Famous Quotes Ipsum

Nothing strengthens the judgement and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility. the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. if the person you're talking to doesn't appear to be listening, be patient. it may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear. don't cry over anyone who won't cry over you. i don't want my hair cut! i don't want my eyebrows up or down. i want them right where they are! i'm leaving now, and if anyone so much as makes a move to stop me, there'll be plenty of hair cut and it won't be mine! power consists.... in deciding which stories will be told. there is a certain kind of kid who is so in love with words that she kisses the pictures of authors on the jackets of books. i was one. all i ever wanted was to be a writer. though this yearning now seems like aspiring to be a blacksmith in the age of the automobile, my childhood image of what a writer did bestowed superhuman powers on the profession. a writer sat privately at her desk and made public things happen. the power was godlike. the sense of accomplishment had to be the same. making words slant across the page was like making rain. flowers grew in ink. hurricanes and revolutions were stirred up by the sound of pen scratching paper. personally, i would sooner have written alice in wonderland than the whole encyclopedia britannica. tomboy. alright, call me a tomboy. tomboys get medals. tomboys win championships. tomboys can fly. oh, and tomboys aren't boys. a single sun shines here and in the land where i was born, though we call it by different names. in the realm of idea, the great principles behind the forms that we see are the same. the search for truth is more precious than its possession. you must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. it's at night, when perhaps we should be dreaming, that the mind is most clear, that we are most able to hold all our life in the palm of our skull. i don't know if anyone has ever pointed out that great attraction of insomnia before, but it is so; the night seems to release a little more of our vast backward inheritance of instincts and feelings; as with the dawn, a little honey is allowed to ooze between the lips of the sandwich, a little of the stuff of dreams to drip into the waking mind. i wish i believed, as j. b. priestley did, that consciousness continues after disembodiment or death, not forever, but for a long while. three score years and ten is such a stingy ration of time, when there is so much time around. perhaps that's why some of us are insomniacs; night is so precious that it would be pusillanimous to sleep all through it! a "bad night" is not always a bad thing. early in the novel that tereza clutched under her arm when she went to visit tomas, anna meets vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. at the end of the novel, anna throws herself under a train. this symmetrical composition - the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end - may seem quite 'novelistic' to you, and i am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as 'fictive', 'fabricated', and 'untrue to life' into the word 'novelistic'. because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. the soul is an emanation of the divinity, a part of the soul of the world, a ray from the source of light. it comes from without into the human body, as into a temporary abode, it goes out of it anew; it wanders in ethereal regions, it returns to visit.... it passes into other habitations, for the soul is immortal. we say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. it never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance. why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong? janis joplin taught me about passion. it is not good for all our wishes to be fulfilled; through sickness we recognize the value of health; through evil, the value of good; through hunger, the value of food; through exertion, the value of rest. one does not love a place the less for having suffered in it unless it has all been suffering, nothing but suffering. the street corner where always, for years, in passing you felt, unexplained, a pang of despair, like nausea, till one night, late, late, on that spot you were struck, struck still, and again felt how her head had thrust to your shoulder. no man's life is ordinary to himself..

Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul. why is compassion not part of our established curriculum, an inherent part of our education? compassion, awe, wonder, curiosity, exaltation, humility - these are the very foundations of any real civilization, no longer the prerogatives, the preserves of any one church, but belonging to everyone, every child in every home, every school. when i dare to be powerful / to use my strength / in the service of my vision / then it becomes / less and less important / whether i am afraid. all humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual. nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it. are there not chapters in everybody's life that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of history?.

The artist's life is in his work, and this is the place to observe him. it's important to have a voice; it's more important to use it. action is eloquence. love is a great beautifier. the way i see it, the men that i'm with, whoever they are, it's like look, you have to accept that i like ice cream, and i know it shows up on my hips but if you can't accept that, then leave. go away. toodles. it is non-negotiable. in tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. for she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the books she took out of the municipal library, and above all, the novels. she had read any number of them, from fielding to thomas mann. they not only offered her the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. it had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. it differentiated her from the others. poets . . . create from the very depths of the collective unconscious, voicing aloud what others only dream. your daughter has a quick and witty tongue. it seems that whatever goes into my mouth makes me fat, just as whatever comes out of it embarrasses me. everytime you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing. you're never fully dressed without a smile. sleeping is curiously addictive. you are part of the world, but not in it, and somehow that just seems right. it seems enough. she thought now of the pink anemones waving in that water. like herself, when he'd first spied on her with her sensitive, fleshy tentacles of thought waving all around her, until he'd touched and made her draw up quickly into a stony fist. but he knew just how to touch her, speak to her, breathe on her, to draw her out again. physical pleasure was such a convincing illusion, and sex, the ultimate charade of safety. early in the novel that tereza clutched under her arm when she went to visit tomas, anna meets vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. at the end of the novel, anna throws herself under a train. this symmetrical composition - the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end - may seem quite 'novelistic' to you, and i am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as 'fictive', 'fabricated', and 'untrue to life' into the word 'novelistic'. because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. when you get into a tight place and it seems you can't go on, hold on, for that's just the place and the time that the tide will turn. doing. what you'll discover will be wonderful. what you'll discover will be yourself. i pray because i can't help myself. i pray because i'm helpless. i pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. it doesn't change god, it changes me. can't say fairer than that. i discovered i scream the same way whether i'm about to be devoured by a great white or if a piece of seaweed touches my foot. finish each day and be done with it. you have done what you could. some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. the whole business is built on ego, vanity, self-satisfaction, and it's total crap to pretend it's not. the form of government most suitable to the artist is no government at all. it is not good for all our wishes to be fulfilled; through sickness we recognize the value of health; through evil, the value of good; through hunger, the value of food; through exertion, the value of rest. the sky was that deep sunday blue going black, just on the cusp of color seeping into empty space. you know that place between sleep and awake? where you still remember dreaming? that's where i'll always think of you. he felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not now where he ended and she began. it is possible to live twenty-four hours a day in a state of love. every movement, every glance, every thought, and every word can be infused with love. if we could stay that way forever; if we could stay filled to the brim and floating toward the darkness, never suffocating or dying - . loss is nothing else but change, and change is nature's delight. it is curious how silly, trivial things, sometimes for no apparent reason, become significant. at first you laugh at these things, you think they are of no importance, you go on and you feel that you haven't got the strength to stop yourself... and so it seems to me that if i die, i shall take part in life one way or another..