Looking Down Quotes - Page 5

• When I was five, a tree was my best friend. An old peppercorn on Grandpa's little farm. I'd haul myself into its calloused arms and hide from the world in its foliage. Apart from the pleasure of looking down on unsuspecting adults, I could be Robin Hood in a one-tree Sherwood Forest or Johnny Weissmuller in his jungle. I fell out of my friend once while Tarzan-ing. Gashed a large chunk from a leg. Almost 70 years later, there's still a scar.

  Phillip Adams

  Years, Grandpa, Tree

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• ... not only is life put in new patterns from the air, but it is somehow arrested, frozen into form. (The leaping hare is caught in a marble panel.) A glaze is put over life. There is no flaw, no crack in the surface; a still reservoir, no ripple on its face. Looking down from the air that morning, I felt that stillness rested like a light over the earth. The waterfalls seemed frozen solid; the tops of the trees were still; the river hardly stirred, a serpent gently moving under its shimmering skin.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Morning, Moving, Light

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• This is the funny thing about Skype. No one is really looking into the camera. People always looking down because they're looking at the image. You wish the camera was there in the center.

  Stanley Tucci

  Funny Things, People, Wish

  Source: collider.com

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• Charity is a cop-out so traditionally female in its apparent self-effacement that there seems resonant comfort in it. We're no longer supposed to serve the imaginations of men who have dominated us. We are to give up ourselves instead to those whose suffering is greater than our own. Looking down is just as distorting as looking up and as dangerous in perpetuating hierarchies.

  Jane Rule

  Giving Up, Men, Self

  Jane Rule (2013). “A Hot-Eyed Moderate: Essays”, p.70, Open Road Media

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• Snobs are people who look down on other people, but that does not justify our looking down on them. Who can say what dark fears of being inferior lurk behind their superior airs or what they suffer in private for the slights they dish out in public?

  Frederick Buechner

  Dark, Air, People

  Frederick Buechner (2009). “Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith”, p.372, Zondervan

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• I was amazed to go Oscar and win it. It was fantastic getting up on the stage there and looking down. I thought, "That guy looks like Steve Martin, and that guy's like Arnold Schwarzenegger." But it was Steve Martin, and it was Arnold Schwarzenegger. Then they have this terrible kind of conveyor belt backstage - literally - where they take you to this big hangar where the world's press are gathered, and they make you stand on a stage, and they introduce you.

  Peter Capaldi

  Winning, Guy, Looks

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• If we're not there making the argument then the cultural gulf that Republicans try to exploit saying, "Ah, these city slickers: they're all looking down on you, they don't care about you. They're just trying to help out their various special interest constituencies," that argument ends up being successful.

  Barack Obama

  Successful, Cities, Special

  Source: abcnews.go.com

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• I worked with the Nato Military Committee. The Head of the Luxembourg Armed Forces had equal standing with me, and I had to respect that. He was the leader of the armed forces of a sovereign country. I had to make sure he never thought that I was looking down on them, merely because they had less power than we did. With that kind of approach you can develop bonds of trust. I tried to do the same thing with my colleagues when I was Secretary of State.

  Colin Powell

  Country, Military, Leader

  Source: www.egonzehnder.com

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• Social science and humanities ... have a mutual contempt for one another, the former looking down on the latter as unscientific, the latter regarding the former as philistine. ... The difference comes down to the fact that social science really wants to be predictive, meaning that man is predictable, while the humanities say that he is not.

  Allan Bloom

  Men, Differences, Humanity

  "The Closing of the American Mind". Book by Allan Bloom, 1987.

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• Oh yeah, I'm literally walking through my house now looking down and there are maybe, like, 15 pairs on the floor. For real. Real talk. It's just simplicity. They're something I wear every day. Before I got a deal with them, I was wearing some type of Vans all the time. I would just order them by the box, like, 10 at a time.

  Lupe Fiasco

  Real, Order, Simplicity

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• When you are old you can look back and see yourself when you are young. It is almost like looking down from heaven. And you see yourself as a young woman, just a big girl really, half awake to the world. You see yourself happy, holding in your arms a good, decent, gentle, beloved young man with the blood keen in his veins, who before long is going to disappear, just disappear, into a storm of hate and flying metal and fire. And you just don't know it.

  Wendell Berry

  Girl, Hate, Men

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• This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth.

  Virginia Woolf

  Echoes, Self, Sea

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1446, Delphi Classics

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• Perhaps all a Tsaritsa is is a beautiful cold girl in the snow, looking down at someone wretched, and not yielding.

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Beautiful, Girl, Snow

  Catherynne M. Valente (2011). “Deathless”, p.85, Macmillan

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• There ain't nothing like being in the corner, and the trainer is whispering in your ear and another guy is putting in your mouthpiece. Five seconds to go, the boom! The bell. It's more exciting than looking down a cliff.

  George Foreman

  Boxing, Guy, Ears

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• It's hard to be wrongfully accused, but it's worse when the people looking down on you are clods who have never read a book or traveled more than twenty miles from the place they were born.

  Patrick Rothfuss

  Book, People, Twenties

  Patrick Rothfuss (2010). “The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chonicle:”, p.54, Hachette UK

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• One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting every one else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons--marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Giving Up, Taken

  C.S. Lewis (1960). “Mere Christianity”

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• I've always had a way with the little people, making it a point to humor them without looking down my nose at their wasted empty lives.

  David Sedaris

  Empty Life, People, Littles

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• My word, Severus, that I shall never reveal the best of you?' Dumbledore sighed, looking down into Snape's ferocious, anguished face. 'If you insist.

  J. K. Rowling

  Faces, Ifs, Snape

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• Christianity taught us to see the eye of the lord looking down upon us. Such forms of knowledge project an image of reality, at the expense of reality itself. They talk figures and icons and signs, but fail to perceive forces and flows. They bind us to other realities, and especially the reality of power as it subjugates us. Their function is to tame, and the result is the fabrication of docile and obedient subjects.

  Gilles Deleuze

  Eye, Reality, Taught Us

  Gilles Deleuze, FeÌl?ix Guattari (2004). “Anti-Oedipus”, p.22, A&C Black

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• I meditate, and when I do, Prince Harry appears in my subconscious and meditates with me. It's a little strange but I don't think there's anything I can do about it. Sometimes he's not the only one; the other day it was me, Prince Harry, the Dalai Lama, Mr. Rogers, Coco the gorilla, and George Clooney. We were all floating above the earth looking down at the continents as they passed. George Clooney suggested I visit Providence, Rhode Island. The Dalai Lama sighed deeply and said he'd like to visit Tibet. Poor Dalai Lama.

  Kristin Cashore

  Thinking, Rhode Island, Islands

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• …I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.

  William Faulkner

  Lying, Thinking, Light

  William Faulkner (2016). “The Sound and the Fury (Third International Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)”, p.90, W. W. Norton & Company

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• To someone standing in the nave, looking down the length of the church toward the east, the round window would seem like a huge sun exploding into innumerable shards of gorgeous color.

  Ken Follett

  Color, Church, Sun

  Ken Follett (2010). “The Pillars of the Earth”, p.894, Penguin

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• I had seen that look before, on the faces of tourists visiting the Texas Book Depository in Dallas where Lee Harvey Oswald took the shots at JFK. I took that tour and met some conspiracy buffs, all of us standing at the gunman’s window and looking down to the spot where the motorcade passed. It’s right there below the window, an easy shot at a slow-moving car. No mystery, just a kid and a rifle and a tragedy. They came looking for dark and terrible revelations and instead found out something even more dark and terrible: that their lives were trite and boring.

  David Wong

  Moving, Book, Kids

  David Wong (2009). “John Dies at the End”, p.422, Macmillan

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• The pages and the words are my world, spread out before your eyes and for your hand to touch. Vaguely, I can see you face looking down into me, as I look back. Do you see my eyes?

  Markus Zusak

  Eye, Hands, Looks

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• Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug. "It's so dreadful to be poor!" sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress. "I don't think it's fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all," added little Amy, with an injured sniff. "We've got Father and Mother, and each other," said Beth contentedly from her corner.

  Louisa May Alcott

  Girl, Mother, Father

  Louisa May Alcott (2015). “Annotated Little Women with English Grammar Exercises: by Louisa May Alcott (Author), Robert Powell (Editor)”, p.4, Powell Publications, LLC

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