With Its Quotes

Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of emotion and observation, multilayered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers. Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language. It will not get us anything that enters not just the conscious mind but the unconscious. It will not allow the book to burrow down into our memory and become part of ourselves, the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom and vicarious experience which helps to form us as complete human beings. It will not develop our awareness or add to the sum of our knowledge and intelligence. Read parts of a newspaper quickly or an encyclopaedia entry, or a fast-food thriller, but do not insult yourself or a book which has been created with its author's painstakingly acquired skill and effort, by seeing how fast you can dispose of it. ~ Susan Hill

They were living to themselves: self, with its hopes, and promises, and dreams, still had hold of them; but the Lord began to fulfill their prayers. They had asked for contrition, and He sent them sorrow; they had asked for purity, and He sent them thrilling anguish; they had asked to be meek, and He had broken their hearts; they has asked to be dead to the world, and He slew all their living hopes; they had asked to be made like unto Him, and He placed them in the furnace, sitting by "as a refiner of silver," till they should reflect His image; they had asked to lay hold of His cross, and when He had reached it out to them, it lacerated their hands. They had asked they knew not what, nor how; but He had taken them at their word, and granted them all their petitions. They were hardly willing to follow so far, or to draw so nigh to Him. They had upon them an awe and fear, as Jacob at Bethel, or Eliphaz in the night visions, or as the apostles when they thought they had seen the spirit, and knew not that it was Jesus. They could almost pray Him to depart from them, or to hide His awefulness. They found it easier to obey than to suffer--to do than to give up--to bear the cross than to hang upon it: but they cannot go back, for they have come too near the unseen cross, and its virtues have pierced too deeply within them. He is fulfilling to them his promise, "And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me.
But now, at last, their turn is come. Before, they had only hear ~ Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

Conceiv'd out of the fullest heat and pulse of European feudalism -personifying ill unparalleled ways the medieval aristocracy, its towering spirit of ruthless and gigantic caste, with its own peculiar air and arrogance (no mere imitation) -only one of the "wolfish earls" so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendant and knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works -works in some respects greater than anything else ill recorded literature. ~ Walt Whitman

And these men, for whom life has no repose, live at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment's happiness is flung so high and dazzling over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment. Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a happiness of their own. ~ Hermann Hesse

One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies. ~ Terry Eagleton

I've been worried about you, she says when they're settled in the kitchen. She has the bright, inquisitive gaze of a crow with its eye on a freshly squashed chipmunk. ~ Stephen King

I once drove a pair of horses from New York to Vicksburg, and to this day I can almost map out that country as I saw it then, with its hills and valleys, villages and rivers. Yes, I naturally attribute something of my success in railroad building to the interest I take in such things. ~ Collis Potter Huntington

Scars If you are like most people, once the acne is gone you will probably have some degree of scarring. The same protocols mentioned in this book are fantastic for eliminating scars over time. Scars can take longer to heal. Another huge help to speeding up the healing of scars is microneedling. This sounds painful but it really isn't. Microneedlers work by having numerous microneedles on a roller make tiny punctures in the dermis, causing blood to rush to the area with its healing factors, including stem cells, that restore the area. Use once every week or two weeks over affected ~ Kyle Craichy

What, then, of the priest's iconic representation of Christ at the altar? If there is no specifically masculine or feminine charism or ontology, the significance of the priest's maleness fades away. What matters - as patristic Christology recognized centuries ago with its dictum, 'That which is not assumed [by the Son of God in the incarnation] is not healed' - is that Christ became human, assuming and thereby healing the nature common to men and women. Although biologically a man, Christ assumed human nature in such a way as to include both men and women in his salvific work. And that means, in turn, that to refuse to allow a woman to preside at the Eucharist may be to say much more than opponents of women's ordination realize - namely, 'that women are not adequate icons of Christ.' The result, notes [Sarah] Hinlicky Wilson near the end of her book, is nothing less than 'to leave both their humanity and their salvation in doubt.' If women can't reflect the human nature of Christ at the altar, how then can they trust Christ's human nature to save them at all? ~ Wesley Hill

Larry sat with his arm stretched out along the top of the front seat. His shirt cuff was pulled back by his position and displayed his slim, strong wrist and the lower part of his brown arm lightly covered with fine hairs. The sun shone goldly upon them. Something in Isabel's immobility attracted my attention, and I glanced at her. She was so still that you might have thought her hypnotized. Her breath was hurried. Her eyes were fixed on the sinewy wrist with its little golden hairs and on that long, delicate, but powerful hand, and I have never seen on a human countenance such a hungry concupiscence as I saw then on hers. It was a mask of lust. I would never have believed that her beautiful features could assume an expression of such unbridled sensuality. It was animal rather than human. The beauty was stripped from her face; the look upon it made her hideous and frightening. It horribly suggested the bitch in heat and I felt rather sick. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us - and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject. - How beautiful are the retired flowers! how would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, "admire me I am a violet! dote upon me I am a primrose!" ~ John Keats

Last night I heard a robin singing in the rain,
And the raindrop's patter made a sweet refrain,
Making all the sweeter the music of the strain.
So, I thought, when trouble comes, as trouble will,
Why should I stop singing? Just beyond the hill
It may be that sunshine floods the green world still.
He who faces the trouble with a heart of cheer
Makes the burden lighter. If there falls a tear,
Sweeter is the cadence in the song we hear.
I have learned your lesson, bird with dappled wing,
Listening to your music with its lilt of spring
When the storm-cloud darkens, then's the TIME to sing. ~ Eben E. Rexford

An endless scream pierced the frigid night air and shook the world with its rage and sorrow. The aged stone and brick that had withstood the great quake over a hundred years ago now trembled before its pain, and even the austere grimace of the lonely grotesque, its only witness, softened in pity. ~ Ava Zavora

Beyond their immaculate design, the reason sharks rule the ocean is their complete indifference to everything except feeding, procreation, and defending their territory. The shark does not love. It feels no empathy. It trusts nothing. It lives in perfect harmony with its environment because it has no aspirations or desires. And no pity. A shark feels no sorrow, no remorse, hopes for nothing, dreams of nothing, has no illusions about itself or anything beyond itself. ~ Rick Yancey

One thing is certain, however; whereas it has been almost commonplace among historians to attribute Adams's opposition to Franklin's style of diplomacy to simple jealousy, in fact Adams also was critical of his fellow envoy because of a genuine concern that America might be ruined by anything less than a wary, coequal, unbending relationship with its new ally.38 ~ John Ferling

We wish to break with all aspects of the liberal State: with its welfare and its warfare, its monopoly privileges and its egalitarianism, its repression of victimless crimes whether personal or economic. Only we offer technology without technocracy, growth without pollution, liberty without chaos, law without tyranny, the defense of property rights in one's person and in one's material possessions. ~ Murray N. Rothbard

Our fights, quarrels, and debates blinded me that I forgot how much she means to me. She means the world, the whole world with its varieties and diversities. ~ Noha Alaa El-Din

With a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object. ~ Donna Tartt

Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead. ~ Italo Calvino

Music can minister to minds diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with its sweet oblivious antidote, cleanse the full bosom of all perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart. ~ William Shakespeare

I love the French edition with its uncut pages. I would not want a reader too lazy to use a knife on me. ~ Lawrence Durrell

Workers of lungless labs- when dying
Will you be proud you were midwife
To implements exemplifying
Assaults against the heart of life?
You knew their purpose, yet you made them.
If you had scruples, you betrayed them.
What pastoral response acquits
Those who made ovens for Auschwitz?
Indeed it is said that the banality
Of evil is its greatest shock.
It jokes. It punches its time clock,
Plays with its kids. The triviality
Of slaughtering millions can't impinge
Upon its peace, or make it cringe. ~ Vikram Seth

This fusion of wood and water is an entrancing thing. Without the wood the stream would be nothing: a mere thin watercourse winding through its flat meadows. Without the water the wood, on its slope and with its air of quietness and mystery and of being a world within itself, could not help being a constantly delightful thing. But water and wood, together, shading and watering and bounding each other, each give to the other something which the other does not possess, the wood giving to the stream something solid and shadowy and immemorial, the stream giving to the wood all the incomparable movement and twinkling transcience of moving water, the tree shadows standing deep in the stream, the reflection of sunlight flickering a kind of waterlight up into the shadowy branches of pine and alder. The wood and the water are here, in fact, one, for each other and with each other. It is a fusion that is almost perfect. ~ H.E. Bates

Donnelley was lifting his shirt away from the torn flesh in his side. He was cranked around, trying to assess the damage in the muck-spotted mirror. To Vero, he looked like an expressionist painting in which all the objects were the same color of too-vivid red: the shirt, the hands holding the shirt, the belt bassing through pant loops. At the center of it all was the thing that corrupted its surroundings with its own gruesome color - a wound. ~ Robert Liparulo

You've got to set a trap so that it kills the rabbit straight off. On the leg is no good. All night the rabbit will cry and twist, then you'll have to kill it in the morning with its eyes looking at you, wondering why you did it. ~ Cate Kennedy

I deliberately disregarded the right angle and rationalist architecture designed with ruler and square to boldly enter the world of curves and straight lines offered by reinforced concrete. [ ... ] This deliberate protest arose from the environment in which I lived, with its white beaches, its huge mountains, its old baroque churches, and the beautiful suntanned women. ~ Oscar Niemeyer

No other youth group like the Scouts has trained so many future leaders while at the same time being a nature organization with its outdoor focus. ~ Richard Louv

Given the behaviour of human beings throughout the ages, they do not deserve life, with its many dark sides, in all its beauty, grandeur and magnificence ... ~ Jose Saramago

The difference was principally in the invisible places toward which their respective hearts were turned. They dreamed of Cairo with its autonomous government, its army, its newspapers and its cinema, while he, facing in the same direction, dreamed just a little beyond Cairo, across the Bhar El Hamar to Mecca. They thought in terms of grievances, censorship, petitions and reforms; he, like any good Moslem who knows only the tenets of his religion, in terms of destiny and divine justice. If the word 'independence' was uttered, they saw platoons of Moslem soldiers marching through streets were all the signs were written in Arabic script, they saw factories and power plants rising from the fields; he saw skies of flame, the wings of avenging angels, and total destruction. ~ Paul Bowles

So what is the solution for those who are struggling with the process of maintaining a positive mental attitude? Keep at it! If you plant a seed in the ground and water it every day, it starts to grow towards the surface. If you don't know and trust that this seed is growing, you will doubt whether anything at all is happening underneath the surface. You may start to say: "I don't believe in this! I water this piece of ground every day but I never see any results for all my hard work!" Part of life is trusting that if you put in the effort, the outcome is already happening with your very intention and then your action. Eventually, one day, that little plant breaks through the soil with its green, new stem. And from there, you watch it grow stronger and more vital every day (as long as you keep looking after it and watering it!). ~ David Fox

In many ways, the felt sense is like a stream moving through an ever-changing landscape. It alters its character in resonance with its surroundings. When the land is rugged and steep, the stream moves with vigor and energy, swirling and bubbling as it crashes over rocks and debris. Out on the plains, the stream meanders so slowly that one might wonder whether it is moving at all. Rains and spring thaw can rapidly increase its volume, possibly even flood nearby land. In the same way, once the setting has been interpreted and defined by the felt sense, we will blend into whatever conditions we find ourselves. This amazing sense encompasses both the content and climate of our internal and external environments. Like the stream, it shapes itself to fit those environments. ~ Peter A. Levine

With its population made up of two categories of people, those who do business and those upon whom they prey, the city has only a painful life to offer the young person who goes there to learn and to study; for sooner or later anyone who lives there, whatever his constitution, becomes disturbed and is eventually deranged and destroyed by the city, often in the most deadly and insidious manner. ~ Thomas Bernhard

Going all in and all out for the All in All is both a death sentence and a life sentence. Your sinful nature, along with its selfish desires, is nailed to the cross. Then, and only then, does your true personality, your true potential, and your true purpose come alive. After all, God cannot resurrect what has not died. And that's why so many people are half alive. They haven't died to self yet. ~ Mark Batterson

Nevertheless, just as I believe that the Book of Scripture illumines the pathway to God, so I believe that the Book of Nature, with its astonishing details-the blade of grass, the Conus cedonulli, or the resonance levels of the carbon atom-also suggest a God of purpose and a God of design. And I think my belief makes me no less a scientist. ~ Owen Gingerich

What mortal is there, over whose first joys and happiness does not break some storm, dispelling with its icy breath his fanciful illusions, and shattering his altar? ~ Alphonse De Lamartine

Something must be
very wrong,' it said,
and I agreed,
although it turned out
the author meant that 'no theory
of physics should produce
infinities with impunity.'
I'd point out that every theory
of the heart
produces infinities
with impunity
if I were the kind of jerk
who uses the heart
to mean the human
tendency to make
others suffer
just because we
hate to suffer
alone. I'm sorry
I brought a fitted sheet
to the beach. I'm sorry
I'm selfish and determined
to make the worst
of everything. I'm
sorry language is a ship
that goes down
while you're building it.
The Hesychasts of Byzantium
stripped their prayers
of words. It's been tried
with poems too. But insofar
as I am a disappointment
to myself and others, it seems fitting
to set up shop in almost
and not quite and that's not
what I meant. I draw the line at the heart,
though, with its
infinities. ~ Michael Robbins

The world, moment by ordinary or agonizing moment, lies chock-full with its own clarifications and rewards. That such rewards most often go unnoticed keeps the artist in business. ~ Robert Wrigley

Without a doubt the sense of beauty does not lie determined in the concreteness of an individual beautiful thing or person. Rather its purpose is much more the enchantment of the soul, for there is nothing physical that is not made with the intent of affecting the soul, and there is no soul that does not intend to dazzle everything physical with its sensations. ~ Alexander Lernet-Holenia

The same objections lie against the doctrine of the world having originated from atoms. For on that doctrine one atom when combining with another must, as it is not made up of parts, enter into the combination with its whole extent, and as thus no increase of bulk takes place we do not get beyond the first atom If, on the other hand, you maintain that the atom enters into the combination with a part only, you offend against the assumption of the atoms having no parts.

Brahma-sûtras, 2e Adhyâya, 1er Pâda, sûtra 29 ~ Adi Shankaracharya

We've lost the real Jesus - or at least exchanged him for a newer, safer, sanitized, ineffectual one. We've created a Christian subculture that comes with its own set of customs, rules, rituals, paradigms, and products that are nowhere near the rugged, revolutionary faith of biblical Christianity. In our subculture Jesus would have never been crucified - he's too nice. ~ Jefferson Bethke

With its Medicaid expansion, Obamacare may turn out to be the most equality-promoting policy enacted in a generation. ~ Timothy Noah

The Music of Negro religion is that plaintive rhythmic melody, with its touching minor cadences, which, despite caricature and defilement, still remains the most original and beautiful expression of human life and longing yet born on American soil. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

It is one of the most detestable habits of a Liliputian mind to credit other people with its own malignant pettiness. ~ Honore De Balzac

I have increasingly become conversant with Pythagoras' and Goethe's idea of a primordial music, not perceptible to the sensuous ear, but sounding and soaring throughout the cosmos. Tracing it to such exalted origins, I begin to understand more deeply the essence of our art and its elemental power over the human soul. Man, being a creature of Nature and subject to the cosmic influences that inform all earthly beings, must needs have been under the sway of that music from his earliest days; his organism reverberated with its vibrations and received it's rhythmic impulses. ~ Bruno Walter

I love the medium of photography, for with its unique realism it gives me the power to go beyond conventional ways of seeing and understanding and say, This is real, too. ~ Wynn Bullock

The mind is an invisible net that can catch any event with its power of perception. ~ Debasish Mridha

In a word, people really loved music without ostentation; they allowed it to operate upon them with its magic charms, no matter whether it was executed by four performers or by four hundred, and employed it in general as the surest medium for improving heart and mind, and thus giving a noble direction to the feelings. ~ Anton Schindler

Who would have guessed it possible that waiting is sustainable. A place with its own harvest. ~ Kay Ryan

We are by the river bank. The river is very, very low. Almost dry. But mostly is wet stones. Grey on the outside. We walk on the stones for awhile. You pick up a stone and crash it onto the others. As it breaks, it is quite wet inside and is very colorful, very pretty. I pick up a stone and break it and run toward the pieces to see the colors. They are beautiful. I laugh and bring the pieces back to you and you are doing the same with your pieces. We keep on crashing stones for hours, anxious to see the beautiful new colors. We are playing. The playfulness of our activity does not presuppose that it is a particular form of play with its own rules. Rather the attitude that carries us through the activity, a playful attitude, turns the activity into play. Our activity has no rules, though it is certainly intentional activity and we both understand what we are doing. The playfulness that gives meaning to our activity includes uncertainty, but in this case the uncertainty is an openness to surprise. This is a particular metaphysical attitude that does not expect the world to be neatly packaged, ruly. Rules may fail to explain what we are doing. We are not self-important, we are not fixed in particular constructions of ourselves, which is part of saying that we are open to self-construction. We are not worried about competence. We are not wedded to a particular way of doing things. While playful we have not abandoned ourselves to, nor are we stuck in, any particular 'world.' We ar ~ María Lugones

From his vantage point in Ruchill Park, Laidlaw looked out over the city. He could see so much of it from here and still it baffled him. 'What is this place?' he thought.

A small and great city, his mind answered. A city with its face against the wind. That made it grimace. But did it have to be so hard? Sometimes it felt so hard…It was a place so kind it would batter cruelty into the ground. And what circumstances kept giving it was cruelty. No wonder he loved it. It danced among its own debris. When Glasgow gave up, the world could call it a day. ~ William McIlvanney

The first thing to realize is that it is is a country that is still being imagined. Here every patch of earth has a story, all your places have nuances; if you say Cornwall to an English person, they think of smugglers, and King Arthur and fish. But there are great parts of my country about which American's know nothing beyond an idea of unimaginable vastness. Of course the Indians that live there know the spirits of these places, but that is not the point. You can't imagine how blue the sky is out West, Charlotte. So much space. It's really wild, not like your Lake District with its little stone walls. In the West the landscape is unmarked by man. ~ Daisy Goodwin

Britain also banned exports from its colonies that competed with its own products, home and abroad. It banned cotton textile imports from India ('calicoes'), which were then superior to the British ones. In 1699 it banned the export of woolen cloth from its colonies to other countries (the Wool Act), destroying the Irish woolen industry and stifling the emergence of woollen manufacture in America. ~ Ha-Joon Chang

never,never was anything at once so frail and so indomitable. a mere reed she feels in my hand! i could bend her with my finger and thumb: and what good would it do if i bent, if i crushed her?
consider that eye: consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking out of it, defying me, with more than courage - with a certain triumph. whatever i do with its cage, i cannot get at it - the savage, beautiful creature! ~ Charlotte Bronte

Point the way,' he was talking in metaphorical terms. This pointing-hand gesture - with its index finger and thumb extended upward - is a well-known symbol of the Ancient Mysteries, and it appears ~ Dan Brown

If there's a criticism of 'Cassadaga' that I agreed with, it's that we left things in the oven too long, that songs were overstuffed, with too many ideas competing for space. ~ Conor Oberst

The beauty that men seek is half a dream
Where'er we wander, yet it lies afar; It touches with its wand a setting star, It stirs the ripple of an ebbing stream. And though we run beyond the dawning gleam, Or kneel to worship at an altar bright, We may not know the soul of its delight, Or more than marvel at its palest beam. ~ Kenneth Rand

The early church was strikingly different from the culture around it in this way - the pagan society was stingy with its money and promiscuous with its body. A pagan gave nobody their money and practically gave everybody their body. And the Christians came along and gave practically nobody their body and they gave practically everybody their money. ~ Timothy Keller

An enlarged global public society, with its many dissenting and corrective voices, can quickly call the bluff of lavishly credentialled and smug intellectual elites. ~ Pankaj Mishra

Intelligence is the ability of a species to live in harmony with its environment. ~ Paul Watson

If you ask all the cells
in my body,
they only answer your name.
Follicles push the hair upwards
so they may brush
against your skin.
Nails grow faster as well.
Lungs breathe rapidly
in hopes of inhaling your scent.
Toes curl to smile and
knees form dimples when you are near.
Brain fireworks.
Stomach fills with flies of butter
and swallows, and
swans swoon.
Cattle, rhinos, and walruses too -
there's a stampede when you are near.
I love you from the bottom of my liver
to the tip of my lashes.
One wink from you and heart stops,
like a sneeze. Bless you.
I cannot even begin to tell you
what happens to soul,
for soul is off
flying with its mate. ~ Kamand Kojouri

I have often perplexed myself over what I saw in Nelle Snyder's aged face at that moment. It was no look of paranoia. It was a look of waiting. Perpetual waiting. That look was to come back to me sixteen years later when I heard Rose's narration at the end of James Cameron's Titanic, with its line about survivors "waiting for an absolution that never came." Yet the waiting I saw in Nelle Snyder's face seemed larger even than a waiting for absolution. It seemed vaster even than Titanic herself. Call it the waiting of the Mother of all Perished Vessels. Or of a Ship of Honeymoon Dreams perchance, with a passenger list spanning all humanity, that once proudly sailed but was lost, aeons ago, and sank to a dark, unreachable abode where nothing whatsoever can be grasped about her except her perplexing power still to haunt us. ~ James Glaeg

Simon had never noticed before, but she wore a silver ring on her right hand, with a partner of flames around the band of it, and a carved L in the center. It reminded him of the ring Clary wore around her neck, with its design of stars.
"It's the Lightwood family ring," she said, noticing where his gaze was fixed. "Every family has an emblem. Ours is fire. ~ Cassandra Clare

Let no one read my principles who is not a mathematician," he famously declared (less famous is the fact that the principles he was referring to were his theories of how the aortic pulmonary valve worked). Ironically, he himself was a poor mathematician, often making simple mistakes. In one of his notes he counted up his growing library: "25 small books, 2 larger books, 16 still larger, 6 bound in vellum, 1 book with green chamois cover." This reckoning (with its charmingly haphazard system of classification) adds up to fifty, but Leonardo reached a different sum: "Total: 48," he confidently declared. ~ Ross King

In all technai or arts (medicine perhaps most of all), there is a self-exhilaration on the part of the practitioner (the intoxication of the ego with its own potency) which is infectious: the patient enjoys a placebo-effect which redounds to the ego of the "artist." ~ Kenny Smith

We flew out of the city and we landed on the page where Moses split the sea and the Jews marched between those suspended mountains of water, hovering, humming on both sides, and the poor expelled merchants wondered if Moses knew what the fuck he was doing. What if his hand got tired and he accidentally dropped his magic cane, or got distracted by a wet desert ass, or lost his sandals, or what if that lush single malt of a God changed his mind again and the fucking Red Sea closed in on them with its menstrual red liquid? ~ Rawi Hage

This is all coming from someplace deeper, like when we make love my soul cries tears of joy because it comes together with its other half. ~ Penelope Ward

When I look at our whole Earth, the galaxy and even the universe, full of beautiful constellations and Earth-like planets, I can't stop questioning why do people think they are so important to the point of using others, feeling jealousy and hatred towards those who expose them to something they can't confront, such as their weaknesses, imperfections, failures, fears and attachments. But whichever path I choose, the answer always comes as one: Everyone's reality matches them, and they will never recover from whatever occurs to them for as long as they call home to this Mental Institution called Earth, for as long as they call normal to what is abnormal, and for as long as they are satisfied with themselves. Earth can show mercy but never regret or remorse, for whenever death approaches with its message, the message always says the same, independently of who reads it: start again. ~ Robin Sacredfire

Paris with its multitude of art directions calls continuously to the deepest penetration and recognition of your inner essence. Only in this way it is possible to create work that refers the time span. ~ Bram Van Velde

Something bad happened on both Mars with its dried-up watercourses and Venus with its runaway greenhouse effect. Could something bad happen on Earth too? Our species currently turns row upon row of environmental knobs, without much regard to long-term consequences. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The realities of motherhood are often obscured by a halo of illusions. The future mother tends to fantasize about love and happiness and overlooks the other aspects of child-rearing: the exhaustion, frustration, loneliness, and even depression, with its attendant state of guilt. ~ Elisabeth Badinter

When he was dressed, Stepan Arkadyevitch sprinkled some scent on himself, pulled down his shirt-cuffs, distributed into his pockets his cigarettes, pocketbook, matches, and watch with its double chain and seals, and shaking out his handkerchief, feeling himself clean, fragrant, healthy, and physically at ease, in spite of his unhappiness, he walked with a slight swing on each leg into the dining-room, where coffee was already waiting for him, and beside the coffee, letters and papers from the office. ~ Leo Tolstoy

We'll start our analysis with a truism, stark, self-evident and understated: Sometimes things do not go well. That seems to have much to do with the terrible nature of the world, with its plagues and famines and tyrannies and betrayals. But here's the rub: sometimes, when things are not going well, it's not the world that's the cause. The cause is instead that which is currently most valued, subjectively and personally. Why? Because the world is revealed, to an indeterminate degree, through the template of your values…If the world you are seeing is not the world you want, therefore, it's time to examine your values. It's time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions. It's time to let go. It might even be time to sacrifice what you love best, so that you can become who you might become, instead of staying who you are. ~ Jordan B. Peterson

Looking at the turmoil of life from this standpoint we find all occupied with its want and misery, exerting all their strength in order to satisfy its endless needs and avert manifold suffering, without, however, daring to expect anything else in return than merely the preservation of this tormented individual existence for a short span of time. And yet, amid all this turmoil we see a pair of lovers exchanging longing glances - yet why so secretly, timidly, and stealthily? Because these lovers are traitors secretly striving to perpetuate all this misery and turmoil that otherwise would come to a timely end. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

It was a singular bedroom, with its high walls of brown volumes, but there could be no more agreeable furniture to a bookworm like myself, and there is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book. I assured him that I could desire no more charming chamber, and no more congenial surroundings. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

I am not trying to say that a passport photo of himself can cure a gloomy man of a gloom for which there is no ground; for true gloom is by nature groundless; such gloom, ours at least, can be traced to no identifiable cause, and with its almost riotous gratuitousness this gloom of ours attained a pitch of intensity that would yield to nothing. If there was any way of making friends with our gloom, it was through the photos, because in these serial snapshots we found an image of ourselves which, though not exactly clear, was - and that was the essential - passive and neutralized. They gave us a kind of freedom in our dealings with ourselves; we could drink beer, torture our blood sausages, make merry and play. We bent and folded the pictures, and cut them up with little scissors we carried about with us for this precise purpose. We juxtaposed old and new pictures, made ourselves one-eyed or three-eyed, put noses on our ears, made our exposed right ears into organs of speech or silence, combined chins and foreheads. And it was not only each with his own likeness that we made these montages; Klepp borrowed features from me and I from him: thus we succeeded in making new, and we hoped, happier creatures. ~ Gunter Grass

Hope is forgivable when you're young, isn't it? With no suspicion of irony, without a soupçon of cynicism, hope lures with its siren song. ~ Rabih Alameddine

There is legitimate pleasure, which is not wrong, but we are not to become so preoccupied with its activities that it takes the place of God. ~ Billy Graham

Throughout most of our history, nothing - not flood, famine, plague, or new weapons - has endangered humanity one-tenth as much as the narcissistic ego, with its self-aggrandizing presumptions and its hell-hound spawn of fear and greed. ~ Tom Robbins

Let us not hate or kill time, but embrace and escort it as a brother in arms, without nostalgia or strain. If we follow the beat of our heart and channel the timeliness of our expectations, we can detach ourselves from greed with its tempting voices whispering "more and more" all the time. ("Swim or sink") ~ Erik Pevernagie

No one seeing a beautifully elaborated lyre with its harmonious, orderly arrangement, and hearing the lyre's music will fail to form a notion of its craftsman-player, to recur to him in thought though ignorant of him by sight. In this way the creative power, which moves and safeguards its objects, is clear to us, though it be not grasped by the understanding. Anyone who refuses to progress this far in following instinctive proofs must be wanting in judgment. But still, whatever we imagined or figured to ourselves or reason delineated is not the reality of God. ~ Gregory Of Nazianzus

Narrative and metaphysics alike become flimsy and frivolous if they venture too far from the home base of all humanism - the single, simple human life that we all more or less lead, with its crude elementals of nurture and appetite, love and competition, the sunshine of well-being and the inevitable night of death. We each live this tale. Fiction has no reason to be embarrassed about telling the same story again and again, since we all, with infinite variations, experience the same story. ~ John Updike

It isn't true about the lambs.
They are not meek.
They are curious and wild,
full of the passion of spring.
They are lovable,
and they are not silent when hungry.

Tonight the last of the triplet lambs
is piercing the quiet with its need.
Its siblings are stronger
and will not let it eat.

I am its keeper, the farmer, its mother.
I will go down to it in the dark,
in the cold barn,
and hold it in my arms.

But it will not lie still--it is not meek.

I will stand in the open doorway
under the weight of watching trees and moon,
and care for it as one of my own.

But it will not love me--it is not meek.

Drink, little one. Take what I can give you.
Tonight the whole world prowls
the perimeters of your life.

Your anger keeps you alive--
it's your only chance.
So I know what I must do
after I have fed you.

I will shape my mouth to the shape
of the sharpest words--
even those bred in silence.

I will impale with words every ear
pressed upon open air.
I will not be meek.

You remind me of the necessity
of having more hope than fear
and of sounding out terrible names.

I am to cry out loud
like a hungry lamb, cry loud
enough to waken wolves in the night.

No one can be allowed to sleep. ~ Alice B. Fogel

The dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful re-invasion of darkness, seemed, in the lawyer's eyes, like a district of some city in a nightmare (The Carew Murder Case) ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

The Situational Character: A Critical Realist Perspective on the Human Animal" by Jon D. Hanson and David G. Yosifon, along with its companion piece, "The Situation: An Introduction to the Situational Character, Critical Realism, Power Economics, and Deep Capture." Situationism ~ Charles Eisenstein

The creature took off with its companions - its pack. "So this is what the Reod did," Hrathen mused to himself. "It made beasts out of gods. ~ Brandon Sanderson

Indonesia is rich in natural resources. Indonesia is rich in manpower with its 103 million inhabitants - not like Malaysia with its 10 million. ~ Sukarno

There can be no religious discourse which is in conflict with its environment and with the world and therefore, we Muslims need to modify this religious discourse. And this has nothing to do with conviction and with religious beliefs, because those are immutable. But we need a new discourse that will be adapted to a new world and which will remove some of the misconceptions. ~ Abdel Fattah El-Sisi

They Lied"

They lied, my friend. They injected
their despair beneath your skin
like a parasitic insect laying eggs
in the body of another species.

Nothing they said is true,
everything about you is honorable. Every pore
that opens and closes - a multitude
along the expanse of your body, the
follicles from which hair sprouts
emerging again and again like spiders' floss
spun from a limitless source.

You wait, huddled. Or carry yourself from
place to place like a burden. As if
you would stash yourself, if you could,
in a bus station locker, or somewhere smaller.
You don't really hope, but
you can't give it up completely.

Some stubborn nugget
is lodged like a bullet in bone.
Though each breath stings with the cold
suck of it, you can know the truth.
Every cell of your body vibrates with its own intelligence.
Every atom is pure. ~ Ellen Bass

Somehow something has gone wrong with poetry in our culture. We have lost touch with its purpose and value, and in doing so, we have lost contact with essential aspects of our own emotional and spiritual lives. ~ Gregory Orr

Night shift. Jamey raises his arm, and a hundred arms are raised. He smiles, with thousands of teeth. Jamey thinks of Narcissus bending to the pool. He thinks of how a swan on a calm lake is one with its reflection, and then lifting off, the bird divides from its self, and both parts becomes smaller and smaller. Division is more interesting than duplication, and an ax is a fascinating tool. It makes a fallen tree into wood that will keep your family warm. It does more than separate a whole into pieces; it changes the spirit of the thing, its use. He thinks about Elise checking her compact, and how he looks over her shoulder to catch her outlined eye in the mirror. Her eye, separated from the rest of her, floating. Normally he doesn't let his mind split into pieces, because it frightens him, but he's in a container here. He has so much time to think on the night shift. ~ Jardine Libaire

All in all, I'd say,
the world is strangling.
And I, in my bed each night,
listen to my twenty shoes
converse about it.
And the moon,
under its dark hood,
falls out of the sky each night,
with its hungry red mouth
to suck at my scars. ~ Anne Sexton

If there is a main problem in American art today," says critic Tom Piazza, "it is not that we need the new to unshackle us from a suffocating and outmoded tradition. The new is constantly pumped out, by the ton and 24 hours a day, into the esthetic rivers, reservoirs and gullies of our culture, and nobody needs to go looking for it. With all the economic force of corporate profit and advertising behind it, pop culture, with its Billy the Kid ethos, has in fact become the new establishment. In a truly Orwellian irony, the new is the status quo."36 ~ James Bau Graves

But that was just it - hate was exactly the right word. Hate is a force of attraction. Hate is just love with its back turned. ~ Terry Pratchett

While the Zionists try to make the rest of the World believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn't even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organisation for their international world swindler, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks.
It is a sign of their rising confidence and sense of security that at a time when one section is still playing the German, French-man, or Englishman, the other with open effrontery comes out as the Jewish race. ~ Adolf Hitler

The dictionary is a perfect example of overalphabetization, with its harsh rules and every little word neatly in place. It almost makes me want to go on a diet of grapes and waste away to nothing. ~ Steve Martin

When you build a building, you finish a building. You don't finish a garden; you start it, and then it carries on with its life. So my analogy was really to say that we composers or some of us should think of ourselves as people who start processes rather than finish them. And there might be surprises. ~ Brian Eno

One side sticks to the facts, and the other side is close to playing with its poop. ~ Keith Olbermann

All important architecture of the last century was strongly influenced by political systems. Look at the Soviet system, with its constructivism and Stalinism, Weimer with its Modern style, Mussolini and the Nazis and Albert Speer's colossal structures. Today's architecture is subservient to the market and its terms. The market has supplanted ideology. Architecture has turned into a spectacle. It has to package itself and no longer has significance as anything but a landmark. ~ Rem Koolhaas

Winter was come indeed bringing with it those pleasures of which the summer dreamer knows nothing - the delight when the fine and glittering day shows in the window, though one knows how cold it is outside; the delight of getting as close as possible to the blazing range which in the shadowy kitchen throws reflections very different from the pale gleams of sunlight in the yard, the range we cannot take with us on our walk, busy with its own activity, growling and grumbling as it sets to work, for in three hours time luncheon must be ready; the delight of filling one's bowl with steaming café-au-lait - for it is only eight o'clock - and swallowing it in boiling gulps while servants at their tasks come in and out with a, 'Good morning: up early, aren't you?' and a kindly, 'It's snug enough in here, but cold outside,' accompanying the words with that smile which is to be seen only on the faces of those who for the moment are thinking of others and not of themselves, whose expressions, entirely freed from egotism, take on a quality of vacillating goodness, a smile which completes that earlier smile of the bright golden sky touching the window-panes, and crowns our every pleasure as we stand there with the lovely heat of the range at our backs, the hot and limpid flavour of the café-au-lait in our mouths; the delight of night-time when, having had to get up to go shiveringly to the icy lavatory in the tower, into which the air creeps through the ill-fitting window, we later return ~ Marcel Proust

97. I approached the symbol, with its layers of meaning, but when I touched it, it changed into only a beautiful princess.
98. I threw the beautiful princess headfirst down the mountain to my acquaintances.
99. Who could be relied upon to deal with her. ~ Donald Barthelme