Traded Away Quotes

Combined families often get bad reviews, but the family my children got when they traded away 'the suffocating four-person' nuclear one is one that has benefited all of them. ~ Jane Smiley

Among the handful of British diplomats and military men aware of their government's secret policy in the Middle East-that the Arabs were being encouraged to fight and die on the strength of promises that had already been traded away-were many who regarded that policy as utterly shameful, an affront to British dignity. ~ Scott Anderson

If memory is our means of preserving that which we consider most valuable, it is also painfully linked to our own transience. When we die, our memories die with us. In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we've created is a way of fending off mortality. It allows ideas to be efficiently passed across time and space, and for one idea to build on another to a degree not possible when a thought has to be passed from brain to brain in order to be sustained.

The externalization of memory not only changed how people think; it also led to a profound shift in the very notion of what it means to be intelligent. Internal memory became devalued. Erudition evolved from possessing information internally to knowing how and where to find it in the labyrinthine world of external memory...But as our culture has transformed from one that was fundamentally based on internal memories to one that is fundamentally based on memories stored outside the brain, what are the implications for ourselves and our society. What we've gained is indisputiable. But what have we traded away? ~ Joshua Foer

The life of membership with all its cumbers is traded away for the life of employment that makes itself free by forgetting you clean as a whistle when you are not of any more use. ~ Wendell Berry

I am charged with guarding sanity, not morality. If you want to stay together, do not split. If you want peace, do not start wars. If you want to avoid genocide, do not wipe out an alien species. But if these are not your highest values, then you may well end up sacrificing them. What you are willing to trade off, may end up traded away - be you warned! But if that is acceptable to you, then so be it. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

Code should run as fast as necessary, but no faster; something important is always traded away to increase speed. ~ Richard E. Pattis

Timbuktu. The last pure place. Isolation being the mother of purity. All men are jealous of Timbuktu because Timbuktu is removed from men, it's the wholeness men have fractured, the sacred extreme they've traded away. ~ Tom Robbins

Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change. ~ Geoffrey West

Is human dignity and human life so cheap that the rights protecting it can be traded away to appease the appetite for intimidation and prejudice of a vicious and self-centered group - for whatever reason, power, politics, nationalism, or unity? ~ Christina Engela

The Communists offer one precious, fatal boon: they take away the sense of sin. ~ Murray Kempton

She jumped out from hiding. "You killed me, you son of a bitch!"
The Windigo stopped. As its bulbous red eyes fell on her, it occurred to her that, even though she was dead, there might be fates that could befall her spirit she should probably try to avoid. Swallowing, she stepped back.
But the Windigo made no move toward her. Its voice was a thing of ice cracking in the middle of a frozen lake. "I have eaten your flesh already, child. Your spirit is of no use to me. I need fresh meat and hot blood." Turning away, it continued through the forest.
"What? That's it? Take my body, then forget about me?" she yelled after its retreating back. "Obviously a guy," she muttered. ~ Douglas Smith

Huge knots of sea-weed hung upon the jagged and pointed stones, trembling in every breath of wind; and the green ivy clung mournfully round the dark and ruined battlements. Behind it rose the ancient castle, its towers roofless, and its massive walls crumbling away, but telling us proudly of its own might and strength, as when, seven hundred years ago, it rang with the clash of arms, or resounded with the noise of feasting and revelry. ~ Charles Dickens

Some people who see cooking as a job. They got into cooking at some stage and they're sort of ticking along trying to get the money together to buy the car to impress the girlfriend and you know they're doing their job, but some of these people one day, all of a sudden it becomes wonderfully exciting to them. They find this love of what they're doing and they're away. ~ Paul Rankin

[Keenan] 'What am I going to do?' He sank to the floor.
[Donia] 'Hope that some of us are kinder to you than you've been to us,' she whispered. Then, before she could soften again, she walked away and left the Summer King kneeling in her foyer. ~ Melissa Marr

What I find disturbing in America is the consuming desire for leisure, convenience, and fun. It seems we, as a nation, have traded God for gadgets. We have traded eternal truth for momentary self-gratification - worshipping false gods of materialism and humanism instead of the Creator of all things. ~ Billy Graham

Are you okay?" he says.

My breath shakes. "Do you know the story of the Prodigal Son?"

"Oh my god. Rev - "

"Do you?"

He sighs. "I don't remember the whole thing."

So I tell him the story.

He listens. When I'm done, he says, "What does that have to do with anything?"

"Which one am I?" I finally ask.

"Rev - "

"I didn't stay with my father. So I'm obviously not the devoted son."

"Dude."

"But is that saying that if I went back to him, he'd welcome me with open arms? Am I supposed to be that son?"

"Are you listening to yourself right now?"

"No." I study him. My voice is a breath away from breaking. "Help me, Dec. Which one am I?"

His eyes are dark and serious. "Neither. Is that what you need me to say? You're neither son.

"But - "

"You're not selfish. You wouldn't be the son who asks for his money and leaves. And you're not spiteful. You don't resent anyone, even the one person you should."

I flinch again. "Don't you understand? I have to be one or the other."

"No, you don't! You moron, there are three people in the story."

"What?"

"You're neither son, Rev. If you're anyone, you're the man who watched his kids act like total dicks, only to stand there with open arms and forgive them."

I'm speechless. I might be gaping at him. As many times as I've read t ~ Brigid Kemmerer

Barefoot conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this Earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn't hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed and I think I know why we are on this Earth; it's to find out that what you love the most will be taken away from you, probably due to an error in high places rather than by design. ~ Philip K. Dick

And yet you take away the one little ewe-lamb of pleasure that I have in this dull life of mine. Well, perhaps generosity is not a woman's most marked characteristic. ~ Thomas Hardy

I walked around him, champagne in hand. Great feeling.
-Give me a flash, he said – just a little quick…
I flashed opened the coat as I strolled by. He exhaled with a sigh- O, he said, Please Again.

This time I stood squarely in front of him. He was sitting on the beautiful new over stuffed chair, and swung the coat open, all the way open. And then slowly closed it, and walked away, hips and heels swaying away from him.
I could hear the groan. God, this was powerful.

He came up behind me and slid his hand down over the fur, the softness, silkiness of the lining flowed over my naked body, a caress on every inch of my flesh –umm indeed.

Now he was sliding his hands up my legs and under the coat.

-Aah,Aah not yet, I said and pulled away from him.

He moaned again – Please, he said… ~ Germaine Gibson

When I had my cancer, the chemotherapy took my hair away. So then I decided I would just keep it short, and this is my signature now. The great thing about it is that I am a bit of a chameleon, so you can put a wig on me and I look totally different. ~ Anthony Warlow

She and I went to school with Shay Mitchell and Hayden Panettiere, Megan Fox was prom queen, Chris Hemsworth was prom king."
I make a clicking noise with my tongue.
"And there was Natalie's worst enemy, a cheerleader who tried to steal Damon away from her in tenth grade; Natalie said she was the slutty version of Nina Dobrev - none of these people really looked like them, not really anyway. Natalie is just ... odd ~ J.A. Redmerski

Everything faded away except one emotion. One so pure and innocent that it seemed intangible. I was encompassed and filled with a sensation that was consuming, warming me throughout. There was a word that was the closest thing to describe it, but the gravity he held of it was so much more than a word could possibly convey. He saw everything I was to God, to this world, to his own heart. Our souls were entwined with it, our destinies written by it, our hearts beat to it.
Love. ~ Ashlan Thomas

I'm overwhelmed with sadness for everything that was lost, and filled with anger toward the people who took it away. My people-or at least, my old people. I don't know who I am anymore, or where I belong.
That's not totally true ... I know I belong with Alex. ~ Lauren Oliver

We were a perfect match. I'm a talker; Laura is a listener. I am restless; she is calm. I can get a little carried away; she is practical and down-to-earth. Above all, she is genuine and natural. There is no phoniness about her. Her appeal was immediate and constant. In August, I went to visit my family in Kennebunkport, planning to stay for a week. After one night, I flew back to Texas to be with Laura. ~ George W. Bush

In a cage of wire-ribs
The size of a man's head, the macaw bristles in a staring
Combustion, suffers the stoking devils of his eyes.
In the old lady's parlour, where an aspidistra succumbs
To the musk of faded velvet, he hangs in clear flames,
Like a torturer's iron instrument preparing
With dense slow shudderings of greens, yellows, blues,
Crimsoning into the barbs:

Or like the smouldering head that hung
In Killdevil's brass kitchen, in irons, who had been
Volcano swearing to vomit the world away in black ash,
And would, one day; or a fugitive aristocrat
From some thunderous mythological hierarchy, caught
By a little boy with a crust and a bent pin,
Or snare of horsehair set for a song-thrush,
And put in a cage to sing.

The old lady who feeds him seeds
Has a grand-daughter. The girl calls him 'Poor Polly', pokes fun.
'Jolly Mop.' But lies under every full moon,
The spun glass of her body bared and so gleam-still
Her brimming eyes do not tremble or spill
The dream where the warrior comes, lightning and iron,
Smashing and burning and rending towards her loin:
Deep into her pillow her silence pleads.

All day he stares at his furnace
With eyes red-raw, but when she comes they close.
'Polly. Pretty Poll', she cajoles, and rocks him gently.
She caresses, whispers kisses. The blue lids stay shut.
She strikes the cage in a t ~ Ted Hughes

Some humans have a notion covering up their face makes them stand out to other people who don't notice them, because they look like everyone else.
They take away the beauty of individuality, by building their faces on fake foundations.
They all want to look the same, but have no reason to flock together. ~ Craig Stone

There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it. ~ Aldous Huxley

At Camp Don Bosco, there were Bibles all over the place, mostly 1970s hippie versions like Good News for Modern Man. They had groovy titles like The Word or The Way, and translated the Bible into "contemporary English," which meant Saul yelling at Jonathan, "You son of a bitch!" (I Samuel 20:30). Awesome! The King James version gave this verse as "Thou son of the perverse rebellious woman," which was bogus in comparison. Maybe these translations went a bit far. I recall one of the Bibles translating the inscription over the cross, "INRI" (Iesus Nazaremus Rex Iudaeorum), as "SSDD" (Same Shit Different Day), and another describing the Last Supper - the night before Jesus' death, a death he freely accepted - where Jesus breaks the bread, gives it to his disciples, and says, "It's better to burn out than fade away," but these memories could be deceptive. ~ Rob Sheffield

If you love something, give it away. ~ Conor Oberst

I don't think you should make so many off-colour jokes about him becoming a cuckold. You're only getting away with it because he doesn't know what it means.' 'That's the beauty of the English language. One can wrap insults inside elegance, like popping anchovies into pastry. ~ Christopher Fowler

We're gonna get weaker. That's already happened. They used to say, you know, an apple a day keeps the doctor away. Now they're saying eat five fruits. That's evidence. You can't argue with that. ~ Karl Pilkington

The corner doesn't mind listening to the stupid things I say;
Sometimes it's the only one keeping me from running away.
And the corner never tells me things I'd rather never know;
We became the best of friends long, long, long ago. ~ Margo T. Rose

For directly afterwards, the Dodger, and Charley, and the two young ladies, went away together, having been kindly furnished by the amiable old Jew with money to spend. ~ Charles Dickens

Kali's nakedness shows that she has cast away illusion; in her, the entire truth about life and death is revealed. Even her color is esoteric; Kali's dark colors stand for the ultimate void state, where as differences dissolve into the absolute beyond all form. Her sword is the force that slices delusion, ignorance, false hope, and lies. Her position on top of Shiva reveals that she is the dynamic force in the universe, the power that churns the stillness of the void, so worlds can be created inside that transcendent nothingness. ~ Sally Kempton

Beer's for the good times. But ain't nothing like a big ass bowl of ice cream with all the trimmings to chase the blues away for me. ~ Elizabeth Reyes

Women who are concerned with being pretty think about what they look like, but women who are concerned with being beautiful think about what they are looking at. They are taking it all in. They are taking in the whole beautiful world and making all that beauty theirs to give away to others. ~ Glennon Doyle Melton

For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

What we once fling away never comes again to us. ~ Ethel M. Dell

The bird rocked free from its blocks and carried them down the tarmac, away from their homes and families and dogs and cats and to a land that didn't want them. ~ Ross Ritchell

Okay," Brayden says. "I'm yours." Starlight reflects in Brayden's eyes and, unbeknownst to either of them, part of Jenner's heart is given away forever. ~ Lynn Kelling

The inspections started in 1991, right after the Gulf War. One of the conditions for the ceasefire was that Iraq had to do away with all of its weapons of mass destruction - biological, chemical and nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. ~ Hans Blix