Middle Quotes - Page 22

• Perhaps that's what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that's what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I'm neither one side nor the other, I'm in the middle, I'm the partition, I've two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that's what I feel, myself vibrating, I'm the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don't belong to either.

  Samuel Beckett

  Self, Hands, Two

  Samuel Beckett (1970). “The collected works of Samuel Beckett”

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• Young people...have more compassion and tenderness toward the elderly than most middle-aged adults. Nothing--not avarice, not pride, not scrupulousness, not impulsiveness--so disillusions a youth about her parents as the seemingly inhumane way they treat her grandparents.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Pride, Compassion, Elderly

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• I don't want to know about the constitution of the rapist--I want to kill him! I don't care if he is white or black, if he is middle-class or poor, if his mother hung him from the clothesline by his balls: I only want to kill him! Any woman who has been raped will agree.

  Diamanda Galas

  Mother, Class, White

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• We cannot continue to see the Middle East in the context of 9/11. We must see it in the context of 2011.

  John F. Kerry

  Middle East, East, Terrorism

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• Death cut the strings that gave me life,
  And handed me to Sorrow,
  The only kind of middle wife
  My folks could beg or borrow.

  Countee Cullen

  Cutting, Wife, Sorrow

  Countee Cullen (2013). “Countee Cullen: Collected Poems: (American Poets Project #32)”, p.51, Library of America

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• Two of the actors, Sean Bean and Orlando Bloom, have been caught between two landslides and are now trapped in a tiny town in the middle of the South Island. They have been taken in by a kindly woman who has offered them food and a bed. They were last reported to be cooking spaghetti and cracking into a bottle of red wine.

  Peter Jackson

  Taken, Wine, Two

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• I never accept lengthy film roles nowadays, because I am always so afraid I will die in the middle of shooting and cause such awful problems.

  John Gielgud

  Age, Causes, Roles

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• The Miss America contest isthe most perfectly rendered theater in our culture, for it so perfectly captures what we yearn for: a low-class ritual, a polished restatement of vulgarity, that wants to open the door to high-class respectability by way of plain middle-class anxiety and ambition.

  Gerald Early

  Ambition, Class, America

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• I know she's just trying to make things nice, so I do my part. Now, when I get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, I turn on the light. I used to just go by sonar: just keep peeing 'til you hear water.

  Adam Ferrara

  Funny, Nice, Humor

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• University politics make me long for the simplicity of the Middle East.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  Science, Long, Simplicity

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• In the Middle Age, in Germany, if you wanted to learn addition and multiplication, you could go to any university. But if you wanted to learn division, you could only do it in one place, Heidelberg. This makes sense, since in my theory with Vladimir Retakh and Robert Wilson, addition and multiplications are cheap, but division is expensive.

  Israel Gelfand

  Science, Age, Germany

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• There would be this algebraic equation with an equals sign in the middle, and all the components would have different letters of the alphabet. It would come out right with x+z^2+t/q=y+co, and the co would be clothes off!

  Tom Stoppard

  Science, Clothes, Different

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• The Prime Minister, a specialist in calling in the locksmith after the horses had fled - the whole herd in fact - and the barn in ruins, ended the week with a great raft of ethics proposals for cabinet, leadership candidates, backbenchers and lobbyists. I think it is more than fair to ask: Why wait for the middle of his third term to institute what the public would have welcomed at the beginning of his first?

  Rex Murphy

  Horse, Thinking, Waiting

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• Bill Clinton says the middle-class folks in Topeka who contribute to The 700 Club or Focus on the Family are radicals whose beliefs pose a mortal danger to this nation!

  Don Feder

  Christian, Religious, Class

  Don Feder (1996). “Who's Afraid of the Religious Right?”, p.12, Regnery Publishing

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• Mankind became hysterical in the Middle Ages because it poorly repressed the sexual impressions of its Greek boyhood.

  Karl Kraus

  Greek, Age, Boyhood

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & one-and-a-half truths: selected aphorisms”

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• We all accuse Vladimir Putin of Cold War nostalgia, but Washington's elites - politicians and intellectuals - miss the old days as well. They wish for the world in which the United States was utterly dominant over its friends, its foes were to be shunned entirely, and the challenges were stark, moral, and vital. Today's world is messy and complicated. China is one of our biggest trading partners and our looming geopolitical rival. Russia is a surly spoiler, but it has a globalized middle class and has created ties in Europe.

  Fareed Zakaria

  Leadership, Money, War

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• F.R. Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel--for theeighteenth century reader, the most frivolous of diversions--did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment.

  Angela Carter

  Reading, Offending, Dubious

  Angela Carter (2012). “Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings”, p.22, Random House

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• And, oh God, in my misspent youth as a housewife, I, too, used to bake bread, in those hectic and desolating days just prior to the woman's movement, when middle-class women were supposed to be wonderful wives and mothers, gracious hostesses.... I used to feel so womanly when I was baking my filthy bread.

  Angela Carter

  Mother, Class, Wife

  Angela Carter (1993). “Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings”, Vintage Books

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• That's how the Germans are.... The aristocrats at the top hard as glass, cold as ice, servants of the King, the working masses willing, pliable, sentimental, susceptible to brutality, the middle class educated and cowardly to the point of servility.

  Alfred Doblin

  Kings, Glasses, Ice

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• Many older wealthy families have learned to instill a sense of public service in their offspring. But newly affluent middle-classparents have not acquired this skill. We are using our children as symbols of leisure-class standing without building in safeguards against an overweening sense of entitlement--a sense of entitlement that may incline some young people more toward the good life than toward the hard work that, for most of us, makes the good life possible.

  David Elkind

  Good Life, Children, Work

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• Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves "oppressed," no one would have taken them seriously.

  Bell Hooks

  Taken, Class, African American

  bell hooks (2014). “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center”, p.7, Routledge

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• Democracy or breakdown in Syria would change the whole Middle East overnight.

  Paul Krugman

  Spring, Democracy, Middle East

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• The new ground that you form in your living is a new self, a new self that isn't at all of the middle ground, a lived-in self that has no need of middle ground. That new self makes unseen reality within seen.

  John de Ruiter

  Reality, Self, Unseen

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• Middle-aged life is merry, and I love to lead it.

  Ogden Nash

  Life Is, Middle Aged, Merry

  Ogden Nash, “Peekabo, I Almost See You”

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• For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish ora German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making "ladies" dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.

  Stephanie Coontz

  Girl, Daughter, Mother

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