The Lesser Bohemians Quotes

Life makes itself with little heed for the appropriate ( p 136). ~ Eimear McBride

the challenge of cheering a troubled soul is compelling, each fleeting smile worth a hundred hours of a lesser suitor's happiness. One ~ Kate Eberlen

A great poem is for ages and ages in common and for all degrees and complexions and all departments and sects and for a woman as much as a man and a man as much as a woman. A great poem is no finish to a man or woman but rather a beginning. Has any one fancied he could sit at last under some due authority and rest satisfied with explanations and realize and be content and full? To no such terminus does the greatest poet bring . . . he brings neither cessation or sheltered fatness and ease. The touch of him tells in action. Whom he takes he takes with firm sure grasp into live regions previously unattained thenceforward is no rest . . . they see the space and ineffable sheen that turn the old spots and lights into dead vacuums. The companion of him beholds the birth and progress of stars and learns one of the meanings. Now there shall be a man cohered out of tumult and chaos . . . the elder encourages the younger and shows him how . . . they two shall launch off fearlessly together till the new world fits an orbit for itself and looks unabashed on the lesser orbits of the stars and sweeps through the ceaseless rings and shall never be quiet again. ~ Walt Whitman

I have always been considered a bit of an outsider, and a general failure at everything I put my hand towards. In fact, you might even go so far as to say that I'm a lesser being of great insignificance! I state this because, when writing a story, you should always start the first line off with at least one basic truth.
-First lines from the novel Sukiyaki ~ Andrew James Pritchard

They leave the insistent monotony of the interstate for more reasonable roads. While the former slices its path through entire states, peppering them with exit signs and mile markers, these lesser cousins of the grand highways keep their manners intact, clinging gently to the hemlines of all but the most obstinate geological points of interest. Charming and sometimes a bit frightening, their paths are as unpredictable and winding as a little boy's route home from school. ~ Kimberly Morgan

Only people who claim their own voice can hear the true song of another. ~ Elizabeth Lesser

Writing 'Native Guard,' I didn't know I was working on a single book. I began writing that book because I was interested in the lesser-known history of these black soldiers stationed off the coast of my hometown. ~ Natasha Trethewey

It may not be the happiness we had before, it may feel like a lesser version of it for a time, we may not even feel it some days at all. But we have to believe more will come. We have to hope. ~ Orson Scott Card

Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public's total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public's contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity-hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide.
(Is it clear I was a hero of rock'n'roll?)
Toward the end of the final tour it became apparent that our audience wanted more than music, more even than its own reduplicated noise. It's possible the culture had reached its limit, a point of severe tension. There was less sense of simple visceral abandon at our concerts during these last weeks. Few cases of arson and vandalism. Fewer still of rape. No smoke bombs or threats of worse explosives. Our followers, in their isolation, were not concerned with precedent now. They w ~ Don DeLillo

Over the past several years, all of us as Canadians, and as members of the North American cultural and economic environment, have been to a greater or lesser extent party to a significant attitudinal change towards our culture. ~ Alex Campbell

Creatures naturally hate their fellow-creatures, and whenever their own interest requires it, harm them. We cannot therefore avoid hatred and injuries from men, while to a great extent we can avoid their scorn. This is why there is usually little point in the respect which young people and those new to the world pay to those they come across, not through mean-mindedness or any other form of self-interest, but through a benevolent desire not to provoke enmity and to win hearts. They do not fulfill this desire, and in some ways they harm their own repute, because the person who is so respected comes to have a greater idea of himself, and he who pays the respect a lesser idea of himself. He who does not look to men for usefulness or fame, should not look for love either, since he will not obtain it. If he wants my opinion, he should preserve his own dignity completely, giving to everyone no more than his due. Thus he will be somewhat more hated and persecuted than otherwise, but not often despised. ~ Giacomo Leopardi

As you open yourself to living at your edge, your deepest purpose will slowly begin to make itself known. In the meantime, you will experience layer after layer of purposes, each one getting closer and closer to the fullness of your deepest purpose. It is as if your deepest purpose is at the center of your being, and it is surrounded by layers of concentric circles, each circle being a lesser purpose. Your life consists of penetrating each circle, from the outside toward the center. ~ David Deida

Then he is a monster!" the Prince crowed, "and I must slay him at once. The Formula works!"
"Your Formula must result in a great deal of fighting," I mused.
"Oh, yes, when applied correctly mighty and noble battles result! Of course I always win - the value of Prince X is a constant. It cannot be lesser than that of Monster Y - this is the Moral Superiority Hypothesis made famous five hundred years ago by my ancestor Ethelred, the Mathematician-King. We have never seen his equal, in all these centuries. ~ Catherynne M Valente

It was I, no less solitary than he but having made the lesser use of the morning, who was to be pitied. ~ Teju Cole

That is what happens when you put your soul in charge of your life. You dare to claim the sky. That sky is different for everyone. For one person, maybe the sky is having a baby, being a parent, growing a family. But for another it's never having kids; it's traveling the globe; it's saving the world... You know your sky. And if you don't, it's because you haven't listened closely enough. ~ Elizabeth Lesser

Christ is a persuasion, a form evoking desire, and the whole force of the gospel depends upon the assumption that this persuasion is also peace: that the desire awakened by the shape of Christ and his church is one truly reborn as agape, rather than merely the way in which a lesser force succumbs to a greater, as an episode in the endless epic of power. (3) ~ David Bentley Hart

Parkour is not just linear. There are moments that are intense and some that are lesser, so you have to move from one to another, and that becomes the musicality of Parkour. ~ David Belle

Many women hear the word "feminine" and feel like it's a noose around their neck. "Don't hold me to a mode of behavior because I'm a woman and you think this is how a woman should act," kind of thing. ~ Elizabeth Lesser

THE ELITES AND THE LESSERS, ONE LOOKS DOWN UPON THE OTHER.
IF YOU'RE A ROAMER, YOU'RE NO LONGER PART OF THE ELITES.
BECOMING A NEW-LESSER MAY SAVE YOU. IF ONLY FOR A LITTLE WHILE.
THREE ISLANDS TWO COLLIDE THE THIRD IS A MYSTERY. ~ Charon Lloyd-Roberts

No man who is resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention, still less can he afford to take the consequences, including the vitiation of his temper and the loss of self control, yield to larger things to which you show no more than equal rights, and yield to lesser ones though clearly your own, better give your path to a dog, than be bitten by him in contesting for the right, not even killing the dog, will cure the bite ~ Abraham Lincoln

Willa maintains a vigil. Certain tasks are relegated to women. Mourning, staring into the wastes, waiting for no one to surface.

It's a white man who's missing. Usually, that would be enough to keep it in the news, but eight days in, the police release their grief in an official report. The art of blame-casting is a lesser sorcery. History is written in sand, and a broom changes everything. Every woman knows the art of covering up a mess: a carpet, a dustpan, bleach on the boards. What do you do with the cleaning supplies of the world? Use them to wash the blood away, and grind the bones into bread. Swallow the confessions whispered in bed.

If events don't make sense, a story grows to cover up the confusion. Motives and mistakes. ~ Maria Dahvana Headley

For Sarah Palin, the least experienced on the world stage, the stress of maintaining the fiction that she was qualified to be vice president sent her over the deep end almost immediately. She went off on a ferocious spending spree that might have killed a lesser woman. Katie Couric's straightforward questions unraveled her. ~ Tina Brown

I think a lot of programs, policies have been put in place since 9/11, have prevented a 9/11-style attack. On the other hand, I think the threat has become greater, not lesser. ~ Michael McCaul

Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story – the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our 'air' (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and, while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be 'high', purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry. I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.

Of course, such an overweening purpose did not develop all at once. The mere stories were the thing. They arose in my mind as 'given' things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew. An absorbing, though continually interrupted labour (especially since, even apart from the necessities of life, the mind would wing to the other pole and spen ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Locally produced foods - defined as those harvested within a 100-mile radius of one's home - have a lesser impact on the environment because of the decreased need for transportation from source to consumer. ~ Tyler Florence

As the builders say, the larger stones do not lie well without the lesser. ~ Plato

It may seem from a cursory look at the news that the streets are a battleground, a deadly arena of fists, guns and knives. In fact armed attacks are not at all common, though they are serious enough to merit attention when they do happen. Lesser levels of violent assault are more frequent, but even these are not as likely as many people think.
The perception of constant street violence derives mainly from the fact that it gets reported while its absence does not. Headlines like 'nobody got stabbed today' would not sell a lot of newspapers, so we are told about incidents that do happen and never hear about the millions of people who go about their business unharmed. To illustrate that, look at this page. The words stand out but there is a lot more white space between and around them. You do not notice it because it is not brought to your attention. So it is with violence - a lot more people do not encounter violence than do. ~ Martin J. Dougherty

I found Him in the shining of the stars,
I marked Him in the flowering of His fields,
But in His ways with men I find Him not.
I waged His wars, and now I pass and die.
O me! for why is all around us here
As if some lesser god had made the world,
But had not force to shape it as he would,
Till the High God behold it from beyond,
And enter it, and make it beautiful? ~ Alfred Tennyson

Perhaps we're not the greater good, but we are the lesser of evils. ~ Don Winslow

If men and women were equal, everybody would have the same values.Because at this point in time, many women feel compelled to care for the children, feel empathetically into another person's reality, more so than many men who often are on more of a straight-shooting path towards achievement come what may. ~ Elizabeth Lesser

My friends, we should consider ourselves fortunate, not because we are any greater or lesser because we face adversity, rather we simply rejoice in the opportunity to face it. ~ Michael Joling

J.R.R.Tolkien has confessed that about a third of the way through The Fellowship of the Ring, some ruffian named Strider confronted the hobbits in an inn, and Tolkien was in despair. He didn't know who Strider was, where the book was going, or what to write next. Strider turns out to be no lesser person than Aragorn, the unrecognized and uncrowned king of all the forces of good, whose restoration to rule is, along with the destruction of the evil ring, the engine that moves the plot of the whole massive trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. ~ Ansen Dibell

Obama, who is becoming more and more preacher-like, wants to be the Punisher-in-Chi ef of the Western World, the Avenger-in-Chie f. There is something oddly Roman about him ... The lesser races must be civilized and they must be punished ... Everyone outside the Roman Empire was called a barbarian. Everyone outside Obama's empire is called a terrorist. ~ Robert Fisk

The Big Dipper rested neatly in the sky, surrounded by lesser bits of light, and I understood how it all fit together. Some moments of our lives were vivid and strong, hanging among all the other memories, not to be forgotten. Our baby was that constellation for us, and no matter where we looked, no matter what other stars dotted our sky, he would always be there, the biggest and the brightest of them all. ~ Deanna Roy

Psal had not thought of all that. He would think of it all night. The loveliest woman from the defeated Peacock longhouse would be his. Yet he did not want her. In the middle of the night, as the longhouse keened to Poh's region and one landscape blended into another, Psal lay on his wheeled bed wondering if he should rape in order to show his ability to compromise. All night, the Lesser Light flickered and Psal often found himself holding his breath. ~ Carole McDonnell

The movies have never been a big deal to me. The movies are the movies. They just make them. If they're good, that's terrific. If they're not, they're not. But I see them as a lesser medium than fiction, than literature, and a more ephemeral medium. ~ Stephen King