Four Quotes - Page 26

• He was endowed with a stupidity which by the least little stretch would go around the globe four times and tie.

  Mark Twain

  Ties, Stupidity, Littles

  Mark Twain, Caroline Thomas Harnsberger (2009). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.458, Courier Corporation

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• Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.

  Paulo Coelho

  Love, Struggle, Power

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• The children were overwhelmingly morbid. Not a single adult asked me where butterflies go when they die, but this question was more popular than pixie sticks with the under-four-foot set. I cursed parents for not preparing their children. When I was five, my mother and sister sat me up on the kitchen counter and explained the facts of life: the Easter Bunny didn't exist, Elijah was God's invisible friend, with any luck Nana would die soon, and if I ever saw a unicorn, I should kill it or catch it for cash. I turned out okay.

  Sloane Crosley

  Mother, Easter, Children

  Sloane Crosley (2012). “I Was Told There'd Be Cake”, p.106, Portobello Books

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• when I was four I almost fell down the shaft of a tin mine and when I was five the car rolled over on the motorway and when I was seven we went on holiday and the gas ring blew out in the caravan and nobody noticed I've been dying all my life

  Jenny Downham

  Holiday, Car, Dying

  Jenny Downham (2007). “Before I Die”, David Fickling Books

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• Tortoise steps, slow steps, four steps like a tank with a tail dragging in the sand. Tortoise steps, land based, land locked, dusty like the desert tortoise herself, fenced in, a prisoner on her own reservation -- teaching us the slow art of revolutionary patience.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Art, Teaching, Land

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• These are the four that are never content: that have never been filled since the dew began- Jacala's mouth, and the glut of the kite, and the hands of the ape, and the eyes of Man.

  Rudyard Kipling

  Eye, Men, Hands

  Rudyard Kipling (2012). “Songs from Books”, p.206, tredition

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• How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think than in all other time. I'd like to be an old man to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Men, Thinking, Long

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• A few weeks later, I’m in a fluorescent-lit classroom in Chelsea awaiting the start of the official Mensa test. I’m sitting next to a guy who’s doing a series of elaborate neck stretches, like we’re about to engage in a vigorous rugby match. He’s neatly laid out four types of gum on his Formica desk: Juicy Fruit, Wrigley Spearmint, Big Red, and Eclipse. I hate this guy. I hope to God he’s not a genius.

  A. J. Jacobs

  Hate, Guy, Genius

  A. J. Jacobs (2004). “The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World”, p.58, Simon and Schuster

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• Astraeus,' Aven called out. 'God of the four winds and friend to sailors. Say a little prayer when you look at him, so he will give us what we need to keep our course.' A little prayer?' said Jack. 'To a constellation?' To what it represents,' said Aven. But I don't believe in what it represents,' said Jack. Prayers aren't for the deity,' said Aven. 'They're for you, to recommit yourself to what you believe.' Can't you do that without praying to a dead Greek god?' Sure,' said Aven. 'But how often would anyone do that, if not in prayer?

  James A. Owen

  Prayer, Believe, Wind

  James A. Owen (2015). “Dawn of the Dragons: Here, There Be Dragons; The Search for the Red Dragon”, p.212, Simon and Schuster

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• Well, life isn't a cakewalk, is it?! Eighty-nine percent of the world's most valuable art was created by men living in rat-infested flats. You think Velásquez wore Adidas? You think he enjoyed the luxuries of central heating and twenty-four-hour pizza delivery?!

  Marisha Pessl

  Art, Men, Thinking

  Marisha Pessl (2013). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.432, Penguin UK

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• She could walk through a lightning storm without being touched; grab a bolt of lightning in the palm of her hand; use the heat of lightning to start the kindling going under her medicine pot. She turned the moon into salve, the stars into swaddling cloth, and healed the wounds of every creature walking up on two or down on four.

  Gloria Naylor

  Stars, Moon, Hands

  Gloria Naylor (2017). “Mama Day: A Novel”, p.6, Open Road Media

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• I understood what he was doing, that he had spent four years fulfilling the absurd and tedious duty of graduating from college and now he was emancipated from that world of abstraction, false security, parents, and material excess.

  Jon Krakauer

  College, Years, Parent

  "Into the Wild". Adventure, Biography, Drama, 2007.

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• I'm about to commence four years of obeying the cause of a bruiser on a horse. I refuse to put down what might be the last book I see for months.

  Tamora Pierce

  Horse, Book, Years

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• But when a man has had only four hours' sleep he isn't sentimental. He sees things as they are: that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice; hideous, witless justice.

  Albert Camus

  Sleep, Men, Light

  ALBERT CAMUS (1971). “NOBEL PRIZE LIBRARY”

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• I acknowledge that four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what our soul is.

  Voltaire

  Soul, Volume, Metaphysics

  "Voltaire – The Philosophical Works".

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• He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Views, Two

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.152, Simon and Schuster

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• When you put four Alaskans into a room, you have five marriages, six divorces, and seven political parties.

  Dana Stabenow

  Party, Divorce, Political

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• Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names were--Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter.

  Beatrix Potter

  Garden, Names, Once Upon A Time

  The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902)

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• I noticed that all the prayers I used to offer to God, and all the prayers I now offer to Joe Pesci, are being answered at about the same 50% rate. Half the time I get what I want, half the time I don't... Same as the four-leaf clover and the horseshoe...same as the Voodoo Lady who tells you your fortune by squeezing the goat's testicles, it's all the same: 50-50. So just pick your superstition, sit back, make a wish, and enjoy yourself.

  George Carlin

  Funny, Sarcastic, Witty

  "You Are All Diseased". Book by George Carlin, 1999.

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• The span of three or four minutes is pretty insignificant in the scheme of things. People lose hundreds of minutes everyday, squandering them on trivial things. But sometimes in those fragments of time, something can happen you'll remember the rest of your life.

  Lisa Kleypas

  People, Everyday, Three

  Lisa Kleypas (2015). “The Travis Family Series, Books 1-3: Blue-Eyed Devil, Smooth Taking Stranger and Sugar Daddy”, p.434, St. Martin's Press

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• The apartment was built at the edge of a high cliff so that when you looked out the back window it seemed as if you were twelve floors up instead of four. It was very much like living on the edge of the world - a last resting place before the final big drop.

  Charles Bukowski

  Twelve, Finals, World

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• I sat and thought for four (delayed train) hours, and all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn't know he was a wizard became more and more real to me.

  J. K. Rowling

  Real, Boys, Brain

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• If a shadow is a two-dimensional projection of the three-dimensional world, then the three-dimensional world as we know it is the projection of the four-dimensional Universe.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Two, Shadow, Three

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• Lay down these words Before your mind like rocks. placed solid, by hands In choice of place, set Before the body of the mind in space and time: Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall riprap of things: Cobble of milky way. straying planets, These poems, people, lost ponies with Dragging saddles -- and rocky sure-foot trails. The worlds like an endless four-dimensional Game of Go. ants and pebbles In the thin loam, each rock a word a creek-washed stone Granite: ingrained with torment of fire and weight Crystal and sediment linked hot all change, in thoughts, As well as things.

  Gary Snyder

  Wall, Fire, Space

  Gary Snyder (1992). “No nature: new and selected poems”, Pantheon

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• Now, look, baby, 'Union' is spelled with 5 letters. It is not a four-letter word.

  Dorothy Parker

  Baby, Looks, Unions

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