Lays Quotes - Page 12

• Do ye not understand?"he said, in near desparation. "I would lay the world at your feet, Claire-and I have nothing to give ye!" He honestly thought it mattered.

  Diana Gabaldon

  Feet, Giving, World

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• All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.

  Ian Mcewan

  His Love, Reassurance, Lifetime

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• Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness — and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling — their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

  Arundhati Roy

  Art, War, Believe

  Arundhati Roy (2003). “War Talk”, p.112, South End Press

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• She was happy, and perfectly in line with the tradition of those women they used to call "ruined," "fallen," feckless, bitches in heat, ravished dolls, sweet sluts, instant princesses, hot numbers, great lays, succulent morsels, everybody's darlings . . .

  Jean Genet

  Sweet, Princess, Numbers

  Jean Genet (1994). “Querelle”, p.84, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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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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• Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question-- 'Is this all?

  Betty Friedan

  Children, Husband, Struggle

  The Feminine Mystique ch. 1 (1963)

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• Not Waving but Drowning Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning. Poor chap, he always loved larking And now he's dead It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way, They said. Oh, no no no, it was too cold always (Still the dead one lay moaning) I was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning.

  Stevie Smith

  Heart, Men, Way

  "Not Waving but Drowning" l. 11 (1957)

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• Being with him made her feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them- as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.

  Arundhati Roy

  Country, Islands, Space

  Arundhati Roy (2002). “The God of Small Things”, p.245, Penguin Books India

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• If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Passion, Dark, Men

  Soren Kierkegaard (2005). “Fear and Trembling”, p.18, Penguin UK

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• AND what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days; Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune, And over it softly her warm ear lays; Whether we look, or whether we listen, We hear life murmur, or see it glisten.

  James Russell Lowell

  Summer, June, Perfect Days

  James Russell Lowell (2012). “The Vision of Sir Launfal And Other Poems by James Russell Lowell, Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Julian W. Abernethy, PH.D.”, p.56, tredition

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• a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he's already got. He'll cling to trouble he's used to before he'll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.

  William Faulkner

  Men, Risk, Trying

  William Faulkner (1985). “Light in August”, Vintage

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• There weren't any curtains in the windows, and the books that didn't fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a bunch of intellectual refugees.

  Haruki Murakami

  Book, Intellectual, Window

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• There have been occasions in my later life (I suppose as in most lives) when I have felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen on all its interest and romance, to shut me out from anything save dull endurance any more. Never has that curtain dropped so heavy and blank, as when my way in life lay stretched out straight before me through the newly-entered road of apprenticeship to Joe.

  Charles Dickens

  Way In Life, Expectations, Romance

  Charles Dickens (2010). “A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Oprah's Book Club): Two Novels”, p.411, Penguin

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• When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, "What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?" "They are the days of a long time ago, Laura," Pa said. "Go to sleep, now." But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods,… She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

  Laura Ingalls Wilder

  Lonely, Sleep, Wind

  Laura Ingalls Wilder (2003). “Little House in the Big Woods”, HarperCollins

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• Nothing happens carelessly. We’re not brought into the world without reason, even though we may never understand the reason. An infant that lives an hour, that dies before it can lay eyes on those who made it, even that soul did not live without purpose: this is my sudden certainty.

  Clive Barker

  Eye, Soul, Purpose

  FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Oct 22, 2012

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• She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me. I ought never to have run away from her... I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little stratagems. Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Running, Flower, Radiance

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• I don't profess to be profound; but I do lay claim to common sense.

  Emily Dickinson

  Common Sense, Profound, Words Of Wisdom

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• ...so now, Mrs. Ramsay thought, she could return to that dream land, that unreal but fascinating place, the Manning's drawing-room at Marlow twenty years ago; where one moved about without haste or anxiety, for there was no future to worry about. She knew what had happened to them, what to her. It was like reading a good book again, for she knew the end of that story, since it had happened twenty years ago, and life, which shot down even from this dining-room table in cascades, heaven knows where, was sealed up there, and lay, like a lake, placidly between its banks.

  Virginia Woolf

  Dream, Reading, Book

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.315, Wordsworth Editions

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• He lay on his chair with his hands clasped above his paunch not reading, or sleeping, but basking like a creature gorged with existence.

  Virginia Woolf

  Reading, Sleep, Hands

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “To the Lighthouse”, p.166, Tyché

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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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• This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star.

  William Shakespeare

  Stars, Liars, Men

  'King Lear' (1605-6) act 1, sc. 2, l. [132]

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• Years later he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Lying, Book, Years

  Cormac McCarthy (2010). “The Road”, p.199, Pan Macmillan

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• The light was leaving in the west it was blue The children's laughter sang and skipping just like the stones they threw the voices echoed across the way its getting late It was just another night with the sun set and the moon rise not so far behind to give us just enough light to lay down underneath the stars listen to papas translations of the stories across the sky we drew our own constellations

  Jack Johnson

  Stars, Laughter, Children

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• If I am more alive because love burns and chars me, as a fire, given wood or wind, feels new elation, it's that he who lays me low is my salvation, and invigorates the more, the more he scars me.

  Michelangelo

  Inspiration, Fire, Wind

  Michelangelo (2000). “The Complete Poems of Michelangelo”, p.34, University of Chicago Press

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• A man will be justified by faith when, excluded from righteousness of works, he by faith lays hold of the righteousness of Christ, and clothed in it, appears in the sight of God not as a sinner, but as righteous.

  John Calvin

  Men, Sight, Justified

  John Calvin (1845). “Institutes of the Christian Religion”, p.318, Lulu.com

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