Extremity Quotes - Page 2

• With this lodging and diet our extreme toil in bearing and planting palisades so strained and bruised us and our continual labor in the extremity of the heat had so weakened us, as were cause sufficient to have made us as miserable in our native country or any other place in the world

  John Smith

  Country, World, Causes

  John Smith (2007). “The Journals of Captain John Smith: A Jamestown Biography”, National Geographic Books

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• How many young hearts have revealed the fact that what they had been trained to imagine, the highest earthly felicity, was but the beginning of care, disappointment, and sorrow, and often led to the extremity of mental and physical suffering.

  Catharine Beecher

  Marriage, Disappointment, Heart

  Catharine Esther Beecher (1872). “Woman's Profession as Mother and Educator: With Views in Opposition to Woman Suffrage”, p.211

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• For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people.

  Mark Haddon

  Light, Difficult Situations, People

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• I am not in the body of life. I hover on the extremities. I float.

  Polly Horvath

  Body, Floats

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• Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all, And sweetest in the gale is heard; And sore must be the storm That could abash the little bird That kept so many warm. I've heard it in the chilliest land And on the strangest sea; Yet, never, in extremity, It asked a crumb of me.

  Emily Dickinson

  Sea, Land, Bird

  c.1860 Complete Poems, no.254 (first published 1891).

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• she committed suicide by putting her extremities down the garbage disposal-first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm.

  David Foster Wallace

  Suicide, Thinking, Garbage Disposal

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• When a woman is frozen of feeling, when she can no longer feel herself, when her blood, her passion, no longer reach the extremities of her psyche, when she is desperate; then a fantasy life is far more pleasurable than anything else she can set her sights upon. Her little match lights, because they have no wood to burn, instead burn up the psyche as though it were a big dry log. The psyche begins to play tricks on itself; it lives now in the fantasy fire of all yearning fulfilled. This kind of fantasizing is like a lie: If you tell it often enough, you begin to believe it.

  Clarissa Pinkola Estes

  Lying, Believe, Passion

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• The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallow subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.

  Neal Stephenson

  Book, Night, Light

  Neal Stephenson (2003). “Snow Crash”, p.1, Spectra

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• Remember laughing? Laughter enhances the blood flow to the body’s extremities and improves cardiovascular function. Laughter releases endorphins and other natural mood elevating and pain-killing chemicals, improves the transfer of oxygen and nutrients to internal organs. Laughter boosts the immune system and helps the body fight off disease, cancer cells as well as viral, bacterial and other infections. Being happy is the best cure of all diseases!

  Patch Adams

  Laughter, Pain, Cancer

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• When a client is driven to the utmost extremity, it is warmth and food and ease from pain he wants. Peace and justice come afterward. Rain symbolizes mercy and sunlight charity, but rain and sunlight are better than mercy and charity. Otherwise they would degrade the things they symbolize.

  Gene Wolfe

  Pain, Rain, Justice

  Gene Wolfe (2011). “The Citadel of the Autarch: Urth: Book of the New Sun”, p.119, Hachette UK

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• For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril;--nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.

  Herman Melville

  Men, Sea, Soul

  Herman Melville (2015). “Pierre or The Ambiguities: Works of Melville”, p.295, 谷月社

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• Passion lends them power, time means to meet, tempering extremities with extremes sweet.

  William Shakespeare

  Sweet, Passion, Mean

  William Shakespeare, Jonnie Patricia Mobley (2003). “The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet: A Facing-pages Translation Into Contemporary English”, p.58, Lorenz Educational Publishers

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• Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth - look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Death, Struggle, Men

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• Juliana?” the words were low and far—too calm for her husband, who had found that he rather enjoyed the full spectrum of emotion now that he had experienced it. “Yes?” “What are you doing twenty feet in the air?” “Looking for a book.” “Would you mind very much returning to the earth?” “What are you thinking, climbing to the rafters in your condition?” “I am not an invalid, Simon, I still have use of all my extremes.” “You do indeed—particularly your extreme ability to try my patience—I believe, however, that you mean extremities.

  Sarah MacLean

  Husband, Believe, Book

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• The words that reverberate for us at the confines of this long adventure of rebellion are not formulas for optimism, for which we have no possible use in the extremities of our unhappiness, but words of courage and intelligence which, on the shores of the eternal seas, even have the qualities of virtue.

  Albert Camus

  Adventure, Sea, Long

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.303, Vintage

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• I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite - only a sense of existence. Well, anything for variety. I am ready to try this for the next ten thousand years, and exhaust it. How sweet to think of! my extremities well charred, and my intellectual part too, so that there is no danger of worm or rot for a long while. My breath is sweet to me. O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Thanksgiving, Running, Sweet

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.373, Penguin

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• The generation of seeds ... is therefore marvelous and analogous to the other productions of living things. For first of all an umbilicus appears. ... Its extremity gradually expands and after gathering a colliquamentous ichor becomes analogous to an amnion. ... In the course of time the seed or fetus begins to become visible.

  Marcello Malpighi

  Life, Science, Generations

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• Every individual strives to grow and exclude, to the extremities of the universe, and to impose the law of its being on every other creature.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Greatness, Law, Individual

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1850). “Representative Men: Seven Lectures”, p.21

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• I hasten to say to snobs from the Surrey pine-and-sand country that no invention since the corn plaster or the electric toothbrush has brought greater balm to the extremities of the senior golfer than the golfmobile, a word that will have to do for want of a better.

  Alistair Cooke

  Senior, Country, Golf

  Alistair Cooke (1996). “Fun and Games with Alistair Cooke: On Sport and Other Amusements”, p.80, Arcade Publishing

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• Whenever fortune wishes to joke, she lifts people from what is humble to the highest extremity of affairs.

  Juvenal

  Forgiveness, Humble, People

  "Satires". Book by Juvenal, III, line 39, 1890.

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• Of all the felicities, the most charming is that of a firm and gentle friendship. It sweetens all our cares, dispels our sorrows, and counsels us in all extremities. Nay, if there were no other comfort in it than the pare exercise of so generous a virtue, even for that single reason a man would not be without it; it is a sovereign antidote against all calamities - even against the fear of death itself.

  Seneca the Younger

  Real, Exercise, Men

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• About the greatest virtue a friend can have, is to be able to hold her tongue; and through this, like all virtues carried to extremity, may grow into a fault, and do great harm, still, it never can do so much harm as that horrible laxity and profligacy of speech which is a the root of half the quarrels, cruelties, and injustices of the world.

  Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

  Real, Roots, Faults

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• Like Patience gazing on kings' graves, and smiling
  Extremity out of act.

  William Shakespeare

  Patience, Kings, Gazing

  William Shakespeare, Edmond Malone (1821). “The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare: Pericles. Titus Andronicus. Addenda. Indexes”, p.200

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• The capital is become an overgrown monster; which, like a dropsical head, will in time leave the body and extremities without nourishment and support.

  Tobias Smollett

  Time, Support, Monsters

  'The Expedition of Humphry Clinker' (1771) vol. 1, letter from Matthew Bramble, 29 May

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• The more civilized a nation, the more conformed its population, until that civilization's last age arrives, when multiplicity wages war with conformity. The former grows ever wilder, ever more dysfunctional in its extremities; whilst the latter seeks to increase its measure of control, until such efforts acquire diabolical tyranny.' - Traveller

  Steven Erikson

  War, Civilization, Effort

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