Smallest Continent Quotes

He was not beyond knowing that they thought him - when he first arrived - a quiet patsy. The Arab. The Yank. The Judge. Your Harness. Mohammed. Mahatma. Ahab. Iron Pants. He wasn't interested in playing himself Irish or Lebanese. Not for him the simple ancestral heart: he wanted to make himself the smallest continent possible. ~ Colum McCann

But as the program got going, the smallest details became issues, even the very name of the disease. Pig farmers complained to the Centers for Disease Control that the name "swine flu" might frighten people away from eating pork. They asked, to no avail, that the flu's name be changed to "New Jersey ~ Gina Kolata

WE stowed the wheels, uncapped the sledge-runners, put on our sis, and took off
down, north, onward, into that silent vastness of fire an ice that said in enormous letters of black and white DEATH, DEATH, written right across a continent. The sledge pulled like a feather, and we laughed with joy. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Seek opportunities to show you care. The smallest gestures often make the biggest difference. ~ John Wooden

Golf is not a game of great shots. It's a game of most accurate misses. The people who win make the smallest mistakes. ~ Gene Littler

And the Bastard grant us ... in our direst need, the smallest gifts: the nail of the horseshoe, the pin of the axle, the feather at the pivot point, the pebble at the mountain's peak, the kiss in despair, the one right word. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

If my life be spared, nothing shall stop me short of visiting every nation of Indians on the Continent of North America. ~ George Catlin

Between his skin and hers, there was the smallest of spaces, barely enough for air, for this slick of sweat now chilling. Even still, a third person, their marriage, had slid in. ~ Lauren Groff

If Continental tea is like a faded yellow telegraph form, in these islands to the west of Ostend it has the dark, glimmering tones of Russian icons, before the milk gives it a color similar to the complexion of an overfed baby; on the Continent weak tea is served in fragile porcelain, here it is casually poured into thick earthenware cups from battered metal teapots, a heavenly brew to restore the traveler, dirt cheap too. ~ Heinrich Boll

My foundation was created so I can find a way to improve the living conditions of my people in the African continent, not just in Congo. ~ Dikembe Mutombo

And so this is the long road the nation traveled to get to Earthday, 1970, and beyond. Those who lead us down it… did not leave us a bad legacy considering the mood in which the continent was settled, and the amount we had to learn, we can be grateful that those battles do not have to be fought, at least not on the same fields, again. We can be just as certain that others will have to be. Environmentalism or conservation or preservation, or whatever it should be called, is not a fact, and never has been. It is a job. ~ Wallace Stegner

No footprints in the sand. Pebbles and bits of weed are strung in scalloped lines. Three outer islands bear low stone forts; a green lantern glows on the tip of a jetty. It feels appropriate somehow, to have reached the edge of the continent, to have only the hammered sea left in front of him. ~ Anthony Doerr

When I first read the Harry Potter books and learned about the lightning bolt scar on Harry's forehead, I thought, Of course. Of course love worked that way. Of course it left its mark on the beloved. This secret mark protected you, kept you safe from harm, reminded you of who you were. All it took was the smallest symbol and you were safe. As I grew older and discovered my love of literature, I externalized the markings, wrote them down in my Moleskine, kept my notebook close - so much so that when the LIA counselors took away my notebook years later, they took away much of this protection. But they didn't take all of it. The empty pages still carried ghosts. ~ Garrard Conley

GUIs tend to impose a large overhead on every single piece of software, even the smallest, and this overhead completely changes the programming environment. Small utility programs are no longer worth writing. Their functions, instead, tend to get swallowed up into omnibus software packages. ~ Neal Stephenson

Waste not the smallest thing created, for grains of sand make mountains, and atomies infinity. ~ Eric Knight

We nurture our sense of connection with the larger whole, noticing that the whole is only as healthy as its smallest part. ~ Sharon Salzberg

You've gotta understand: in July of '44, the Allies were still contained on the peninsula in western France and the destruction of Europe had not really begun. War had not really touched the European continent at that point. ~ Christopher McQuarrie

Let him take heart who does advance, even in the smallest degree. ~ Plato

I fell in love with Virginia Woolf in college. I especially admire how well she writes about daily life, how she captures so much meaning and consequence in the smallest details of a day. ~ Karen Thompson Walker

It was the guys who'd been bullied and roughed up for being the smallest in the class. Those guys had learned early how to fight tooth-and-nail, how to survive through any means necessary. And Kade should know. He'd been one of them. They grew up to be more dangerous than any of the bullies. ~ Tiffany Snow

The smallest effort to remember the Divine, or even one of its timeless truths, connects you to a calmness whose power is in that secret strength found in all things deep. ~ Guy Finley

The Jewish usurers are fast-rooted even in the smallest villages, and if they lend five gulden they require a security of six times as much. They charge interest, upon interest, and upon this again interest, so that the poor man loses everything that he owns. ~ Desiderius Erasmus

We settled this continent without art. So it was easy for us to treat it as an imported luxury, not a necessity. ~ Arthur Erickson

The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible. Then he goes up the St. Lawrence and the inhabited country comes into view, mainly a French-speaking country with its own cultural traditions. To enter the United States is a matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent. ~ Northrop Frye

There are certain fixed rules that one observes for one's own comfort. For instance, never be flippantly rude to any inoffensive grey-bearded stranger that you may meet in pine forests or hotel smoking-rooms on the Continent. It always turns out to be the King of Sweden. ~ Hector Hugh Munro

The most dangerous lovers women have are men of Cordis's feminine temperament. Such men, by the delicacy and sensitiveness of their own organizations, read women as easily and accurately as women read each other. They are alert to detect and interpret those smallest trifles in tone, expression, and bearing, which betray the real mood far more unmistakably than more obvious signs. ~ Edward Bellamy

Nature is a miserly accountant, grudging the pennies, watching the clock, punishing the smallest extravagance. ~ Richard Dawkins

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met. ~ Abraham Lincoln

It's the world's smallest violin, playing 'My Heart Pumps Purple Piss for You'. ~ Stephen King

The final advantage is the same that applies in every other competitive venture. If you would like to write better than everyone else, you have to want to write better than everyone else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you've written against the various middlemen--editors, agents, and publishers--whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards are not as high. Too many writers are browbeaten into settling for less than their best. ~ William Zinsser

Such,' he said,'O King, seems to me the present life of men on earth, in comparison with that time which to us is uncertain, as if when on a winter's night you sit feasting with your ealdormen and thegnsö a single sparrow should fly swiftly into the hall, and coming in at one door, instantly fly out through another. In that time in which it is indoors it is indeed not touched by the fury of the winter, and yet, this smallest space of calmness being passed almost in a flash, from winter going into winter again, it is lost to your eyes. Somewhat like this appears the life of man; but of what follows or what went before, we are utterly ignorant. ~ Bede

Ebola, that little bastard of a bug, had popped up earlier in the summer in Sierra Leone in the worst outbreak in history. Was it possible that global warming had changed something important about the ecological balance in Africa and turned it into an optimal, continent-sized petri dish for breeding that virus? ~ Bobby Adair

Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance. ~ Oscar Wilde

The smallest oceans still make big big waves. ~ Eddie Vedder

The two [Greco-Roman and Latin] worlds also had enough unifying elements, however, to be considered a single continent. First of all, both the East and the West were the heirs to the Bible and to the ancient Church, which in both worlds refer beyond themselves to an origin that lies outside today's Europe, namely in Palestine. Secondly, both shared the idea of the Roman Empire and of the essential nature of the Church, and therefore of law and legal instruments. The last factor I would mention is monasticism, which throughout the great upheavals of history continued to be the indispensable bearer not only of cultural continuity but above all of fundamental religious and moral values, of the ultimate guidance of humankind. As a pre-political and supra-political force, monasticism was also the bringer of ever-welcome and necessary rebirths of culture and civilization. ~ Pope Benedict XVI

It is not wholly surprising, however, that, when India began to reassert herself, two nations should have replaced the single British Raj; but all impartial students must regret that the unity of the Indian sub-continent has been once more lost, and trust that the two great nations of India and Pakistan may soon forget the bitterness born of centuries of strife, in cooperation for the common welfare of their peoples. ~ Arthur Llewellyn Basham

If somebody tells you an obviously untrue story, on the Continent you would remark, "You are a liar, Sir, and a rather dirty one at that." In England you just say "Oh, is that so?" Or "That's rather an unusual story, isn't it? ~ George Mikes