Concrete Quotes - Page 20

• To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against.

  Seamus Heaney

  Reliability, World, Stood Up

  Seamus Heaney (2014). “Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture”, p.10, Macmillan

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• Grit is not synonymous with hard work. It involves a certain single-mindedness. An ungritty prison inmate will mount a daring new escape attempt every month, but a gritty prison inmate will tunnel his way out one spoonful of concrete at a time. Grit

  Chip Heath

  Hard Work, Tunnels, Months

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• It is the transcendent (or 'abstract' or 'self-contained') nature of music that the new so called concretism--Pop Art, eighteen-hour slices-of-reality films, musique concrete--opposes. But instead of bringing art and reality closer together, the new movement merely thins out the distinction.

  Igor Stravinsky

  Art, Reality, Self

  Igor Stravinsky, Robert Craft (1969). “Retrospectives and Conclusions”

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• To arrive at abstraction, it is always necessary to begin with a concrete reality.

  Pablo Picasso

  Reality, Simplicity, Abstraction

  Pablo Picasso (1972). “Picasso on art: a selection of views”, Viking Adult

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• For one day, or for one day for a week, refrain from something you habitually do to run away, to escape. Pick something concrete, such as overeating or excessive sleeping or overworking or spending too much time texting or checking e-mails. Make a commitment to yourself to gently and compassionately work with refraining from this habit for this one day. Really commit to it. Do this with the intention that it will put you in touch with the underlying anxiety or uncertainty that you've been avoiding. Do it and see what you discover.

  Pema Chodron

  Running, Sleep, Commitment

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• I wanted to make a concrete impression; the idea of a woman that is free, moody, never the object, one that has a complete control of her finances and knows how it is to be independent.

  Paco Rabanne

  Independent, Ideas, Finance

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• If I were Achilles I would put my foot in a f**k off block of concrete!

  Eddie Izzard

  Funny, Sarcastic, Block

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• Some people think that mathematics is a serious business that must always be cold and dry; but we think mathematics is fun, and we aren't ashamed to admit the fact. Why should a strict boundary line be drawn between work and play? Concrete mathematics is full of appealing patterns; the manipulations are not always easy, but the answers can be astonishingly attractive.

  Ronald Graham

  Education, Fun, Math

  Ronald L. Graham, Donald Ervin Knuth, Oren Patashnik (1989). “Concrete mathematics: a foundation for computer science”, Addison Wesley Publishing Company

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• For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.

  Rachel Cusk

  Form, Results, Circumstances

  "Keeping it in the family" by Rachel Cusk, www.theguardian.com. August 12, 2006.

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• some may think that to affirm dialogue—the encounter of women and men in the world in order to transform the world—is naively and subjectively idealistic. there is nothing, however, more real or concrete than people in the world and with the world, than humans with other humans.

  Paulo Freire

  Real, Men, Thinking

  Paulo Freire (2014). “Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition”, p.129, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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• If you and I are friends, there is an expectancy that exists within our relationship. When we see each other or are apart, there is an expectancy of being together, of laughing and talking. The expectancy has no concrete definition; it is alive and dynamic and everything that emerges from our being together is a unique gift shared by no one else.

  William P. Young

  Unique, Talking, Laughing

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• Rain was coming down in sheets. I could hear it, on the concrete outside and on the old building above me. It creaked and swayed in the spring thunderstorm and the wind, timbers gently flexing, wise enough with age to give a little, rather than put up stubborn resistance until they broke. I could probably stand to learn something from that.

  Jim Butcher

  Wise, Spring, Rain

  Jim Butcher (2010). “The Dresden Files Collection 1-6”, p.190, Penguin

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• the only way Bex would miss this would be if she were unconscious. And tied up. And in a concrete bunker. In Siberia.

  Ally Carter

  Friendship, Missing, Would Be

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• Maybe she'd been drinking too much of the super-sweet Mexican Coca-Cola they had down here. Or maybe she was just tired, alone, and far from home. Because somewhere in the brittle, concrete center of Azrael's dark heart, something was melting.

  Melissa de la Cruz

  Sweet, Drinking, Home

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• I hear voices. A shout. A laugh. Clay's laugh. I strained to see through the night. Fog had rolled in from Lake Ontario, but I could hear him laughing. The concrete turned to grass. The fog wasn't from the lake, but from a pond. Our pond. I was at Stonehaven, bounding through the back acres. Clay was running ahead of me.

  Kelley Armstrong

  Running, Night, Lakes

  Kelley Armstrong (2012). “Werewolves: Book One: Bitten, Stolen and Beginnings”, p.506, Vintage Canada

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• But why should you be interested in me?" Good question. I can’t explain it myself right this moment. But maybe – just maybe – if we start getting together and talking, after a while something like Francis Lai’s soundtrack music will start playing in the background, and a whole slew of concrete reasons why I’m interested in you will line up out of nowhere. With luck, it might even snow for us.

  Haruki Murakami

  Talking, Snow, Luck

  Haruki Murakami (2011). “After Dark”, p.188, Random House

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• I'm a bartender. I like recipes. They're concretes. Was the drink recipe for seduction one shot charm and two shots self-deception, shaken, not stirred?

  Karen Marie Moning

  Self, Two, Deception

  Karen Marie Moning (2008). “Faefever: Fever Series”, p.92, Delacorte Press

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• The physical reinvention of the world is endless, relentless, fascinating, exhaustive; nothing that seems solid is. If you could stand at just a little distance in time, how fluid and shape-shifting physical reality would be, everything hurrying into some other form, even concrete, even stone.

  Mark Doty

  Distance, Reality, Would Be

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• Do you realize it’s been only a century that we’ve been able to go from house to car to office to car to wherever, with the heater on, and the defroster on, protected from the rain and the cold? It hasn’t been much longer than that we’ve had lighting for streets. Think of all that darkness, all that world out there, all that mystery that we’ve turned into well-lighted concrete bunkers, safe and warm and dull.

  Sheri S. Tepper

  Rain, Thinking, Car

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• It was the day of the worms. That first almost-warm, after-the-rainy-night day in April, when you bolt from your house to find yourself in a world of worms. They were as numerous here in the East End as they had been in the West. The sidewalks, the streets. The very places where they didn't belong. Forlorn, marooned on concrete and asphalt, no place to burrow, April's orphans.

  Jerry Spinelli

  Night, House, Finding Yourself

  Jerry Spinelli (1991). “Maniac Magee”

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• He recognized with absolute certainty the empty fragility of even the noblest theorizings as compared with the definitive plenitude of the smallest fact grasped in its total, concrete reality.

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

  Reality, Fragility, Facts

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• Nothing can prevent your picture from coming into concrete form except the same power which gave it birth – yourself. (Genevieve Behrend)

  Rhonda Byrne

  Law Of Attraction, Birth, Form

  Rhonda Byrne (2008). “The Secret”, p.102, Simon and Schuster

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• No matter what else you came up against, if you could smile and laugh while a monkey did you with chestnuts in a dank concrete basement while somebody took pictures, well, any other situation would be a piece of cake

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Cake, Laughing, Would Be

  Chuck Palahniuk (2001). “Choke: A Novel”, Anchor Books

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• Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete? Proving nature's laws wrong, it learned to walk without having feet. Funny, it seems to by keeping it's dreams; it learned to breathe fresh air. Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else even cared.

  Tupac Shakur

  Dream, Persistence, Feet

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• A concrete agenda and landslide victory might not even guarantee a president his mandate in a capital as polarized as Washington.

  Ron Fournier

  Victory, President, Guarantees

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