Down And Quotes - Page 40

But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills, And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me, And tho’ they could not end me, left me maim’d To dwell in presence of immortal youth, Immortal age beside immortal youth, And all I was, in ashes. - Tithonus

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Strong, Age, Ashes

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Illustrated)”, p.1255, Delphi Classics

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Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work. Therefore, whenever I see a fly settling, in the decisive moment, on the nose of such a person of affairs; or if he is spattered with mud from a carriage which drives past him in still greater haste; or the drawbridge opens up before him; or a tile falls down and knocks him dead, then I laugh heartily.

Soren Kierkegaard

Fall, Past, Men

"Either/Or". Book by Søren Kierkegaard, transl. in "Bulletin: Comparative literature series", Nr. 3, Texas University (1912), p. 45, 1843.

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It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.

George Orwell

Dog, Knowing, Anxiety

George Orwell (2012). “Down and Out in Paris and London”, p.14, Lulu.com

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Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may record our emptiness.

Khalil Gibran

Life, Spiritual, Wisdom

Khalil Gibran “The New Frontier and Sand and Foam”, Library of Alexandria

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Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers.

Virginia Woolf

Song, Book, Library

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.828, Wordsworth Editions

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When you feel in your gut what you are and then dynamically pursue it - don't back down and don't give up - then you're going to mystify a lot of folks.

Bob Dylan

Giving Up, Self Esteem, Don't Give Up

Bob Dylan (2007). “Dylan on Dylan: The Essential Interviews”, Hodder & Stoughton

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And the very act of living is a tide; at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded

Jodi Picoult

Pain, Differences, One Day

Jodi Picoult (2009). “My Sister's Keeper - Movie Tie-In: A Novel”, p.422, Simon and Schuster

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Thomas More: ...And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you--where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast--man's laws, not God's--and if you cut them down...d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

Robert Bolt

Country, Cutting, Blow

A Man for All Seasons act 1 (1960)

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If toast always lands butter-side down, and cats always land on their feet, what happens if you strap toast on the back of a cat and drop it?

Steven Wright

Funny, Humor, Cat

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He'll be coming and going" he had said. "One day you'll see him and another you won't. He doesn't like being tied down--and of course he has other countries to attend to. It's quite all right. He'll often drop in. Only you mustn't press him. He's wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.

C. S. Lewis

Country, Religion, One Day

C.S.Lewis (2016). “The Chronicles of Narnia Vol I: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”, p.131, ENRICH CULTURE GROUP LIMITED

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So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him, you swallowed him whole. Love was substance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream.

Jodi Picoult

Eye, I Love Him, Sight

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Flow down and down in always widening rings of being.

Rumi

Flow, Rings

"The Essential Rumi". Book translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne, A. J. Arberry and Reynold Nicholson. Chapter 1: "The Tavern", p. 2, 1995.

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Do anything, save to lie down and die!

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Lying, Dies

Nathaniel Hawthorne (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated)”, p.249, Delphi Classics

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The passion for revenge should never blind you to the pragmatics of the situation. There are some people who are so blighted by their past, so warped by experience and the pull of that silken cord, that they never free themselves of the shadows that live in the time machine... And if there is a kind thought due them, it may be found contained in the words of the late Gerald Kersh, who wrote:"... there are men whom one hates until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armour, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment.

Harlan Ellison

Revenge, Hate, Passion

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Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in verses, in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to think of writing them down, and then in the morning they vanished; and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old brittle husk.

Hermann Hesse

Beautiful, Morning, Writing

Hermann Hesse (2013). “Steppenwolf: A Novel”, p.30, Macmillan

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I will see you bereft of all that you have, of home and happiness and beautiful things. I will see your nation cast down and your allies drawn away. I will see you as alone and friendless and wretched as am I; and then you may live as long as you like, in some dark and lonely corner of the earth, and I shall call myself content. -Lien, Albino Celestial (Dragon)

Naomi Novik

Beautiful, Lonely, Home

Naomi Novik (2009). “In His Majesty's Service: Three Novels of Temeraire (His Majesty's Service, Throne of Jade, and Black Powder War)”, p.674, Del Rey

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I was already beginning to realize that the only way to conduct oneself in a situation where bombs rained down and bullets whizzed past, was to accept the dangers and all the consequences as calmly as possible. Fretting and sweating about it all was not going to help.

Roald Dahl

Past, Bombs, Bullets

Roald Dahl (2009). “Going Solo”, p.102, Penguin

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In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world...It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled.

Ian Mcewan

Reading, Writing, Mean

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...if a child waited to speak until all the grown-ups settled down and gave her some room to say her piece, the most important things would never get said.

Katherine Hannigan

Children, Important, Pieces

Katherine Hannigan (2011). “Ida B: . . . and Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and (Possibly) Save the World”, p.26, Harper Collins

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Harry looked down and saw deep green mountains and lakes, coppery in the sunset.

J. K. Rowling

Sunset, Lakes, Mountain

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That's why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.) I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.

Adrienne Rich

Responsibility, Warrior, Thinking

Adrienne Rich (1993). “Your Native Land, Your Life”, p.22, W. W. Norton & Company

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The world is like a ride in an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it's very brightly coloured and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question: "Is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, "Hey, don't worry, don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride." And we kill those people.

Bill Hicks

Life, Fun, Powerful

"Revelations". 1993.

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But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.

Herman Melville

Joy, Woe, Calm

Herman Melville (1892). “Moby Dick”, p.366

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She laughs and looks out the window and I think for a minute that she's going to start to cry. I'm standing by the door and I look over at the Elvis Costello poster, at his eyes, watching her, watching us, and I try to get her away from it, so I tell her to come over here, sit down, and she thinks I want to hug her or something and she comes over to me and puts her arms around my back and says something like 'I think we've all lost some sort of feeling.

Bret Easton Ellis

Eye, Thinking, Doors

Bret Easton Ellis (2010). “Less Than Zero”, p.118, Pan Macmillan

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And that's when she put her book down. And looked at me. And said it: "Life isn't fair, Bill. we tell our children that it is, but it's a terrible thing to do. It's not only a lie, it's a cruel lie. Life is not fair, and it never has been, and it's never going to be.

William Goldman

Life, Children, Lying

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