The Question Quotes

The question is not whether we are able to change but whether we are changing fats enough. ~ Angela Merkel

I think we have a good foundation which Mr. Lee Kuan Yew laid down, but you have to move forward. Now the question is what can Mr. Lee Hsien Loong and his team, and all our younger ministers can do now to build on the foundation which Mr. Lee Kuan Yew has built. ~ Tony Tan

Aye," the prince said. "I told the story to Ser Balon, but not all of it. As the children splashed in the pools, Daenerys watched from amongst the orange trees, and a realization came to her. She could not tell the highborn from the low. Naked, they were only children. All innocent, all vulnerable, all deserving of long life, love, protection. "There is your realm," she told her son and heir, "remember them, on everything you do." My own mother said those same words to me when I was old enough to leave the pools. It is an easy thing for a prince to call the spears, but in the end the children pay the price. For their sake, the wise prince will wage non war without good cause, nor any war he cannot hope to win.
"I am not blind, nor deaf. I know that you all believe me weak, frightened, feeble. Your father knew me better. Oberyn was ever the viper. Deadly, dangerous, unpredictable. No man dared tread on him. I was the grass. Pleasant, complaisant, sweet-smelling, swaying with every breeze. Who fears to walk upon the grass? But it is the grass that hides the viper from his enemies and shelters him until he strikes. Your father and I worked more closely than you know...but now he is gone. The question is, can I trust his daughters to serve me in his place? ~ George R.R. Martin

The question that faces the strategic decision maker is not what his organisation should do tomorrow. It is, what do we have to do today to be ready for an uncertain tomorrow? ~ Peter Drucker

Karen had no problem standing up to people. She'd say 'no' before the question was even asked. ~ Cate Cameron

The question in the Simpson case has never been whether he is guilty or not guilty but, given the facts and circumstances of this case, whether it is possible for him to be innocent. And the answer to that question has always been an unequivocal no. ~ Vincent Bugliosi

Freud expressed the opinion - not quite in earnest, though, it seemed to me - that philosophy was the most decent form of sublimation of repressed sexuality, nothing more. In response I put the question, 'What then is science, particularly psychoanalytic psychology?' Whereupon he, visible a bit surprised, answered evasively: 'At least psychology has a social purpose. ~ Ludwig Binswanger

And there are vampires, too? Werewolves, warlocks, all that stuff?"
Clary gnawed her lower lip. "So I hear."
"And you kill them, too?" Simon asked, directing the question to Jace, who had put the stele back in his pocket and was examining his flawless nails for defects.
"Only when they've been naughty. ~ Cassandra Clare

Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself? ~ Emil Cioran

The partisan when he is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question, but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions. ~ Socrates

Goldene Haar!' he exclaims and takes one of my long braids into his hand. I am not certain I heard right. Did he say 'golden hair' about my braids?
Are you Jewish? The question startles me. 'Yes, I am Jewish.' How old are you?
I am thirteen.' 'You are tall for your age. Is this your mother?' He touches Mommy lightly on the shoulder. 'You go with your mother. ~ Livia Bitton-Jackson

The only answers to the question, "why me", are more situations that raise the same question. That's because self-pity is a wall that blocks all light. ~ Charles F. Glassman

…to apply scientific arguments to the question of God's existence, as if this were somehow a showstopper, is committing a category error ~ Francis S. Collins

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

There are many idols but I would categorize them into three: heroes who are strong enough to lay themselves bare to the people and cowards who hide behind symbols and crafted figures. Then there is one who rules over them. They all love the same thing; praise and adoration. The question is, to whom does the glory belong to, really? ~ DON SANTO

Just beyond the ticket booth Father had painted on a wall in bright red letters the question: DO YOU KNOW WHICH IS THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL IN THE ZOO? An arrow pointed to a small curtain. There were so many eager, curious hands that pulled at the curtain that we had to replace it regularly. Behind it was a mirror. ~ Yann Martel

I know the answer to the question now, by the way: why bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. It came from my inner editor, the part of me that forces the wordy writer in me to dump ninety percent of all modifiers: Ask both questions again, minus the adjectives.
"Why do things happen to people?"
Just because. ~ Chris Crutcher

It appears - because it has been the case for twenty years - that every problem is solvable ... that no matter how badly the world economy slumps there is a pain-free way out of it. Once the realization dawns that there is not, and that the pain will be severe, the question is posed that has not really been posed for twenty years: who should feel it? ~ Paul Mason

Thus Milton refines the question down to a matter of faith," said Coleridge, bringing the lecture to a close, "and a kind of faith more independent, autonomous - more truly strong, as a matter of fact - than the Puritans really sought. Faith, he tells us, is not an exotic bloom to be laboriously maintained by the exclusion of most aspects of the day to day world, nor a useful delusion to be supported by sophistries and half-truths like a child's belief in Father Christmas - not, in short, a prudently unregarded adherence to a constructed creed; but rather must be, if anything, a clear-eyed recognition of the patterns and tendencies, to be found in every piece of the world's fabric, which are the lineaments of God. This is why religion can only be advice and clarification, and cannot carry any spurs of enforcement - for only belief and behavior that is independently arrived at, and then chosen, can be praised or blamed. This being the case, it can be seen as a criminal abridgement of a person's rights willfully to keep him in ignorance of any facts - no piece can be judged inadmissible, for the more stones, both bright and dark, that are added to the mosaic, the clearer is our picture of God. ~ Tim Powers

You do have to listen to the stories, for stories always mean something. The question that worries me is: WHAT exactly do they mean? ~ Cressida Cowell

At the end of the day the question comes, what are you doing for the world? You have to try to do something that's going to add something positive. ~ Paul Feig

ON HER DEATHBED, Gertrude Stein is said to have asked, 'What is the answer?' Then, after a long silence, 'What is the question?' Don't start looking in the Bible for the answers it gives. Start by listening for the questions it asks. ~ Frederick Buechner

You know why I think we still execute people? Because, even if we don't want to say it out loud-for the really heinous crimes, we want to know that there's a really heinous punishment. Simple as that. We want to bring society closer together-huddle and circle our wagons-and that means getting rid of people we think are incapable of learning a moral lesson. I guess the question is: Who gets to identify those people? And what if, God forbid, they got it wrong? ~ Jodi Picoult

If the general picture of an expanding universe and a Big Bang is correct, we must then confront still more difficult questions. What were conditions like at the time of the Big Bang? What happened before that? Was there a tiny universe, devoid of all matter, and then the matter suddenly created from nothing? How does that happen? In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must, of course ask next where God comes from. And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and decide that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question? Or, if we say that God has always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed? ~ Carl Sagan

I got into the movies by accident. When I got an offer, I thought, 'Let's try this, too.' Everything in my life has happened by trial and error. I didn't even think I would win the Miss India title, so where's the question of thinking I'd come this far. ~ Priyanka Chopra

There's an imperative to make sure you distinguish fiction from the fact, because if the fact is doing the work, why did you do fiction? And once you raise the question of why - why do fiction? - then you have to answer it in your text as a kind of enactment of the answer. ~ Fred D'Aguiar

However, once technology enables us to re-engineer human minds, Homo sapiens will disappear, human history will come to an end and a completely new kind of process will begin, which people like you and me cannot comprehend. Many scholars try to predict how the world will look in the year 2100 or 2200. This is a waste of time. Any worthwhile prediction must take into account the ability to re-engineer human minds, and this is impossible. There are many wise answers to the question, 'What would people with minds like ours do with biotechnology?' Yet there are no good answers to the question, 'What would beings with a different kind of mind do with biotechnology?' All we can say is that people similar to us are likely to use biotechnology to re-engineer their own minds, and our present-day minds cannot grasp what might happen next. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

The question becomes, because we're remotely far away from the territory we're about to bomb, does it make it easier to do it? That it is an important question, and the military is asking those questions. ~ Gavin Hood

That said, the question remains: how to strike the balance between free speech and mutual respect in this mixed-up world, both blessed and cursed with instant communication? We should not fight fire with fire, threats with threats. ~ Timothy Garton Ash

The story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 1o) can he interpreted mystically in such a way that the question of the knowledge of God becomes its focus. The priest and the Levite, who walk past the man who fell among robbers and was seriously hurt, are pious God-fearing persons. They "know" God and the law of God. They have God the same way that the one who knows has that which is known. They know what God wants them to be and do. They also know where God is to he found, in the scriptures and the cult of the temple. For them, God is mediated through the existing institutions. They have their God - one who is not to he found on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho.

What is wrong with this knowledge of God? The problem is not the knowledge of the Torah or the knowledge of the temple. (It is absurd to read an anti-Judaistic meaning into a story of the Jew Jesus, since it could just as well have come from Hillel or another Jewish teacher.) What is false is a knowledge of God that does not allow for any unknowing or any negative theology. Because both actors know that God is "this," they do not see "that." Hence the Good Samaritan is the anti-fundamentalist story par excellence.

"And so I ask God to rid me of God," Meister Eckhart says. The God who is known and familiar is too small for him. ~ Dorothee Solle

The question we should be asking is not why people are sometimes cruel, or even why a few people are usually cruel (all evidence suggests true sadists are an extremely small proportion of the population overall), but how we have come to create institutions that encourage such behavior and that suggest cruel people are in some ways admirable-or at least as deserving of sympathy as those they push around. ~ David Graeber

It can be proven that wounded people wound others. Walk circumspectly among wounded people, their injuries are deeply submerged in their brain's amygdala, and without the time-tested practice of emotional intelligence, you might find yourself scarred by association. Give your associations time to reveal their emotional intelligence or lack thereof; employers measure their associates seasonally, quarterly, and or annually; but ask yourself the question: (Q) WHY haven't you? ~ Tracey Bond

Behind the door lies the question: Have you ever heard of a thing called knocking? ~ Jarod Kintz

Pendergast thought for a moment. Finally, his silvery eyes turned to her. "Failure is always useful."

"A nice thought. But personally? I think failure sucks." Gladstone slumped down in her chair, trying to get comfortable. After so many hours, it was difficult.

"The question failure asks is: what don't we know that we don't know?"

"Whoa, man," Lam said. "That's deep. ~ Douglas Preston

Is Joe your father, Zach?'
I don't know where the question came from, but it was out, and I couldn't take it back even if I'd wanted to.
'No.' Zach shook his head. 'I never knew my dad. I don't know anything about him. ~ Ally Carter

The question is not how to get cured, but how to live. ~ Joseph Conrad

Be wise in the use of time. The question in life is not "how much time do we have?" The question is "what shall we do with it?" ~ Anna Robertson Brown Lindsay

Ignoring the question is not the solution of problem,
Same as forgetting the sorrow isn't happiness ~ Sarthak Tiwari

It's not the quality of the answers that changes our lives, it's the quality of the question ~ Steven Aitchison

For thousands of years humanity has been trying to answer the question: "Do we have life after death?" Maybe for the first time you must now answer the question: "Do I really have a life before death? ~ Dragos Bratasanu

If you do not believe in a personal God, the question: 'What is the purpose of life?' is unaskable and unanswerable. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Like Raphael's Seven," Izak continued, aching hope in his expression. "You're a consort. Elijah's consort has a Guard." Elena didn't know what she would do with a Guard, but saying no to this fragile, broken, hopeful boy was out of the question. "Consider yourself the first member." His smile lit up the whole room. ~ Nalini Singh

The "question" is the vaccination against and the cure for ignorance. ~ Ted Agon

To penetrate or to be penetrated, that is the question. ~ Stefan Angelina McElvain

Almost everyone thinks they are a good person, but the question you should be asking is, am I good enough to go to Heaven? How would you know? ~ Candace Cameron Bure

The question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be when He made us. ~ C.S. Lewis

If the question is 'How do we stop enormous evils in the world?' the answer is, unfortunately, quite frequently 'War.' Nazi and Japanese racist genocide were ended by soldiers shooting people, and by bombers bombing people, not by people who believed 'war is not the answer. ~ Dennis Prager

Evil likes darkness." "Why is that?" Seth asked. Grandma thought about the question a moment before answering. "Because evil likes to hide. ~ Brandon Mull

Because I never thought anyone would listen to me," she filled in the answer before Greg even had a chance to phrase the question. "I never thought anyone would care enough to make it all stop. ~ R.P. Rochford

Why are these historical observations interesting?...they suggest that we should be careful about attributing our distinction between philosophy and science to earlier thinkers…The examples I have given do raise an interesting question: Why is it that we tend to see such a radical break between philosophy and science, and, more important, should we? The question can be raised directly, without the need for history, as Quine has done. But history brings the point home in an especially clear way: It shows us an assumption we take for granted by pointing out that it is not an assumption everyone makes. ~ Daniel Garber

It's two A.M. "To sleep or to write that is the question?" Whether it tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of my piss poor punctuation or take arms against a sea of keys with so many new possibilities. ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

We Jews who willingly and happily confirm our covenantal status and its attendant rights and duties must take the question of mission seriously: either to accept it or reject it knowingly and with conviction. ~ David Novak

The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery. Thoreau: 'Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations…' Lose the whole world, he asserts, get lost in it, and find your soul. ~ Rebecca Solnit

New Orleans is a city whose basic industry is the service industry. That's why it makes its money. That's - it brings people to the city. People come to the city and experience the wonders of this extraordinary city and everything else. The question is that, how do we create jobs which are the jobs that have pay, that - living wages? ~ Danny Glover

She turned her head a fraction of an inch, her eyes very dark, pools of ink, silencing him. She did not say a word. In her eyes he read the answer to the question she had not allowed him to ask. No one had ever looked at him like that. Like he was every star shining down on them that night and the ground beneath her feet, and every other ridiculous phrase found in books that he'd never believed could possibly be true. And he knew she hated herself in
that moment and he knew she loved him precisely because she did not speak a single word. ~ Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The question of the acceptance of theories should, I propose, be demoted to the status of a minor problem. For science may be regarded as a growing system of problems, rather than as a system of beliefs. And for a system of problems, the tentative acceptance of a theory or a conjecture means hardly more than that it is considered worthy of further criticism. ~ Karl R. Popper

But when whites ask me The Question, it's just a reminder that I'm not like them, I don't look like them, which must mean I'm not from here. ~ Michele Serros

To espresso or to latte, that is the question ... whether 'tis tastier on the palate to choose white mocha over plain ... or to take a cup to go. Or a mug to stay, or extra cream, or have nothing, and by opposing the endless choice, end one's heartache ... ~ Jasper Fforde

We have laws in our country that tell us not to murder or steal and we have police that enforce them. The question is whether you personally need the police to watch you. If they disappeared would you begin killing and thieving because you know no one will come after you, or will you carry on not doing it because it is what you actually believe is right? ~ Lewis N. Roe

The question that we need to address is this: What relevance do these ancient traditions have to the experience of a modern adolescent growing up in the Western world? Rather than indulge in idle speculation, I have invited a number of young people to express their views on psychedelics and the effects these substances have had upon their lives and minds. ~ Rick Doblin

Science fiction, as I mentioned before, writes about what is neither impossible nor possible; the fact is that, when the question of possibility comes up in science fiction, the author can only reply that nobody knows. We haven't been there yet. We haven't discovered that yet. Science fiction hasn't happened. ~ Joanna Russ

Heart answered the question
which yet to be posed by mind. ~ Toba Beta

I know that I am honest and sincere in my desire to do well; but the question is whether I know enough to accomplish what I desire. ~ Grover Cleveland

We attend a postmodern meeting, and everyone leaves happy because everyone at the meeting was able to express himself or herself, even if no decisions were made. We give equal awards to our kids so nobody feels left out. Our news media is more concerned with the question, "How did that make you feel?" than any other. ~ Gudjon Bergmann

Genius sees the answer before the question. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

We cannot raise the question: How can there be evil if God exists? without raising the second: How can there be good if He exists not? ~ Boethius

God isn't separate from us, because He's the love inside our minds. Every problem, inside and out, is due to a separation from love on someone's part. Thirty-five thousand people a day die of hunger on earth, and there's no dearth of food. The question is not 'what kind of God would let children starve?' but rather, 'What kind of people let children starve?' ~ Marianne Williamson

I don't think there is any good answer to the question why shouldn't gays and lesbians who want to serve their country be allowed to do it. ~ John Bolton

Every moment of our life has a purpose, that every action of ours, no matter how dull or routine or trivial it may seem in itself, has a dignity and a worth beyond human understanding ... For it means that no moment can be wasted, no opportunity missed, since each has a purpose in man's life, each has a purpose in God's plan. Think of your day, today or yesterday. Think of the work you did, the people you met, moment by moment. What did it mean to you- and might it have meant for God? Is the question too simple to answer, or are we just afraid to ask it for fear of the answer we must give? ~ Walter J. Ciszek

Too many people think that when a couple doesn't fight that they are strong, but I have never bought that. The question should never be "do you fight," but "can you fight," because fights happen, that's just the way it is. What's important is how you handle it. The strongest couples aren't the ones who avoid fighting, but the ones who do fight and are able to grow from it, and come out on the other side with something better than they had before. ~ Julianna Scott

While the question of who killed President Kennedy is important, the question 'what killed him' is more important. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

That these mandates exist is hardly news, but their cumulative effect on women's lives tends to be examined through a fragmented lens, one-pathology-at-a-time, the eating disorder lit on the self-help shelves separated from the books on women's troubled relationships with men, the books on compulsive shopping separated from the books on female sexuality, the books on culture and media separated from the books on female psychology. Take your pick, choose your demon: Women Who Love Too Much in one camp, Women Who Eat Too Much in another, Women Who Shop Too Much in a third. In fact, the camps are not so disparate, and the question of appetite - specifically the question of what happens to the female appetite when it's submerged and rerouted - is the thread that binds them together. One woman's tub of cottage cheese is another's maxed-out MasterCard; one woman's soul-murdering love affair is another's frenzied eating binge. ~ Caroline Knapp

The question is not how many years I've lived. The question is how I lived those many years. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

For socialism is not merely the labour question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to Heaven from Earth but to set up Heaven on earth. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Reporters also tend to love trials. It may be that we are transfixed by a process in which the person being asked a question actually has to answer it. He cannot say he would rather not comment. He cannot tell an anecdote on a different subject. He has to answer the question - under oath that he is telling the truth. ~ Calvin Trillin

If you feel your school is failing you, the question is why. Is it a lack of parental involvement, large classes, school violence, poor learning environment? Are there any standards to determine where problems are? Are there tutoring or mentoring programs? If the school is still failing after 3 years then what are your options? ~ John Rowland

The sense of a spiritual dimension in life is absolutely important, and the religious communities are also important. The question of believing in a set of creedal statements is a lot less important, because I realize the Christian movement thrived then and can now on other elements of the tradition. ~ Elaine Pagels

Who the Hell is Lane? he asked. Unmistakably, it was the question of a still very young man who, now and then, is not inclined to admiti that he know the first names of certain people. ~ J.D. Salinger

A few generations ago, men went to work or war and rarely got to see life beyond their careers. A generation ago, our parents had to answer the question of what they would do with the last third of their lives. How would they spend their retirement? Would it be squandered on silly things or invested in significance? But now, the question of legacy isn't a matter of if you live long enough or when you retire; it's a matter of what you will do with what you have right now. You don't have to earn a living for thirty years to turn around and spend the next thirty giving it away. If significance is what matters to you, you can structure your life and work in a way that allows you to live your legacy now. In fact, your giving doesn't have to be a by-product of your success; it can be the very thing that drives it in the first place. ~ Jeff Goins

It will be possible, through the detailed determination of amino-acid sequences of hemoglobin molecules and of other molecules too, to obtain much information about the course of the evolutionary process, and to illuminate the question of the origin of species. ~ Linus Pauling

I'd worked on leprosy and malaria in India [at the World Bank] and asked myself the question: Why do we let 2 million children die every year around the world for not having clean water? Because they're faceless and nameless. So, for me, Facebook looked like it was going to solve the problem of the invisible victim. ~ Sheryl Sandberg

Why
should I, who have no need to work for food, spin? ' may be the question
asked. Because I am eating what does not belong to me. I am living on the
spoliation of my countrymen. Trace the source of every coin that finds its way
into your pocket, and you will realise the truth of what I write. Every one
must spin. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Blessed is the man who "takes the risk of a decision" -
asks himself the question: "Would it solve the problem?
Is it right as I see it? Is it in the best interests of all? ~ Marianne Moore

From a business perspective, the question related to cities and sustainability is clear and compelling: can you have a healthy company in an unhealthy city? Arguably, no. Companies need healthy cities to provide reliable infrastructure, an educated and vital workforce, a vibrant economy, and a safe and secure environment to survive and thrive. Business executives have a lot to learn from cities, and a lot to contribute, and this book shows the way, chronicling the successes and the lessons learned about what it takes to make a city healthy, in every sense of the word. ~ Joel Makower

The question is ... How did a girl like Annabelle manage to talk a man like you into joining our silly little family party?"
Annabelle smiled sweetly. "I promised he could tie me up afterward and spank me. ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

The question of questions for the politicians should ever be-What type of social structure am I tending to produce? But this is a question he never entertains. ~ Herbert Spencer

You could probably get through life without knowing how to roast a chicken, but the question is, would you want to? ~ Nigella Lawson

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

The question now isn't whether I want to fool around with this man. The question is how I'm ever going to give it up. ~ Sarina Bowen

On the question of whether a behavioral science can in principle be constructed, we shall take no sides. That some kinds of human behavior can be described and even predicted in terms of objectively verifiable and quantifiable data seems to us to have been established. ~ Anatol Rapoport

To the question how one kind of labor can be measured against another, how the labor of the artisan can be measured against the labor of the artist, how the labor of the strong can be measured against the labor of the weak, the communists can give no answer. ~ Benjamin N. Cardozo

I do not see why the axiom of Prudence should not be questioned, when it conflicts with present inclination, on a ground similar to that on which Egoists refuse to admit the axiom of Rational Benevolence. If the Utilitarian has to answer the question, 'Why should I sacrifice my own happiness for the greater happiness of another?' it must surely be admissible to ask the Egoist 'Why should I sacrifice a present pleasure for a greater one in the future? Why should I concern myself about my own future feelings any more than about the feelings of other persons?' ~ Henry Sidgwick

On the question of whether mathematics was discovered or invented, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans had no doubt-mathematics was real, immutable, omnipresent, and more sublime than anything that could conceivably emerge from the feeble human mind. The Pythagoreans literally embedded the universe into mathematics. In fact, to the Pythagoreans, God was not a mathematician-mathematics was God!

The importance of the Pythagorean philosophy lies not only in its actual, intrinsic value. By setting the stage, and to some extent the agenda, for the next generation of philosophers-Plato in particular-the Pythagoreans established a commanding position in Western thought. ~ Mario Livio

[As] authorities "over" us are removed, as we wobble out on our own, the question of whether to be or not to be arises with real relevance for the first time, since the burden of being is felt most fully by the self-determining self. ~ William H Gass

The question tumbles out of my mouth like a smooth stone in a stream, its edges worn clean by how often I roll it around in my head. ~ Sara Raasch

Naturally the question suggests itself, Why did these people want the river now when nobody had wanted it in the five preceding generations? Apparently it was because at this late day they thought they had discovered a way to make it useful; for it had come to be believed that the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of California, and therefore afforded a short cut from Canada to China. Previously the supposition had been that it emptied into the Atlantic, or Sea of Virginia. ~ Mark Twain

To be or not to be?' That is not the question. What is the question? The question is not one of being, but of becoming. 'To become more or not to become more' This is the question faced by each intelligence in our universe. ~ Truman G. Madsen

The conviction that life has a purpose is rooted in every fibre of man, it is a property of the human substance. Free men give many names to this purpose, and think and talk a lot about its nature. But for us the question is simpler. Today, in this place, our only purpose is to reach the spring. At the moment we care about nothing else. Behind this aim there is not at the moment any other aim. In the morning while we wait endlessly lined up in roll-call square for the time to leave for work, while every breath of wind penetrates our clothes and runs in violent shivers over our defenceless bodies, and everything is grey around us, and we are grey; in the morning, when it is still dark, we all look at the sky in the east to spot the first signs of a milder season, and the rising of the sun is commented on every day: today a little earlier than yesterday, today a little warmer than yesterday, in two months, in a month, the cold will call a truce and we will have one enemy less. Today the sun rose bright and clear for the first time from the horizon of mud. It is a Polish sun, cold, white, distant, and only warms the skin, but when it dissolved the last mists a murmur ran through our colourless numbers, and when even I felt its lukewarmth through my clothes I understood how men can worship the sun. ~ Primo Levi

The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it. ~ Robert Fitzgerald

Then, what is sacrelige [sic]? If it is nothing more than a rebellion against dogma, it is eventually as meaningless as the dogma it defies, and they are both become hounds ranting in the high grass, never see the boar in the thicket. Only a religious person can perpetrate sacrelige: and if its blasphemy reaches the heart of the question; if it investigates deeply enough to unfold, not the pattern, but the materials of the pattern, and the necessity of a pattern; if it questions so deeply that the doubt it arouses is frightening and cannot be dismissed; then it has done its true sacreligious [sic] work, in the service of its adversary: the only service that nihilism can ever perform.
(unused 1949 prefatory note to The Recognitions) ~ William Gaddis