Arresting Quotes - Page 2

• It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a little glint of flame. Do you know how sometimes on very fine days the sun will shine with a particular intensity that makes the most mundane objects in the landscape glow with an unusual radiance, so that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting, even beautiful? Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time.

  Bill Bryson

  Beautiful, Australia, Light

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• An arresting testimony to the haunting power of friendships, THE AFTER GIRLS is a story that understands what it is to be passionate, confused, and on the brink. I loved every resonant word.

  Micol Ostow

  Girl, Confused, Stories

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• In Fascism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed. Nobody had the idea of arresting Jews and torturing them to confess the Jewish plot. Because in Fascism, you are guilty for your whole being.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Ideas, Plot, Guilty

  Interview with Dianna Dilworth, www.believermag.com. July 2004.

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• Lizzie Harris's debut collection, Stop Wanting, crafts images and lines of such arresting splendor that I am very often driven to joy at the feats of beauty and healing that language is capable of bringing into being.

  Tracy K. Smith

  Healing, Joy, Splendor

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• The most important domestic challenge facing the U.S. at the close of the twentieth century is the re-creation of fatherhood as avital social role for men. At stake is nothing less than the success of the American experiment. For unless we reverse the trend of fatherlessness, no other set of accomplishments--not economic growth or prison construction or welfare reform or better schools--will succeed in arresting the decline of child well-being and the spread of male violence. To tolerate the trend of fatherlessness is to accept the inevitability of continued social recession.

  David Blankenhorn

  Children, School, Men

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• My wife made me watch this documentary about the Iraq War, and there was a really powerful moment where they followed some civilian whose family had been killed. This was 5 or 10 minutes of this woman talking, and it was extremely arresting. You realize how you never hear from the person on the receiving end of a war without a reporter stepping in to compartmentalize the story. Usually they're just a few shots at the end of a news report, wailing and screaming at a funeral.

  Charlie Brooker

  Powerful, War, Talking

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• [In the case of] dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the states, who are parties thereto, have the right, and are duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil.

  James Madison

  Party, Exercise, Evil

  James Madison (1836). “The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution: As Recommended by the General Convention at Philadelphia in 1787. Together with the Journal of the Federal Convention, Luther Martin's Letter, Yates's Minutes, Congressional Opinions, Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of '98-'99, and Other Illustrations of the Constitution”, p.497

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• If ideas are what feed serious literature and arresting language, who today is writing a novel of ideas (which can often mean comedy)? I think of Joshua Cohen. Who else?

  Cynthia Ozick

  Writing, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• The evil eye is the fascinum, it is that which has the effect of arresting movement and, literally, of killing life. At the moment the subject stops, suspending his gesture, he is mortified. This anti-life, anti-movement function of the terminal point is the fascinum, and it is precisely one of the dimensions in which the power of the gaze is exercised directly.

  Jacques Lacan

  Eye, Evil, Movement

  Jacques Lacan (2004). “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis”, p.164, Karnac Books

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• [The] arresting of time is photography's unique capacity, and the decision of when to click the shutter is the photographer's chief responsibility.

  Janet Malcolm

  Photography, Responsibility, Unique

  Janet Malcolm (1997). “Diana & Nikon: Essays on Photography”

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• Arresting a single drunk or a single vagrant who has harmed no identifiable person seems unjust, and in a sense it is. But failing to do anything about a score of drunks or a hundred vagrants may destroy an entire community.

  James Q. Wilson

  Drunk, Community, Unjust

  James Q. Wilson (1995). “On Character: Essays”, p.132, American Enterprise Institute

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• Let's get the government stay out of our private lives, once and for all, and stop arresting smokers. Let's take a stand for personal freedom.

  Willie Nelson

  Government, Personal Freedom, Private Life

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• The US ... cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth ... it lives in a perpetual present. in the US everything human is artificial. The country is without hope. What is arresting here is ... both the absence of architecture in the cities and the dizzying absence of emotion and character in the faces and bodies.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Country, Character, Past

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• Novels often have leisurely openings; a TV drama needs an arresting opening.

  Andrew Davies

  Drama, Needs, Tvs

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• The arresting officer, who I had literally known, all my life. You know what I mean? This guy lived four doors down the street me, in a town of less than four hundred people. *We've met.* Now, he takes me to jail, and he asks me if I have any aliases. And I was just being a smartass, and I said, "Yeah. They call me, "Tater Salad!" Seventeen years later, I'm handcuffed on a bench in New York with blood coming out of my nose, and this cop goes, "Are you Ron 'Tater Salad' White?"

  Ron White

  Funny, Mean, Doors

  "Blue Collar Comedy Tour: The Movie", www.imdb.com. 2003.

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• It is a stark and arresting fact that, since the middle of the 20th century, humankind has consumed more natural resources than in all previous human history

  Margaret Beckett

  Facts, Natural, Century

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• I want every man on the force to try his best, his level best, to try to avoid arresting anyone. I know that this going to take great will power but try.

  Chill Wills

  Power, Men, Trying

  "Character: Police Captain". "Where the Boys Are", www.imdb.com. 1960.

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• I should love to do a novel, about one abnormal character seeing present-day life, very ordinary life, yet arresting through it, abnormality, until at the end the reader sees, and with little reluctance, that he is not abnormal at all, and that the main character might as well be himself.

  Patricia Highsmith

  Character, Ordinary, Abnormal

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• Incarcerating people for their [drug] consumption choices has the consistency of arresting a survivor of suicide for attempted murder.

  Ilana Mercer

  Suicide, People, Choices

  "Vices Are Not Crimes". www.wnd.com. May 08, 2002.

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• We have to stop arresting prostitutes and not arresting traffickers and pimps. It's absurd. We're arresting the victim or the survivor and not the oppressor.

  Gloria Steinem

  Pimp, Survivor, Victim

  Interview with Max Miller, bigthink.com. October 28, 2010.

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• Studies indicate that vegetarians often have lower morbidity and mortality rates. . . . Not only is mortality from coronary artery disease lower in vegetarians than in non-vegetarians, but vegetarian diets have also been successful in arresting coronary artery disease. Scientific data suggest positive relationships between a vegetarian diet and reduced risk for obesity, coronary artery disease, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and some types of cancer.

  John Robbins

  Cancer, Successful, Data

  John Robbins (2010). “The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World”, p.15, Conari Press

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