The Great Alone Quotes

They were kids, she and Matthew; no one asked their opinion or told them anything. They just had to muddle along and live in the world presented to them, confused a lot of the time because nothing made sense, but certain of their subterranean place on the food chain. ~ Kristin Hannah

I'm not just saying this because I'm in the movie, but I really would recommend 'Secretariat.' It's fun, inspiring, and it's a great movie to take your little kids, brothers, sisters, or nieces and nephews to see that actually has real people in it and not animated characters. ~ Kevin Connolly

One morning, on my way to a lecture on Balzac, it came to me with great clarity that there was no way that that guy, the professor, was going to tell me anything useful. No doubt he knew many useful things, but he wasn't going to say them; rather, he was going to tell us again that Balzac's Paris was extremely comprehensive. I went instead to the undergraduate library, to the basement where government documents were stored. ~ Elif Batuman

The great point in Christianity is the search for an independent content for spiritual life which, according to the insights of its founder, could be elevated, not by the forces of a world external to the soul of man, but by the revelation of a new world within his soul. Islam fully agrees with this insight and supplements it by the further insight that the illumination of the new world thus revealed is not something foreign to the world of matter but permeates it through and through.
Thus the affirmation of spirit sought by Christianity would come not by the renunciation of external forces which are already permeated by the illumination of spirit, but by a proper adjustment of man's relation to these forces in view of the light received from the world within. ~ Muhammad Iqbal

The administration of a great organized molar security has as its correlate a whole micro-management of petty fears, a permanent molecular insecurity, to the point that the motto of domestic policymakers might be: a macropolitics of society by and for the micropolitics of insecurity ~ Gilles Deleuze

At the end of the day, if you have a great product and service paired with the wrong pricing strategy / business model, you don't have a business. ~ Richie Norton

The lives of most authors - even, or perhaps especially, the great ones - are necessarily a catalogue of tedious inwardness and cloistered composition. Globe-trotting Hemingways and brawling Christopher Marlowes are the exception, not the rule. ~ Paul Di Filippo

It's a great relief for me that no one will ask me anymore: "Orhan, when will you get the Nobel Prize?" ~ Orhan Pamuk

A great human revolution in just a single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a nation and, further, can even enable a change in the destiny of all humankind. ~ Daisaku Ikeda

Aiden was taught about the old world, the ways in which his ancestors and their nations lived. In those 'grandest times' it seemed Outside was valued highly, that great attention was lavished upon the sun, and the air, and movement. There were tales of people running in circles, fighting in the open air, crowds choosing to watch. He'd thought such sport nonsense, the idea of participating in vast collectives in the Outside ridiculous enough, but even the idea that one might take such a thing as 'a walk', that there was a better use of time than spending it with the height human accomplishment, surrounded by fine and beautiful possessions, rich jewellery and glorious illustration, with the writings of generations for comfort, had seemed purest idiocy. Imagine, he had thought, Outside having as much to offer as Inside. Imagine it having any point at all. Oh, he thought, how those people of the past placed false treasure in the powers of sun, and of sky. Oh, how they underestimated true wealth: the jewels of the earth, hewn and sculpted and sanded into glittering lumps of perfection. ~ A.E. Shaw

The amount of psychology which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great. ~ William James

There are so many great things about this business. Almost everybody is on the same team. It is all for one-friendly competitiveness. No one is out to hurt anyone. ~ Bobby Flay

Great question in science - questions like the ones Herschel raised about the structure of the universe - are seldom answered by ivory-tower types engaging in pure thought. They are answered by people who are willing to get down into the trenches and grapple with nature. If that means casting your own telescope mirrors, as Herschel did, so be it. ~ James Trefil

A stable social system is necessary, but every stable system hitherto devised has hampered the development of exceptional artistic or intellectual merit. How much murder and anarchy are we prepared to endure for the sake of great achievements such as those of the Renaissance? ~ Bertrand Russell

I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgement, it takes place every day. ~ Albert Camus

You ever watch It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown?" Deuce asked. "Stupid Fucker makes me laugh."
I decided, I too, really liked that stupid fucker Charlie Brown and made a mental note to watch everything featuring Charlie Brown as soon as I got home. ~ Madeline Sheehan

It doesn't matter that Cathy was what I have called a monster. Perhaps we can't understand Cathy, but on the other hand we are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins. And who in his mind has not probed the black water? ~ John Steinbeck

I discovered that the wisdom of the world, and a great deal of its folly also, is to be found in the pages of books. And ~ C.S. Lewis

This would be a great world to dance in if we didn't have to pay the fiddler. ~ Will Rogers

shortly I should be able to live at peace in my cottage, with all the twenty four hours of the day to myself. Forty-six I am, and never yet had a whole week of leisure. What will 'for ever' feel like, and can I use it all? Please note its address from March onwards - Clouds Hill, Moreton, Dorset - and visit it, sometime, if you still stravage the roads of England in a great car. The cottage has two rooms; one, upstairs, for music (a gramophone and records) and one downstairs for books. There is a bath, in a demi-cupboard. For food one goes a mile, to Bovington (near the Tank Corps Depot) and at sleep-time I take my great sleeping bag, embroidered MEUM, and spread it on what seems the nicest bit of floor. There is a second bag, embroidered TUUM, for guests. The cottage looks simple, outside, and does no hurt to its setting which is twenty miles of broken heath and a river valley filled with rhododendrons run wild. I think everything, inside and outside my place, approaches perfection. ~ T.E. Lawrence

The suburbanization and the ghettos that were created as a result of the limits of where [African-Americans] could live in the North [still exist today.] And ... the South was forced to change, in part because they were losing such a large part of their workforce through the Great Migration. ~ Isabel Wilkerson

Men spoke much in my boyhood about restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it's a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospects of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a great many devoted art lovers to rout. ~ Ben Shahn

Being the firstborn gives you great patience. But you reach a point where after trying and trying you say, Patience be damned. Let them suffer their distorted worldview. Your job is to preserve yourself, not to descend into their hole. It's a relief when you arrive at this place, the point of absurdity, because then you are free, you know you owe them nothing. ~ Abraham Verghese

Some of you may be in great distress of mind, a distress out of which no fellow-creature can deliver you. You are poor nervous people at whom others often laugh. I can assure you that God will not laugh at you; he knows all about that sad complaint of yours, so I urge you to go to him, for the experience of many of us has taught us that, "the Lord is gracious and full of compassion. ~ Zack Eswine

As Tim followed me up the narrow stairwell, he playfully pinched my butt with every step, a pleasant (and painful
in a black-and-blue sort of way) reminder that all I had yearned for as a student twenty-five years before had come true, even if I hadn't taken the time to notice it until now: I was happy. At twenty years old, had I articulated what I thought I needed in life, I would have probably said a big house, a successful husband, and a great career. Yet all I really needed for true happiness was the homeless, unemployed bus driver right behind me, pinching my butt every step of the way. ~ Doreen Orion

We are the two great painters of this era; you are in the Egyptian style, I in themodern style. (to Pablo Picasso) ~ Henri Rousseau

I'd love to get fat on camera. Wouldn't that be great? I'll tell you what's almost as hard though, getting bulked up, getting that big. Here we are in LA and you see guys walking down the street and everyone looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger. That's really quite grim, if you haven't done it before. ~ Jeremy Irvine

Which is worse, overload or underload? Luckily, I never had to choose. One or Pass on to where? Back into my cells to lurk like a virus waiting for the next opportunity? Out into the ether of the world to wait for the circumstances that would provoke its reappearance? Endogenous or exogenous, nature or nurture - it's the great mystery of mental illness. ~ Susanna Kaysen

Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss, these three, are in a class by
themselves among the great mathematicians, and it is not for
ordinary mortals to attempt to range them in order of merit. ~ Eric Temple Bell

People do not buy fortune cookies because they taste better than every other cookie on the shelf. They buy them for the delight they deliver at the end of a meal. Marketers spend most of their time selling the cookie, when what they should be doing is finding a way to create a better fortune. Of course your job is to bake a good cookie, the very best that you can, but you must also spend time figuring out how to tell a great story. ~ William Mougayar

Book love is something like romantic love. When we are reading a really great book, burdens feel lighter, cares seem smaller, and commonplaces are suddenly delightful. You become your best optimistic self. Like romantic love, book love fills you with a certain warmth and completeness. The world holds promise. ~ Steve Leveen

Golf has an ambivalent relationship with the environment. On one hand, it's a great preserver of open spaces. Golf doesn't pave the world - it helps to green the world. But the downside is, it uses a lot of fertilizer, pesticides and water. ~ Thomas Friedman

He led quite a great life, ... He was an Old Testament figure railing against the establishment - a Jewish guy from New York who became a Buddhist, a poet, a musician. ~ Tom Hayden

Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that. ~ Nell Freudenberger

We're supposed to procreate and society, god knows, is ferocious on the subject. Heterosexuality is considered such a great and natural good that you have to execute people and put them in prison if they don't practice this glorious act. ~ Gore Vidal

Nature is my religion. And my desire ... my ambition ... the great goal I wish to achieve is to take my readers with me into the heart of this Nature. I love it, and I feel that they must love it ... if I can only get the two acquainted. ~ James Oliver Curwood

The bodies we have are not made for extended use. We must cope with accumulated DNA damage, cell damage, muscle atrophy, bone loss, decreased muscle mass, and joints worn out from overuse during a lifetime of bipedal locomotion. It might have worked great for prehistoric humans, but it wreaks havoc on our knees and hips. ~ S. Jay Olshansky

Compared with that of a great artist, the friendliness of a great nobleman, however charming it may be, seems like play-acting, like simulation. Saint-Loup sought to please; Elstir loved to give, to give himself. Everything he possessed, ideas, works, and the rest which he counted for far less, he would have given gladly to anyone who understood him. But, for lack of congenial company, he lived in an unsociable isolation which fashionable people call pose and ill-breeding, the authorities a recalcitrant spirit, his neighbours madness, his family selfishness and pride. ~ Marcel Proust

The great benefit of science is that it can contribute tremendously to the alleviation of suffering at the physical level, but it is only through the cultivation of the qualities of the human heart and the transformation of our attitudes that we can begin to address and overcome our mental suffering ~ Dalai Lama

Why did I, like thousands of others, have to carry a cross I hadn't chosen, a cross which was not made for my shoulders and which didn't concern me? Who decided to come rummaging around in my obscure existence, invade my gray anonymity, my meager tranquility, and bowl me like a little ball in a great game of skittles? God? Well, in that case, if He exists, if He really exists, let Him hide His face. Let Him put His two hands on His head, and let Him bow down. It may be, as Peiper used to teach us, that many men are unworthy of Him, but now I know that He, too, is unworthy of most of us, and that if the creature is capable of producing horror, it's solely because his Creator has slipped him the recipe for it. ~ Philippe Claudel

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization. ~ Lincoln Steffens

For "I" to become "we" and yet remain "I," is one of the great challenges of marriage. ~ Nathaniel Branden

When I open my eyes, the morning light makes me wish I hadn't. Raffe lies on his sofa, watching me with those dark blue eyes. I swallow, suddenly feeling awkward and unkempt. Great. The world has come to an end, my mother is out there with the street gangs, crazier than ever, my sister has been kidnapped by vengeful angels, and I'm concerned that my hair is greasy and my breath smells bad. ~ Susan Ee

One of the many remarkable things about K is the equal ease with which he talks to a Swami or a Western scientist, an industrial millionaire or a Prime Minister. He has discoursed on meditation with the Dalai Lama and would have no apprehension in conversing with any of the world's great philosophers, yet he is undoubtedly a shy, diffident man who shuns ordinary conversation, has read very little (and that little forgotten) and who has no intellectual pretensions. The answer to this anomaly is, I think, that he perceives some truth as clearly as he can see his own hand. No counter-argument can disturb such a clear vision. While others discuss and argue about the theory of X, K actually holds X like an apple in his hand. ~ Mary Lutyens

In moments of great stress, the mind focuses itself upon some quite unimportant matter which is remembered long afterwards with the utmost fidelity, driven in, as it were, by the mental stress of the moment. It may be some quite irrelevant detail, like the pattern of a wallpaper, but it will never be forgotten. ~ Agatha Christie

It's a great shame that the world was organized with two sexes. It makes for a lot of trouble. ~ Margaret Ayer Barnes

No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or to get all the credit for doing it ~ Andrew Carnegie

The new evangelization calls for followers of Christ who are unconditionally pro-life: who will proclaim, celebrate and serve the Gospel of life in every situation. A sign of hope is the increasing recognition that the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil ... I renew the appeal I made ... for a consensus to end the death penalty, which is both cruel and unnecessary. ~ Pope John Paul II