Passages Quotes - Page 30

• We’re Nephilim. Every one of our life’s passages has some mystical component — our births, our deaths, our, marriages, everything has a ceremony and a rune. There is one as well if you wish to become someone’s parabatai. It’s no small commitment.

  Cassandra Clare

  Commitment, Wish, Nephilim

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• St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: “The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.” No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Country, Father, Past

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.35, Macmillan

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• The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of day with some purchased relief.

  Russell Brand

  Pain, Addiction, Priorities

  "Amy Winehouse's Death: Russell Brand Pens Appreciation For the Late Singer" by Jane Kellogg, www.hollywoodreporter.com. July 24, 2011.

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• She had always lived her best life in dreams. She knew no greater pleasure than that moment of passage into the other place, when her limbs grew warm and heavy and the sparkling darkness behind her lids became ordered and doors opened; when conscious thought grew owl's wings and talons and became other than conscious.

  John Crowley

  Dream, Doors, Wings

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• I can't believe it's actually happening. This is independent adulthood, this is what it feels like. Shouldn't there be some sort of ritual? In certain remote African tribes there'd be some incredible four day rites of passage ceremony involving tattooing and potent hallucinogenic drugs extracted from tree-frogs, and village elders smearing my body with monkey blood, but here,rites of passage is all about three new pairs of pants and stuffing your duvet in a bin-liner.

  David Nicholls

  Believe, Independent, African Tribes

  David Nicholls (2004). “A Question of Attraction: A Novel”, p.25, Villard

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• The roar of the traffic, the passage of undifferentiated faces, this way and that way, drugs me into dreams; rubs the features from faces. People might walk through me. And what is this moment of time, this particular day in which I have found myself caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar - forest trees or the roar of wild beasts. Time has whizzed back an inch or two on its reel; our short progress has been cancelled. I think also that our bodies are in truth naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.

  Virginia Woolf

  Dream, Thinking, Two

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.691, Wordsworth Editions

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• To believe that will has power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality (which is always potentiality to do and not to do) — this is the perpetual illusion of morality.

  Giorgio Agamben

  Believe, Decision, Morality

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• In the nineteenth century some parts of the world were unexplored, but there was almost no restriction on travel.:; Up to 1914 you did not need a passport for any country except Russia.:; The European emigrant, if he could scrape together a few pounds for the passage, simply set sail for America or Australia, and when he got there no questions were asked.:; In the eighteenth century it had been quite normal and safe to travel in a country with which your own country was at war.

  George Orwell

  Country, War, America

  George Orwell (1968). “The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell: As I please, 1943-1945”

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• Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child's small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity.

  William James

  Spiritual, Children, Maturity

  Dr. William James (2013). “The William James Reader”, p.482, Simon and Schuster

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• In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication.

  Alberto Manguel

  Communication, States, Learning To Read

  Alberto Manguel (2014). “A History of Reading”, p.95, Penguin

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• More hearts are breaking in this world of ours Than one would say. In distant villages And solitudes remote, where winds have wafted The barbed seeds of love, or birds of passage Scattered them in their flight, do they take root, And grow in silence, and in silence perish.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Heart, Wind, Roots

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1849). “The Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ; Complete in One Volume”, p.73

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• I think of music a lot when I paint. The theme of it to a degree is music. So instead of literally putting in music or literally putting in a musical instrument, I use only a hint of the instrument, but the brocaded pattern is like a line of Bach because of its order and the leaves going up are like passages from Vivaldi, and the emphasis on drapery is where the sound comes.

  Nelson Shanks

  Thinking, Order, Musical

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• Things go away to return, brightened for the passage

  A. R. Ammons

  Travel, Going Away, Return

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• It’s all fine to say, “Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget”—and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change.

  John Steinbeck

  People, Passing Away, Doe

  John Steinbeck (1993). “Cannery Row”, p.92, Penguin

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• The first book ever written in an alphabet was the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament. And the most important passage was the Ten Commandments. The first commandment is the most revolutionary sentence ever written. It states: "I am the Lord thy God there is no other." The second prohibits us from making images. Thus, there is a profound rejection of any goddess influence and a ban of representative art.

  Leonard Shlain

  Art, Book, Profound

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• Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.

  Stanislaw Lem

  Lying, Dark, Men

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• Love is a religion, and its rituals cost more than those of other religions. It goes by quickly and, like a street urchin, it likes to mark its passage by a trail of devastation.

  Honore de Balzac

  Love Is, Cost, Devastation

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• There are passages of the Bible that are soiled forever by the touches of the hands of ministers who delight in the cheap jokes they have left behind them.

  Phillips Brooks

  Hands, Forever, Delight

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 415, 1895.

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• Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.

  Susan Sontag

  Plato, Book, Self

  Susan Sontag (2013). “Regarding the Pain of Others”, p.96, Macmillan

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• There is, indeed, a most dangerous passage in the history of a democratic people. When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education and their experience of free institutions, the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint at the sight of new possessions they are about to obtain. In their intense and exclusive anxiety to make a fortune they lose sight of the close connection that exists between the private fortune of each and the prosperity of all.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Men, Sight, Self

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• So often we look at a calendar of days as merely a symbol of the passage of time. We forget why we are on this earth. We forget that there is a reason for all the pain and the struggle.

  Lynn Andrews

  Inspirational, Life, Pain

  Lynn V. Andrews (1993). “Walk in Balance: Meditations with Lynn Andrews”, Harper San Francisco

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• He [Jesus] did not say, 'You will never have a rough passage, you will never be over-strained, you will never feel uncomfortable,' but he did say, 'You will never be overcome.

  Julian of Norwich

  Jesus, Overcoming, Uncomfortable

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• Does not the passage of Moses and the Israelites into the Holy Land yield incomparably more poetic variety than the voyages of Ulysses or Aeneas?

  Abraham Cowley

  Bible, Yield, Aeneas

  Abraham Cowley, Thomas Sprat (1710). “The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley ...: Consisting of Those which Were Formerly Printed, and Those which He Design'd for the Press, Publish'd Out of the Author's Original Copies ; with The Cutter of Coleman-street”

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• A confessional passage has probably never been written that didn't stink a little bit of the writer's pride in having given up his pride.

  J. D. Salinger

  Pride, Littles, Given

  'Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction' (1963) p. 195 'Seymour' (1959)

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• The mature person becomes able to differentiate feelings into as many nuances, strong and passionate experiences, or delicate and sensitive ones, as in the different passages of music in a symphony. Unfortunately, many of us have feelings limited like notes in a bugle call.

  Rollo May

  Strong, Symphony, Mature Person

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