't be too definite, don't make a vision you might cling to, or create an idea you lose yourself in. Don't look at a map and ponder the depth of the Yellow Sea; don't imagine the shapes of its waves. Don't contemplate lost parents or lost girls. Resist the urge to explain their stories, because eventually you've got to understand that an answer isn't the same thing as a solution, and a story is sometimes only an excuse. ~ Nic Pizzolatto

What worlds are there herein? I'll tell you. In these seas of fragrant waters, numerous as atoms in unspeakably many buddha-fields, rest an equal number of world systems. Each world system also contains an equal number of worlds. Those world systems in the ocean of worlds have various resting places, various shapes and forms, various substances and essences, various locations, various entryways, various adornments, various boundaries, various alignments, various similarities, and various powers of maintenance. ~ Thomas Cleary

It is clear, then, that the desire for certainty shapes our spaces of possibility, our perceptions, and our lives both personally and professionally. Usually, this need saves us. But it also sabotages us. This produces an ongoing tension between what we might think of as our conscious selves and our automatic selves. To overcome our inborn reflex that pushes us to seek certainty (sometimes at any cost), we must lead with our conscious selves and tell ourselves a new story, one that with insistent practice will change our future past and even our physiological responses. We must create internal and external ecologies that… celebrate doubt!
This means the biggest obstacle to deviation and seeing differently isn't actually our environment as such, or our" intelligence, or even - ironically - the challenge of reaching the mythical "aha" moment. Rather, it is the nature of human perception itself, and in particular the perceived need for knowing. Yet the deep paradox is that the mechanisms of perception are also the process by which we can unlock powerful new perceptions and ways to deviate. Which means that mechanism of generating a perception is the blocker… and the process of creating perception is the enabler of creativity ~ Beau Lotto

Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose. In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires ... ~ Elizabeth Hardwick

At other times, at the edge of a wood, especially at dusk, the trees themselves would assume strange shapes: sometimes they were arms rising heavenwards, , or else the trunk would twist and turn like a body being bent by the wind. At night, when I woke up and the moon and the stars were out, I would see in the sky things that filled me simultaneously with dread and longing. I remember that once, one Christmas Eve, I saw a great naked women, standing erect, with rolling eyes; she must have been a hundred feet high, but along she drifted, growing ever longer and ever thinner, and finally fell apart, each limb remaining separate, with the head floating away first as the rest of her body continued to waver ~ Gustave Flaubert

When we work from the Soul consciousness, we can shape our own destiny. ~ Harold Klemp

Imagining themes that are specific to coating lines, shapes, shades, thoughts, the decoration of our homes and the objects of utility or pure pleasure, adapting its purpose in a material-specific way to metal or wood, marble or fabric - it is, without any doubt, an absorbing occupation. ~ Emile Galle

A lot of times people will think, "I'm strong, I'm in shape; why can't I do this pose?" But that's not the point. There's nothing to win in yoga. You just do what you can do, one day to the next. ~ Adam Levine

If they can play eight more years, then I can too. I'm in better shape than they are. ~ Teemu Selanne

The music aids the message, it's there to punctuate and abbreviate and shape the silence. ~ Saul Williams

He had the philosopher's disease of seeing so far ahead that all the little pleasant shapes and colors of existence passed under his nose unseen. ~ Will Durant

Human beings understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the un-sayable, not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men. ~ Salman Rushdie

Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa

You can't shape me anymore. I am the uncontrolled element, the random act. I am forward movement in time. You think you can see me? Then tell me, who am I? You don't know. ~ Janet Fitch

I really think the biopic thing so rarely works, because people's lives don't have a dramatic shape that can be satisfying. ~ Bill Condon

I really look at my childhood as being one giant rusty tuna can that I continue to recycle in many different shapes. ~ Augusten Burroughs

This is the awe-inspiring universe of magic: There are no atoms, only waves and motions all around. Here, you discard all belief in barriers to understanding. You put aside understanding itself. This universe cannot be seen, cannot be heard, cannot be detected in any way by fixed perceptions. It is the ultimate void where no preordained screens occur upon which forms may be projected. You have only one awareness here - the screen of the magi: Imagination! Here, you learn what it is to be human. You are a creator of order, of beautiful shapes and systems, an organizer of chaos. ~ Frank Herbert

Gift

Nothing will hurt you that much despite how you feel

the stress on your back shapes your insight

this splendid November rain Toussaint. I find

you by your marks, he says

an imprint

But when I summon you, I talk to - I say -

my memory of your face. It's kind of crazy

to others. They're not very interesting he says.

When I first came to this country, and now

I know the language I say, but I had in a dream

spoken it many years previously. That is,

not the language of the dead the language

of France. I took one year of French in 1964

and then nothing but once, in 1977 I spoke French

in a dream all night: I was in the future I

moved here in 1992. Country of the more

logical than I? though the people of my quartier

know and like me, even as I a foreigner remain strange

You do everything alone a woman said to me.

There are ways to care without interfering

but the French speak of anguish frequently

they are conscious of emotional extremity

a terrible gift. It's all a gift, he says . . .

some haven't been opened. I'm not sure

he said that it's nearly my sixty-seventh birthday

today though it's the day of the dead hello

we love you they say. ~ Alice Notley

Before that first line of pale chalk, before the underdrawing fleshes out into shapes and proportions, there is a stab of grief for all the things she didn't get to paint. The finches wheeling in the rafters of the barn, Cornelis reading in the arbor, Tomas bent over in his roses in the flower garden, apple blossoms, walnuts beside oysters, Kathrijn in the full bloom of her short life, Barent sleeping in a field of lilacs, the Gypsies in the market, late-night revelers in the taverns…. Every work is a depiction and a lie. We rearrange the living, exaggerate the light, intimate dusk when it's really noonday sun. ~ Dominic Smith

Like the classic it has become, the Farewell Address has demonstrated the capacity to assume different shapes in different eras, to change color, if you will, in varying shades of light. ~ Joseph J. Ellis

A university is not about results in the next quarter; it is not even about who a student has become by graduation. It is about learning that molds a lifetime, learning that transmits the heritage of millennia; learning that shapes the future ~ Drew Gilpin Faust

One of the things that kept most comics from being monthly was that very few artists could produce 24 pages per month. Jack Kirby was very much the exception to the rule, but his towering presence at Marvel started to dictate the whole shape of the industry - and that's where problems set in! ~ John Byrne

Of course, the speed at which any society embraces these strategies will always be a product of the interplay between politics, culture, and leadership. Culture shapes a society's political responses, and its leadership and politics, in turn, shape culture. What exactly is culture? I like this concise definition offered by BusinessDictionary.com: culture is the "pattern of responses discovered, developed, or invented during the group's history of handling problems which arise from interactions among its members, and between them and their environment. These responses are considered the correct way to perceive, feel, think, and act, and are passed on to the new members through immersion and teaching. Culture determines what is acceptable or unacceptable, important or unimportant, right or wrong, workable or unworkable." One ~ Thomas L. Friedman

If we have not struggled/as hard as we can/at our strongest/how will we sense/the shape of our losses/or know what sustains/us longest or name/what change costs us,/saying how strange/it is that one sector/of the self can step in/for another in trouble,/how loss activates/a latent double, how/we can feed/as upon nectar/upon need? ~ Kay Ryan

I had been in the gym training for many, many years, but I definitely stepped it up when it was time to get into shape to play 'Lights'. I began trying to live the life of a boxer, and that means everything that you would expect. ~ Holt McCallany

Was it home, the mercury-lit street? Was he returning like the elephant to his graveyard, to lie down and soon become ivory in whose bulk slept, latent, exquisite shapes of chessmen, backscratchers, hollow open-work Chinese spheres nested one inside the other? ~ Thomas Pynchon

While Ginger didn't like the evil-recipe days, she certainly loved the treat-making days. She liked rolling dough and cutting it into perfect shapes. She liked grating chocolate into curlicues and pouring syrups into lollipop molds. ~ Suzanne Selfors

Google, as the supplier of the Web's principal navigational tools, also shapes our relationship with the content that it serves up so efficiently and in such profusion. The intellectual technologies it has pioneered promote the speedy, superficial skimming of information and discourage any deep, prolonged engagement with a single argument, idea, or narrative. ~ Nicholas Carr

I'm not looking for a road to walk. Rather, I'm looking for a path to create. For creating a path shapes men, while walking a road simply appeases them. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough