Awful Quotes - Page 7

• Mine was not an Enlightened mind, I now was aware: it was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure. I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful.

  Russell Kirk

  Organization, Perfect, Mind

  Russell Kirk (1963). “Confessions of a bohemian Tory: episodes and reflections of a vagrant career”

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• Overnight, punk had become as stupid as everything else. This wonderful vital force that was articulated by the music was really about corrupting every form-it was about advocating kids to not wait to be told what to do, but make life up for themselves, it was about trying to get people to use their imaginations again, it was about not being perfect, it was about saying it was ok to be amateurish and funny, that real creativity came out of making a mess, it was about working with what you got in front of you and turning everything embarrassing, awful, and stupid in your life to your advantage.

  Legs McNeil

  Real, Stupid, Creativity

  Legs McNeil, Gillian McCain (2006). “Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk”, p.334, Grove Press

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• I knew I had done something awful. I had killed love, before I even knew the enormity of what love meant.

  Edna O'Brien

  Love Is, Done, Love Means

  Edna O'Brien (2012). “Country Girl”, p.39, Faber & Faber

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• The greatest tragedy of life is that, having paid that awful price of suffering "according to the flesh that his bowels might be filled with compassion," and being now prepared to reach down and help us, he is forbidden because we won't let him. We look down instead of up.

  Truman G. Madsen

  Life, Compassion, Preparation

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• I think we should all live on the precipe of life, as fully and as dangerously as possible. Everyone should make the assumption that they're going through life only once. Tomorrow we die. Why not take chances, extend yourself? How awful it is when a person comes to the end of life full of regret.

  Edward Albee

  Regret, Thinking, Why Not

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• The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year. Unless you give at least 45 minutes to careful, fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading, your 90 minutes of a night are chiefly wasted.

  Arnold Bennett

  Book, Reading, Cutting

  Arnold Bennett (2013). “How To Live On Twenty-Four Hours A Day”, p.40, Read Books Ltd

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• If you're doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there'd be no point. I'm trying to think if there's sunny nonsense. Sunny, funny nonsense for children — oh, how boring, boring, boring. As Schubert said, there is no happy music. And that's true, there really isn't. And there's probably no happy nonsense, either.

  Edward Gorey

  Children, Thinking, Trying

  Edward Gorey (2001). “Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey : Interviews”, Houghton Mifflin

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• One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Christian, Believe, Writing

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor”, p.92, Macmillan

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• A man who piously shuts himself up to meditate upon the sin of wickedness and to keep it fresh in his mind joins a brotherhood of awful examples.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Men, Brotherhood, Mind

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.32, 谷月社

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• This awful catastrophe is not the end but the beginning. History does not end so. It is the way its chapters open.

  Saint Augustine

  Risk, Doe, Way

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• The poor homosexuals -- they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution (AIDS).

  Pat Buchanan

  War, Poor, Aids

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• Basically, I realized I was living in that awful stage of life between twenty-six to and thirty-seven known as stupidity. It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don't even have a philosophy about all the things you don't know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight.

  Lorrie Moore

  Philosophy, Eight, Stupidity

  FaceBook post by Lorrie Moore from Dec 25, 2011

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• And we need things in life that are exciting and inspiring. It can't just be about solving some awful problem. There have to be reasons to get up in the morning.

  Elon Musk

  Morning, Things In Life, Needs

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• It is not great talents God blesses so much as great likeness to Jesus. A holy minister is an awful weapon in the hand of God.

  Robert Murray M'Cheyne

  Jesus, Hands, Weapons

  Robert Murray M'Cheyne, Andrew Alexander Bonar (1852). “Memoir and remains of the rev. Robert Murray M'Cheyne, minister of St. Peter's church, Dundee”, p.243

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• Get your texts from God - your thoughts, your words, from God... It is not great talents God blesses so much as great likeness to Jesus. A holy minister is an awful weapon in the hand of God. A word spoken by you when your conscience is clear, and your heart full of God's Spirit, is worth ten thousand words spoken in unbelief and sin.

  Robert Murray M'Cheyne

  Jesus, Heart, Hands

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• The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.

  Jean Renoir

  Life Is, Reason

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• In a sense, a cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense – a ‘final’ irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the ‘West’s’ escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space.

  Donna J. Haraway

  Men, Self, Space

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• Then one day, we’ll put the reward in the old place, and put in the rat, and, by golloy, the old habit will rememerge right away. habits never really disappear. They’re encoded into the sturctures of our brain, and that’s a huge advantage for us, because it would be awful if we had to relearn how to drive after every vacation. The problem is that your brain can’t tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it’s always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.

  Charles Duhigg

  Vacation, Old Habits, Differences

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• There are an awful lot of people in the world and it's going to be terribly hard to photograph all of them... It was my teacher Lisette Model who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it will be.

  Diane Arbus

  Photography, Teacher, People

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• To be located in society means to be at the intersection point of specific social forces. Commonly one ignores these forces one also knows that there is not an awful lot that one can do about this.

  Peter L. Berger

  Mean, Social, Force

  Peter L. Berger (1973). “Invitation to sociology: a humanistic perspective”, Overlook Pr

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• If, like Harry Keogh, I could talk to the dead - God, there are an awful lot of people I would like to speak to! Not least my father. Being in the army for 22 years, I didnt see enough of him, and I know there are a great many things I could have learned from him.

  Brian Lumley

  Father, Army, Years

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• If the Eagles were to get back together, it would have to be for the right reasons. I think it would look awful if it were just for the money.

  Glenn Frey

  Thinking, Eagles, Together

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• There are an awful lot of people who despise government precisely because it opened the door for common citizenship for people of all races and all natures in the United States.

  Taylor Branch

  Doors, Race, Government

  "The Tavis Smiley Show", www.pbs.org. March 22, 2013.

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• I get an awful lot of fan mail, and I read all that I can.

  John Denver

  Fans, Mail, I Can

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• Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair’s-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?

  Molly Ivins

  Hair, Texas, Differences

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