Lays Quotes - Page 15

• But later that day, the streets of Kweilin were strewn with newspapers reporting great Kuomintang victories, and on top of these papers, like fresh fish from a butcher, lay rows of people - men, women and children who had never lost hope, but had lost their lives instead.

  Amy Tan

  Children, Men, People

  Amy Tan (2006). “The Joy Luck Club: A Novel”, p.19, Penguin

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• I suffered no pain, my hunger had taken the edge off; instead I felt pleasantly empty, untouched by everything around me and happy to be unseen by all. I put my legs up on the bench and leaned back, the best way to feel the true well-being of seclusion. There wasn't a cloud in my mind, nor did I feel any discomfort, and I hadn't a single unfulfilled desire or craving as far as my thought could reach. I lay with open eyes in a state of utter absence from myself and felt deliciously out of it.

  Knut Hamsun

  Pain, Taken, Eye

  Knut Hamsun (1999). “Hunger”, p.39, Canongate Books

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• My family suffered. My hair turned up in every corner, every drawer, every meal. Even in the rice puddings Tessie made, covering each little bowl with wax paper before putting it away in the fridge--even into these prophylactically secure desserts my hair found its way! Jet black hairs wound themselves around bars of soap. They lay pressed like flower stems between the pages of books. They turned up in eyeglass cases, birthday cards, once--I swear--inside an egg Tessie had just cracked. The next-door neighbor's cat coughed up a hairball one day and the hair was not the cat's.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Flower, Book, Cat

  Jeffrey Eugenides (2003). “Middlesex”, p.306, A&C Black

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• Remember to be gentle with yourself and others. We are all children of chance, and none can say while some fields will blossom and others lay brown beneath the August sun. Care for those around you. Look past your differences. Their dreams are no less than yours, their choices in life no more easily made. And give. Give in any way you can, of whatever you possess. To give is to love. To withhold is to wither. Care less for your harvest than how is shared, and your life will have meaning and your heart will have peace.

  Kent Nerburn

  Dream, Children, Heart

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• I wept in my dreams. I dreamed you lay in the grave; I awoke, and the tears still poured down my cheeks. I wept in my dreams, I dreamed you had left me; I awoke and I went on weeping long and bitterly. I wept in my dreams, I dreamed you were still kind to me; I awoke, and still the flow of my tears streams on.

  Heinrich Heine

  Dream, Long, Tears

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• Two babies were born on the same day at the same hospital. They lay there and looked at each other. Their families came and took them away. Eighty years later, by a bizarre coincidence, they lay in the same hospital, on their deathbeds, next to each other. One of them looked at the other and said, 'So, what did you think?

  Steven Wright

  Life, Baby, Destiny

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• I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

  Willa Cather

  Success, Sleep, Air

  "My Antonia". Book by Willa Cather, 1918.

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• Deep in the meadow, hidden far away, A cloak of leaves, a moonbeam ray, Forget your woes and let your troubles lay, And when again it's morning, they'll wash away. Here it's safe, here it's warm, Here the daisies guard you from every harm, Here your dreams are sweet and tomorrow brings them true, Here is the place where I love you.

  Suzanne Collins

  Dream, Sweet, Morning

  "The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, Book 1)". Book by Suzanne Collins, September 14, 2008.

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• Great God! What have I turned into? What right have you people to clutter up my life, steal my time, probe my soul, suckle my thoughts, have me for your companion, confidant, and information bureau? What do you take me for? Am I an entertainer on salary, required every evening to play an intellectual farce under your stupid noses? Am I a slave, bought and paid for, to crawl on my belly in front of you idlers and lay at your feet all that I do and all that I know?

  Henry Miller

  Stupid, Play, Feet

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• While Leonidas was preparing to make his stand, a Persian envoy arrived. The envoy explained to Leonidas the futility of trying to resist the advance of the Great King's army and demanded that the Greeks lay down their arms and submit to the might of Persia. Leonidas laconically told Xerxes, "Come and get them.

  Plutarch

  Kings, Army, Greek

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• Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer . . . For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Believe, Errors, Degrees

  Willard Van Orman Quine, Roger F. Gibson (2004). “Quintessence: Basic Readings from the Philosophy of W.V. Quine”, p.52, Harvard University Press

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• This soldier, I realized, must have had friends at home and in his regiment; yet he lay there deserted by all except his dog. I looked on, unmoved, at battles which decided the future of nations. Tearless, I had given orders which brought death to thousands. Yet here I was stirred, profoundly stirred, stirred to tears. And by what? By the grief of one dog. Napoleon Bonaparte, on finding a dog beside the body of his dead master, licking his face and howling, on a moonlit field after a battle. Napoleon was haunted by this scene until his own death.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Dog, Grief, Home

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• The soul is like an uninhabited world that comes to life only when God lays His head against us.

  Thomas Aquinas

  God, Soul, World

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• Was his life nothing? Had he nothing to show, no work? He did not count his work, anyone could have done it. What had he known, but the long, marital embrace with his wife. Curious, that this was what his life amounted to! At any rate, it was something, it was eternal. He would say so to anybody, and be proud of it. He lay with his wife in his arms, and she was still his fulfillment, just the same as ever. And that was the be-all and the end-all. Yes, and he was proud of it.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Long, Wife, Done

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• People want pretty much the same things: They wanted to be happy. Most young people seemed to think that those things lay somewhere in the future, while most older people believed they lay in the past.

  Nicholas Sparks

  Past, Thinking, People

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• Peering down into the water where the morning sun fashioned wheels of light, coronets fanwise in which lay trapped each twig, each grain of sediment, long flakes and blades of light in the dusty water sliding away like optic strobes where motes sifted and spun.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Morning, Light, Long

  Cormac McCarthy (2010). “Suttree”, p.7, Pan Macmillan

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• Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be.

  Francis Spufford

  Song, Reading, Tree

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• The road was frozen. The village lay quiet under the cold sky. Komako hitched up the skirt of her kimono and tucked it into her obi. The moon shone like a blade frozen in blue ice.

  Yasunari Kawabata

  Moon, Blue, Ice

  Yasunari Kawabata (2013). “Snow Country”, p.77, Vintage

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• I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.

  James Madison

  Government, Liberty, Politics

  "Time Magazine: We Don't Need No Stinking Constitution" by Larry Elder, www.realclearpolitics.com. July 7, 2011.

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• If they [Plato and Aristotle] wrote about politics it was as if to lay down rules for a madhouse. And if they pretended to treat it as something really important it was because they knew that the madmen they were talking to believed themselves to be kings and emperors. They humored these beliefs in order to calm down their madness with as little harm as possible.

  Blaise Pascal

  Kings, Plato, Order

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• A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Language, Repeats, Captives

  Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958). “Philosophical Investigations”

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• I lay there, stretched out, looking at the one star visible through the tiny window of the room. Only connect. How can you do that when the connections are broken?

  Jeanette Winterson

  Stars, Broken, Connections

  Jeanette Winterson (2006). “Lighthousekeeping”, p.116, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• There's a strange sensation - you recall it from childhood - about sleeping in the afternoon. You rise into a different world from the one in which you lay down. The shadows have been rearranged. There's a sensation of sad sweetness, as if something has been overlooked. I used to feel it coming out of the movies just before dinnertime, after the matinee. How, I wondered, did Broadway actors face it, this bittersweet sense of time's slipping past.

  Jacquelyn Mitchard

  Sleep, Past, Childhood

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• Lay down the song you strum, And rest yourself 'neath the strength of strings No voice can hope to hum.

  Bob Dylan

  Song, Voice, Strings

  Song: Lay Down Your Weary Tune, Album: Biograph

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• Then when dusk began to settle he would retrace his steps, back to his own world. And on the way home, a loneliness would always claim his heart. He could never quite get a grip on what it was. It just seemed that whatever lay waiting "out there" was all too vast, too overwhelming for him to possibly ever make a dent in.

  Haruki Murakami

  Loneliness, Home, Heart

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