Drifting Quotes - Page 6

• I don't want to be a slave to history or facts. As long as I'm getting a good cursory understanding of what it is and I'm not drifting too far away at certain points, then I can play with the idea and take it anywhere I want to.

  Scott Walker

  Play, Ideas, Long

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• The world is filled with people who are no longer needed. And who try to make slaves of all of us. And they have their music and we have ours. Theirs, the wasted songs of a superstitious nightmare. And without their music and ideological miscarriages to compare our songs of freedom to, we'd not have any opposite to compare music with - - and like the drifting wind, hitting against no obstacle, we'd never know its speed, its power.

  Woody Guthrie

  Song, Miscarriage, Wind

  Woody Guthrie, Dave Marsh, Harold Leventhal (1992). “Pastures of plenty: a self-portrait”, Perennial

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• Because I actively enjoy sleeping, dreams, the unexplainable dialogues that take place in my head as I am drifting off, all that, I tell myself that lying down to an afternoon nap that goes on and on through eternity is not something to be concerned about. What spoils this pleasant fancy is the recollection that when people are dead they don't read books. This I find unbearable.

  William Maxwell

  Dream, Lying, Book

  William Maxwell, Christopher Carduff (2008). “Later novels and stories: The château, So long, see you tomorrow, stories and improvisations, 1957-1999”

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• When characters are drifting away from the "correct road", or in fact from any road they were supposed to follow, they lose control, they find other goals...and possibly their real selves. All these moments of changes, of self-questioning, are like an engine to the films I make - that's where lie the dynamics I'm interested in as a director.

  Anne Fontaine

  Real, Lying, Character

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• It's called a sea anchor,' [Evanlyn] explained. 'It'll stop us drifting too far.' Alyss was impressed. 'And you said you were pig-ignorant when it came to boats.' 'I don't remember saying that,' Evanlyn replied with a frown. Alyss shrugged. 'Oh? Well, it must have been me.

  John Flanagan

  Pigs, Anchors, Sea

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• We catched fish, and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn’t ever feel like talking loud, and it warn’t often that we laughed, only a kind of low chuckle. We had mighty good weather, as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all, that night, nor the next, nor the next.

  Mark Twain

  Stars, Night, Drifting Off

  Mark Twain (2010). “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: The Only Authoritative Text Based on the Complete, Original Manuscript”, p.78, Univ of California Press

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• I hope the poem, as it goes on, gets more complicated, a little more demanding, a little more ambiguous or speculative, so that we're drifting away from the casual beginning of the poem into something a little more serious.

  Billy Collins

  Goes On, Littles, Serious

  "Poet Billy Collins discusses humor, authenticity and ‘Aimless Love’". "PBS Newshour", www.pbs.org. October 29, 2013.

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• Then Nuvoletta reflected for the last time in her little long life and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one. She cancelled all her engauzements. She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuee! Nuee! A lightdress fluttered. She was gone. And into the river that had been a stream . . . there fell a tear, a singult tear, the loveliest of all tears . . . for it was a leaptear. But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh! I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

  James Joyce

  Silly, Heart, Rivers

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• In the days that follow, he begins to remember things about Moushumi, images that come to him without warning while he is sitting at his desk at work, or during a meeting, or drifting off to sleep, or standing in the mornings under the shower. They are scenes he has carried within him, buried but intact, scenes he has never thought about or had reason to conjure up until now.

  Jhumpa Lahiri

  Morning, Sleep, Drifting Off

  Jhumpa Lahiri (2003). “The Namesake”, p.200, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Both me and my wife's extended family all live within a 50-mile radius. Like me, a lot of them did time in London then started drifting back to the countryside and the sea. Perhaps it's a homing instinct.

  Robert Smith

  Sea, Wife, London

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• My biggest concern is that America is drifting towards mediocrity and that people don't recognize - and by people I'm meaning Washington - don't recognize the sense of urgency and the fact that I don't think this is a crisis anymore. I think it's an emergency.

  Howard Schultz

  Thinking, America, People

  "Howard Schultz: 'We Can't Wait for Washington' and CEOs Need to Show Confidence in the Economy" by Lauren Effron, abcnews.go.com. September 7, 2011.

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• Shopping malls are liquid TVs for the end of the twentieth century. A whole micro-circuitry of desire, ideology and expenditure for processed bodies drifting through the cyber-space of ultracapitalism.

  Arthur Kroker

  Shopping, Space, Desire

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• It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.

  Mark Twain

  Criticism, Bears, Crime

  Mark Twain, Harriet Elinor Smith (2012). “Autobiography of Mark Twain: Reader's Edition”, p.201, Univ of California Press

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• Surely with as good reason as had Archimedes to have the cylinder, cone and sphere engraved on his tombstone might our distinguished countrymen leave testamentary directions for the cubic eikosiheptagram to be engraved on theirs. Spirit of the Universe! wither are we drifting, and when, where, and how is all this to end?

  James Joseph Sylvester

  Tombstone, Science, Might

  James Joseph Sylvester (1973). “1854-1973”

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• We made love. How pedestrian the words look-trite, worn, practically featureless with use-but how can one better describe that which happens when it happens? That creation? That magic blending? I might say we became figures in a mesmerized dance before the rocking talisman of the moon, starting slow, so slow... a pair of feathers drifting through clear liquid substance of sky... gradually accelerating, faster and faster and finally into photon existence of pure light... as my whole straining body burst like fluid electricity into hers.

  Ken Kesey

  Sex, Moon, Sky

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• Rather than accepting the drifting separation of the generations, we might begin to define a more complex and interesting set of life stages and parenting passages, each emphasizing the connections to the generations ahead and behind. As I grow older, for example, I might first see my role as a parent in need of older, mentoring parents, and then become a mentoring parent myself. When I become a grandparent, I might expect to seek out older mentoring grandparents, and then later become a mentoring grandparent.

  Richard Louv

  Grandparent, Interesting, Example

  Richard Louv (1990). “Childhood's Future”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• One time on a dive, I wound up drifting up in darkness surrounded by billions of photoluminescent creatures. It was a religious experience, one only a poet could do justice to.

  Graham Hawkes

  Religious, Justice, Darkness

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• When you first start out don't set yourself a lofty goal of sitting down to meditate for twenty minutes. Aim instead for ten minutes or even five minutes - utilizing those few moments when you find yourself willing or even desiring just to take a break from the daily grind to observe your mind rather than drifting off into daydreams.

  Tsoknyi Rinpoche

  Drifting Off, Goal, Finding Yourself

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• At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,
  A fisherman stood aghast,
  To see the form of a maiden fair,
  Lashed close to a drifting mast.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Beach, Sea, Aghast

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1848). “Poems”, p.39

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• Aimless drifting also fulfills an intention.

  Mason Cooley

  Ambition, Intention

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• There is a thin line between genius and insanity, and in Larry's (MacPhail) case it was sometimes so thin you could see him drifting back and forth.

  Leo Durocher

  Insanity, Genius, Lines

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• I wish I could close my eyes and be blown into dust and nothingness, feel all my thoughts disperse like dandelion fluff drifting off on the wind. But his hands keep pulling me back: into the alley, and Portland, and a world that has suddenly stopped making sense.

  Lauren Oliver

  Eye, Drifting Off, Dust

  Lauren Oliver (2015). “Delirium Trilogy: Delirium, Pandemonium, Requiem”, p.259, Hachette UK

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• To be human is to have one's little modicum of romance secreted away in one's composition. One never ceases to make a hero of one's self, (in private,) during life, but only alters the style of heroism from time to time as the drifting years belittle certain gods of his admiration and raise up others in their stead.

  Mark Twain

  Hero, Self, Years

  Mark Twain (2017). “The Complete Works of Mark Twain (Illustrated Edition): Novels, Short Stories, Memoir, Travel Books, Letters, Biography, Articles & Speeches: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi, Yankee in King Arthur's Court…”, p.698, e-artnow

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• Holland is a dream, Monsieur, a dream of gold and smoke-smokier by day, more gilded by night. And night and day that dream is peopled with Lohengrins like these, dreamily riding their black bicycles with high handle-bars, funereal swans constantly drifting throughout the whole country, around the seas, along the canals.

  Albert Camus

  Dream, Country, Night

  Albert Camus (1960). “Collected fiction”

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• You could drive a rental car until you don't want it. Just get out of it while it's moving and just walk away. No, I don't feel like being in that car any longer. Just call Hertz. Hi, your car is drifting into the intersection of 28th and Broadway, if you're interested. It's now your problem.

  Louis C. K.

  Moving, Car, Broadway

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