Objects Quotes - Page 6

• It was a blessing and also a curse of handwritten letters that unlike email you couldn’t obsessively reread what you’d written after you’d sent it. You couldn’t attempt to un-send it. Once you’d sent it it was gone. It was an object that no longer belonged to you but belonged to your recipient to do with what he would. You tended to remember the feeling of what you’d said more than the words. You gave to object away and left yourself with the memory. That was what it was to give.

  Ann Brashares

  Memories, Blessing, Giving

  Ann Brashares (2011). “Sisterhood Everlasting (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants): A Novel”, p.206, Random House

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• Grover started to sniffle and I figured if I didn't cheer him up he'd either start bawling or chewing up my mattress. He tends to eat household objects whenever he gets upset.

  Rick Riordan

  Cheer, Upset, Chewing

  Rick Riordan (2007). “The Titan's curse”

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• I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought feeling after feeling action after action had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an harrow to the string then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead through to H. I set out on one of them. But now there's an impassable frontier-post across it. So many roads once now so many culs de sac.

  C. S. Lewis

  Grief, Thinking, Frustration

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.24, Faber & Faber

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• They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.

  Tim O'Brien

  Fall, Eye, Coward

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.21, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• At least we know we tend to be afraid. If you object to my plural noun, I'll retract it.

  Janis Joplin

  Nouns, Knows, Ifs

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• So many objects, so many memories. Each was being labelled and packed away in bags just as it was in her mind. To be stored in an area that would sometime be called upon to teach and help in future life.

  Cecelia Ahern

  Memories, Mind, Bags

  Cecelia Ahern (2004). “PS, I Love You: A Novel”, p.122, Hachette UK

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• Acquaintance: "A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to. A degree of friendship called slight when its object is poor or obscure, and intimate when he is rich or famous.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Degrees, Rich, Obscure

  Cynic's Word Book (1906) p. 12

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• For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidised flat, books are like flowers. He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicoloured rows: he watches over each of them with an old-fashioned gardener's delight, holds them like fragile objects in his thin, bloodless hands.

  Stefan Zweig

  Flower, Book, Men

  Stefan Zweig (2009). “The Post Office Girl”, Sort of

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• Once someone appears to us primarily as an object, kindness has no place to root.

  Sharon Salzberg

  Kindness, Roots

  FaceBook post by Sharon Salzberg from Jul 21, 2011

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• I wonder sometimes what the memory of God looks like. Is it a palace of infinite rooms, a chest of many jeweled objects, a long, lonely landscape where each tree recalls an eon, each pebble the life of a man? Where do I live, in the memory of God?

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Lonely, Memories, Men

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• Sonnet XXV Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own: I wavered through the streets, among Objects: Nothing mattered or had a name: The world was made of air, which waited. I knew rooms full of ashes, Tunnels where the moon lived, Rough warehouses that growled 'get lost', Questions that insisted in the sand. Everything was empty, dead, mute, Fallen abandoned, and decayed: Inconceivably alien, it all Belonged to someone else - to no one: Till your beauty and your poverty Filled the autumn plentiful with gifts.

  Pablo Neruda

  Autumn, Moon, Tunnels

  Pablo Neruda, “Sonnet XXV”

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• For pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space ; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects ; and sounds very remote and then very close ; flesh being gashed and blood sparting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.” — Virginia Woolf, The Waves

  Virginia Woolf

  Pain, Virginia, Blood

  Virginia Woolf (2005). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.763, Wordsworth Editions

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• The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Mind, World, Metaphor

  Pierre Bourdieu (1977). “Equisse D'une Théorie de la Pratique”, p.91, Cambridge University Press

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• One must do violence to the object of one's desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.

  Marquis de Sade

  Desire, Violence, Surrender

  Sade (marquis de), Marquis de Sade (1987). “The 120 days of Sodom and other writings”, Grove Pr

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• She was incapable of love for any object not of her own choice and she resented anyone's demand for it.

  Ayn Rand

  Choices, Demand, Incapable

  Ayn Rand (2011). “Ayn Rand Novel Collection”, p.997, Penguin

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• The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word "love", and look on things as if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. "Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created." We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the divine love may rest "well pleased".

  C. S. Lewis

  Love Is, Men, Long

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.86, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• God has no needs. Human love, as Plato teaches us, is the child of Poverty – of want or lack; it is caused by a real or supposed goal in its beloved which the lover needs and desires. But God's love, far from being caused by goodness in the object, causes all the goodness which the object has, loving it first into existence, and then into real, though derivative, lovability. God is Goodness. He can give good, but cannot need or get it. In that sense , His love is, as it were, bottomlessly selfless by very definition; it has everything to give, and nothing to receive.

  C. S. Lewis

  Plato, Children, Real

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• We are afraid that Heaven is a bribe, and that if we make it our goal we shall no longer be disinterested. It is not so. Heaven offers nothing that the mercenary soul can desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to. There are rewards that do not sully motives. A man's love for a woman is not mercenary because he wants to marry her, nor his love for poetry mercenary because he wants to read it, nor his love of exercise less disinterested because he wants to run and leap and walk. Love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object.

  C. S. Lewis

  Running, Heart, Exercise

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• What distinguishes - in both senses of that word - contemplation is rather this: it is a knowing which is inspired by love. "Without love there would be no contemplation." Contemplation is a loving attainment of awareness. It is intuition of the beloved object.

  Josef Pieper

  Knowing, Intuition, Would Be

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• Comrades!' he cried. 'You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink the milk and eat those apples.

  George Orwell

  Animal, Night, Pigs

  George Orwell, A.M. Heath (2003). “Animal Farm and 1984”, p.39, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• When people learn to master their feelings, they can soon learn to master their reflections and thoughts in the degree requisite for attaining the objects they are seeking. But while they yield to a feeling or spirit that distracts their minds from a subject they wish to study and learn, so long they will never gain the mastery of their minds.

  Brigham Young

  Reflection, Yield, Long

  Brigham Young (1858). “Journal of Discourses”

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• But there was something about the largest object in the solar system vanishing that tended to disrupt normal schedules.

  James Dashner

  Schedules, Vanishing, Normal

  James Dashner (2016). “The Maze Runner Series Complete Collection (Maze Runner)”, p.206, Delacorte Press

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• What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.

  Annie Dillard

  Differences, Blue, Whales

  Annie Dillard (2016). “Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters”, p.66, Canongate Books

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• She was nothing more than a mere good-tempered, civil and obliging Young Woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her -- she was only an Object of Contempt

  Jane Austen

  Young, Contempt, Mere

  'Love and Freindship' (written 1790) 'Letter the 13th'

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• If gratitude and esteem are good foundations of affection, Elizabeth's change of sentiment will be neither improbable nor faulty. But if otherwise--if regard springing from such sources is unreasonable or unnatural, in comparison of what is so often described as arising on a first interview with its object, and even before two words have been exchanged, nothing can be said in her defence, except that she had given somewhat of a trial to the latter method in her partiality for Wickham, and that its ill success might, perhaps, authorise her to seek the other less interesting mode of attachment.

  Jane Austen

  Gratitude, Attachment, Two

  Jane Austen (2008). “Pride and Prejudice”, p.371, Waking Lion Press

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