Peculiar Quotes - Page 26

• I feel a little peculiar around the children. For one thing, they grown. And I see they think me and Nettie and Shug and Albert and Samuel and Harpo and Sofia and Jack and Odessa real old and don't know much what going on. But I don't think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt.

  Alice Walker

  Children, Real, Thinking

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• I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.

  George Orwell

  Fashion, Lying, Believe

  "Looking Back on the SpanishWar" sec. 4 (1942)

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• But nobody ever forgot anything, not really, though sometimes they pretended, when it suited them. Memories were permanent. Sorrowful ones remained sad even with the passing of time, yet happy ones could never be recreated - not with the same joy. Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.

  Rohinton Mistry

  Pain, Memories, Sadness

  Rohinton Mistry (2008). “A Fine Balance”, p.337, Faber & Faber

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• After another moment's silence she mumbled that I was peculiar, that that was probably why she loved me but that one day I might disgust her for the very same reason.

  Albert Camus

  Love, Silence, One Day

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• He had seen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Long, Excuse, Combination

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works”, p.31, e-artnow

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• The psychic entropy peculiar to the human condition involves seeing more to do than one can actually accomplish and feeling able to accomplish more than what conditions allow.

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Psychics, Feelings, Able

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2001). “Flow: the psychology of optimal experience”

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• Is war perhaps nothing else but a need to face death, to conquer and master it, to come out of it alive -- a peculiar form of denial of our mortality?

  Copyright: Elisabeth Kubler-Ross Family Limited Partnership.

  Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

  War, Needs, Denial

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• For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?

  Annie Dillard

  Writing, Ordinary, Doe

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• Maturity, as I conceived it, was recognizing what was bad or peculiar in life, admitting it has to stay that way, and going ahead with the best of things.

  Richard Ford

  Maturity, Admitting, Way

  Richard Ford (2012). “The Bascombe Novels: The Sportswriter, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land”, p.77, A&C Black

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• This is newness: every little tawdry Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar, Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only you Don't know what to make of the sudden slippiness, The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant. There's no getting up it by the words you know. No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe. We have only come to look. You are too new To want the world in a glass hat.

  Sylvia Plath

  Shoes, Elephants, White

  Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.156, Faber & Faber

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• It always strikes me, and it is very peculiar, that, whenever we see the image of indescribable and unutterable desolation—of loneliness, poverty, and misery, the end and extreme of things—the thought of God comes into one's mind.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  God, Loneliness, Mind

  Vincent van Gogh (1959). “Complete Letters: With Reproductions of All the Drawings in the Correspondence”

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• What we ask is to be human individuals, however peculiar and unexpected. It is no good saying: "You are a little girl and therefore you ought to like dolls"; if the answer is, "But I don't," there is no more to be said.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Girl, Dolls, Answers

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• We're living in a funny world kid, a peculiar civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty. The politicians are preachers, and the preachers are politicians. The tax collectors collect for themselves. The Bad People want us to have more dough, and the good people are fighting to keep it from us. It's not good for us, know what I mean? If we had all we wanted to eat, we'd eat too much. We'd have inflation in the toilet paper industry. That's the way I understand it. That's about the size of some of the arguments I've heard.

  Jim Thompson

  Mean, Kids, Fighting

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• Oh, this beast? It's...perspicacious loris. 'Perspicacious' meaning 'wise or canny'." "Get stuffed," Bovril said, then giggled. "And it insults people," Telsa said. "How peculiar.

  Scott Westerfeld

  Wise, People, Insult

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• Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.

  Charles Darwin

  Inspirational, Expression, Blushing

  Charles Darwin (2015). “Darwin on Evolution: Words of Wisdom from the Father of Evolution”, p.24, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• Did you just kiss me?" Will inquired. Magnus made a slip-second decision. "No." "I thought-" "On occasion the aftereffects of the painkilling spells can result in hallucinations of the most bizarre sort." "Oh," Will said. "How peculiar.

  Cassandra Clare

  Kissing, Decision, Kiss Me

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• She was still under the spell of her infatuation. She had tried to forget him, realizing the inutility of remembering. But the thought of him was like an obsession, ever pressing itself upon her. It was not that she dwelt upon details of their acquaintance, or recalled in any special or peculiar way his personality; it was his being, his existence, which dominated her thought, fading sometimes as if it would melt into the mist of the forgotten, reviving again with an intensity which filled her with an incomprehensible longing.

  Kate Chopin

  Personality, Special, Details

  Kate Chopin (2006). “Awakening EasyRead Edition”, p.98, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• A reader's tastes are peculiar. Choosing books to read is like making your way down a remote and winding path. Your stops on that path are always idiosyncratic. One book leads to another and another the way one thought leads to another and another. My type of reader is the sort who burrows through the stacks in the bookstore or the library (or the Web site — stacks are stacks), yielding to impulse and instinct.

  Jane Smiley

  Book, Library, Way

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• The Admiral's using us," he says to the kids around him. "Don't you see that?" Most of the kids just shrug, but Hayden's there, and he never misses an opportunity to add his peculiar wisdom to a situation. "I'd rather be used whole than in pieces," Hayden says.

  Neal Shusterman

  Kids, Opportunity, Missing

  Neal Shusterman (2009). “Unwind”, p.205, Simon and Schuster

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• Style is something peculiar to one person; it expresses one personality and one only; it cannot be shared.

  Freya Stark

  Acceptance, Personality, Style

  Freya Stark (2014). “The Zodiac Arch”, p.33, I.B.Tauris

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• The history of men of science has one peculiar advantage, as it shows the importance of little things in producing great results. Smeaton learned his principle of constructing a lighthouse, by noticing the trunk of a tree to be diminished from a curve to a cyclinder ... and Newton, turning an old box into a water-clock, or the yard of a house into a sundial, are examples of those habits of patient observation which scientific biography attractively recommends.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Science, Men, Curves

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• I have a peculiar theory about radium, and I believe it is the correct one. I believe that there is some mysterious ray pervading the universe that is fluorescing to it. In other words, that all its energy is not self-constructed but that there is a mysterious something in the atmosphere that scientists have not found that is drawing out those infinitesimal atoms and distributing them forcefully and indestructibly.

  Thomas A. Edison

  Believe, Science, Self

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• The fundamental idea of these pylons, or great archways, is based on a method of construction peculiar to me, of which the principle consists in giving to the edges of the pyramid a curve of such a nature that this pyramid shall be capable of resisting the force of the wind without necessitating the junction of the edges by diagonals as is usually done.

  Gustave Eiffel

  Science, Curves, Wind

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• God wants man to fulfill his commands as a human being and with the quality peculiar to human beings.

  Martin Buber

  Men, Quality, Want

  Martin Buber (1997). “Israel and the World: Essays in a Time of Crisis”, p.142, Syracuse University Press

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• I smiled: I thought to myself Mr. Rochester is peculiar — he seems to forget that he pays me £30 per annum for receiving his orders. "The smile is very well," said he, catching instantly the passing expression; "but speak too." "I was thinking, sir, that very few masters would trouble themselves to inquire whether or not their paid subordinates were piqued and hurt by their orders.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Hurt, Thinking, Expression

  Charlotte Bronte (2014). “The Complete Works Of Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, and The Professor”, p.184, Harper Collins

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