Extremes Quotes - Page 15

• If it is perfectly acceptable for a widow to disfigure herself or commit suicide to save face for her husband's family, why should a mother not be moved to extreme action by the loss of a child or children? We are their caretakers. We love them. We nurse them when they are sick. . . But no woman should live longer than her children. It is against the law of nature. If she does, why wouldn't she wish to leap from a cliff, hang from a branch, or swallow lye?

  Lisa See

  Mother, Suicide, Children

  18 Copy quote

• The central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn't want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly regularly throughout human history.

  Alan Moore

  Thinking, Mad, People

  "A FOR ALAN, Pt. 1: The Alan Moore interview". GIANT Magazine Interview, web.archive.org. November 1, 2005.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Armful For every parcel I stoop down to seize I lose some other off my arms and knees, And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns, Extremes too hard to comprehend at. once Yet nothing I should care to leave behind. With all I have to hold with hand and mind And heart, if need be, I will do my best. To keep their building balanced at my breast. I crouch down to prevent them as they fall; Then sit down in the middle of them all. I had to drop the armful in the road And try to stack them in a better load.

  Robert Frost

  Fall, Heart, Hands

  Robert Frost (1928). “West-running Brook”, Henry Holt

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It never occurred to him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to a weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their allegiance under this oppression of a great personality. . . . But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink even in his extreme morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not coward enough to admire it.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Personality, Enemy

  "The Man Who Was Thursday". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, Ch. VI : The Exposure, 1908.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosohpically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation.

  Edith Wharton

  Mirrors, August, Cities

  Edith Wharton (2014). “Edith Wharton The Dover Reader”, p.271, Courier Corporation

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• I would never want to live anywhere but Baltimore. You can look far and wide, but you'll never discover a stranger city with such extreme style. It's as if every eccentric in the South decided to move north, ran out of gas in Baltimore, and decided to stay.

  John Waters

  Moving, Cities, Style

  "Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste". Book by John Waters, 1981.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• My hobby is extreme Catholic behavior - before the Reformation.

  John Waters

  Catholic, Hobbies, Behavior

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality, and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Strong, Catholic, Identity

  1881 Virginibus Puerisque,'An Apology for Idlers'.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries who demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill.

  Noam Chomsky

  Powerful, Demand, Death Penalty

  6 Copy quote

• Speak in extremes, it'll save you time.

  David Bowie

  Speak, Songwriting

  Song: A Big Hurt, Album: Tin Machine II

  23 Copy quote

  Show source

• Or maybe they were just doing it for fun. A lark. Their religion is tolerant of extreme forms of recreation. Boys will be boys, after all, and sociopathic boys will be sociopathic.

  Dean Koontz

  Fun, Boys, Larks

  Dean Koontz (2014). “The Odd Thomas Series 7-Book Bundle: Odd Thomas, Forever Odd, Brother Odd, Odd Hours, Odd Apocalypse, Odd Interlude, Deeply Odd”, p.288, Bantam

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Extreme torture is mute, and so we sat silent, petrified, like columns of marble buried under the sand of an earthquake. Neither wished to listen to the other because our heart-threads had become weak and even breathing would have broken them.

  Khalil Gibran

  Heart, Breathing, Earthquakes

  Khalil Gibran (2007). “Kahlil Gibran: Masterpieces”

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• I try--without success--to stop finding reasons for vanity in anything. When I happen to manage it nonetheless, I feel that I no longer belong to the mortal gang. I am above everything then, above the gods themselves. Perhaps that is what death is: a sensation of great, of extreme superiority.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Vanity, Trying, Gang

  4 Copy quote

• If we submit everything to reason our religion will be left with nothing mysterious or supernatural. If we offend the principles of reason our religion will be absurd and ridiculous . . . There are two equally dangerous extremes: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason.

  Blaise Pascal

  Two, Principles, Ridiculous

  4 Copy quote

• The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.

  Frank Herbert

  Stress, Thinking, Training

  Frank Herbert (2003). “Dune”, p.230, Penguin

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• I believe He wants us to love others so much that we go to extremes to help them.

  Francis Chan

  Believe, Want, Helping

  Francis Chan (2013). “Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God”, p.23, David C Cook

  40 Copy quote

  Show source

• Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.

  Primo Levi

  Later In Life, Perfect, Joy

  Primo Levi (1996). “Survival In Auschwitz”, p.17, Simon and Schuster

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• To hope under the most extreme circumstances is an act of defiance that permits a person to live his life on his own terms. It is part of the human spirit to endure and give a miracle a chance to happen.

  Jerome Groopman

  Giving, Miracle, Spirit

  Jerome Groopman (2003). “The Anatomy of Hope: How People Prevail in the Face of Illness”, p.58, Random House

  40 Copy quote

  Show source

• I wouldn't say that my emotions are extreme. I'd say they are committed. My moods are the equivalent of Madonna's dancing: inappropriate but all-out. If I'm going to be sad, I might as well be the saddest a girl can get. And if I'm happy, I want to be the happiest. The trouble is, I feel highs so ecstatic that just being normal feels like a thousand-mile drop and being unhappy is excruciating.

  Emma Forrest

  Girl, Dancing, Unhappy

  Emma Forrest (2014). “Namedropper”, p.98, Bloomsbury Publishing

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?

  Anthony Burgess

  Orange, Pleasure, Wells

  Stanley Kubrick, Anthony Burgess (1972). “A clockwork orange”, HarperCollins Publishers

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

  John Stuart Mill

  Mean, Details Of Life, Practice

  John Stuart Mill (2017). “The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill: Utilitarianism, The Subjection of Women, On Liberty, Principles of Political Economy, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, Memoirs…”, p.189, e-artnow

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Fatigue can make it hard to have faith. Too much busyness can make it hard to have faith. Too much of too little solitude can impact faith. For that matter, so can a bout of hunger or overwork, anything carried to an extreme. Faith thrives on routine. Look at any monastery and you will see that. Faith keeps on keeping on.

  Julia Cameron

  Impact, Solitude, Routine

  Julia Cameron (2009). “Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance”, p.73, Penguin

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Supposedly there's an actual, researched link between extreme creativity and mental illness, and I believe it because I've seen it with my own eyes.

  Deb Caletti

  Believe, Eye, Creativity

  Deb Caletti (2013). “Love Is All You Need: Wild Roses; The Nature of Jade”, p.8, Simon and Schuster

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Jealousy can’t sour someone to this extreme, can it? (Aiden) It can and it does. Believe me. I’ve seen a lot worse than this in my billion or so years of existence – the first murder man committed was one brother against the other for no other reason than that one petty emotion. Jealousy turns to hatred which then turns to poison. It infects and it destroys until it eats someone alive. (Deimos)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Brother, Believe, Men

  4 Copy quote

• No other German writer of comparable stature has been a more extreme critic of German nationalism than Nietzsche.

  Walter Kaufmann

  Critics, Has Beens, Stature

  4 Copy quote