Quiet Quotes - Page 16

• Quiet heroism or youthful idealism, or both? What do we know? That life without heroism and idealism is not worth living - or that either can be fatal?

  Erich Segal

  Heroism, Idealism, Knows

  Erich Segal (2014). “The Class”, p.517, Bantam

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• Days pass when I forget the mystery. Problems insoluble and problems offering their own ignored solutions jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing their colored clothes; caps and bells. And then once more the quiet mystery is present to me, the throng's clamor recedes: the mystery that there is anything, anything at all, let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything, rather than void: and that, 0 Lord, Creator, Hallowed one, You still, hour by hour sustain it.

  Denise Levertov

  Memories, Clothes, Offering

  Denise Levertov (1997). “The Stream & the Sapphire: Selected Poems on Religious Themes”, p.33, New Directions Publishing

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• Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather uses is comfort. So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish.

  Alice Sebold

  Quilts, Humble, Hands

  Alice Sebold (2014). “The Lovely Bones: Picador Classic”, p.229, Pan Macmillan

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• She tried to explain the real state of the case to her sister. "I do not attempt to deny," said she, "that I think very highly of him--that I greatly esteem, that I like him." Marianne here burst with forth with indignation: "Esteem him! Like him! Cold-hearted Elinor. Oh! worse than cold-hearted! Ashamed of being otherwise. Use those words again, and I will leave the room this moment." Elinor could not help laughing. "Excuse me," said she, "and be assured that I meant no offence to you, by speaking, in so quiet a way, of my own feelings.

  Jane Austen

  Real, Thinking, Laughing

  Jane Austen (1864). “Sense and Sensibility”, p.17

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• My teeth became sour as I listened to his story. It was then that I understood why he was quiet all the time.

  Ishmael Beah

  Teeth, Stories, Sour

  Ishmael Beah (2007). “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier”, p.80, Macmillan

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• You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet, when to let things take their course.

  Sue Monk Kidd

  Courses, Knows

  Sue Monk Kidd (2002). “The Secret Life of Bees”, Viking Press

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• Her face was working and twitching with passion, but his looked up at the sky, still quiet, neither angry nor afraid, but a little sad.

  C. S. Lewis

  Passion, Sky, Littles

  C. S. LEWIS (1950). “THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE”

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• O gouvernment francais, I think it was not very clever of You to put this terrible doll in La Ferte; for when Governments are found dead there is always a little doll on top of them, pulling and tweaking with his little hands to get back at the microscopic knife which sticks firmly in the quiet meat of their hearts.

  e. e. cummings

  Clever, Heart, Thinking

  E.E. Cummings (2015). “The Enormous Room”, p.102, Xist Publishing

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• Karma Repair Kit Items 1-4. 1.Get enough food to eat, and eat it. 2.Find a place to sleep where it is quiet, and sleep there. 3.Reduce intellectual and emotional noise until you arrive at the silence of yourself, and listen to it. 4.

  Richard Brautigan

  Karma, Sleep, Emotional

  Richard Brautigan (1989). “Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America ; The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster ; And, In Watermelon Sugar”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• We can be walking witnesses and standing sermons to which objective onlookers can say a quiet amen.

  Neal A. Maxwell

  Amen, Witness, Standing

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• You don’t want a general houseworker, do you? Or a traveling companion, quiet, refined, speaks fluent French entirely in the present tense? Or an assistant billiard-maker? Or a private librarian? Or a lady car-washer? Because if you do, I should appreciate your giving me a trial at the job. Any minute now, I am going to become one of the Great Unemployed. I am about to leave literature flat on its face. I don’t want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.

  Dorothy Parker

  Jobs, Book, Reading

  Dorothy Parker (1970). “A month of Saturdays: thirty-one famous pieces by "Constant Reader"”

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• And then more quiet, silence so deep it almost drowned out the roar of the night music that pounded away in my secret self.

  Jeff Lindsay

  Night, Self, Silence

  Jeff Lindsay (2005). “Darkly Dreaming Dexter”, p.9, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

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• It was always late at night, when everything and everyone else was quiet, that those voices would rise like ghosts, soft and haunting, filling your mind until sleep finally came.

  Sarah Dessen

  Sleep, Night, Voice

  Sarah Dessen (2004). “Keeping the Moon”, p.101, Penguin

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• A fragrant breeze wandered up from the quiet sea, trailed along the beach, and drifted back to the sea again, wondering where to go next. On a mad impulse it went up to the beach again. It drifted back to sea.

  Douglas Adams

  Beach, Sea, Mad

  Douglas Adams (2009). “Life, the Universe and Everything”, p.71, Pan Macmillan

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• A spiritual desert is spreading: an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Spiritual, Despair, Desert

  "Papal Homily at Closing Mass in Sydney: 'May This 23rd World Youth Day Be Experienced as a New Upper Room'". Speech by Pope Benedict XVI given at the World Youth Day in Sydney, Australia, www.catholic-church.org. July 19, 2008.

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• O how all things are far removed and long have passed away. I do believe the star, whose light my face reflects, is dead and has been so for many thousand years. I had a vision of a passing boat and heard some voices saying disquieting things. I heard a clock strike in some distant house... but in which house?... I long to quiet my anxious heart and stand beneath the sky's immensity. I long to pray... And one of all the stars must still exist. I do believe that I would know which one alone endured, and which like a white city stands at the ray's end shining in the heavens.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Stars, Believe, Heart

  Rainer Maria Rilke, “Lament (O How All Things Are Far Removed)”

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• I really would like to stop working forever–never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I’m doing now–and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I’d like to keep living with someone — maybe even a man — and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence.

  Allen Ginsberg

  Writing, Men, Museums

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• George Smiley: [quoting an old letter from Bill Haydon about Jim Prideaux] He has that heavy quiet that commands. He's my other half. Between us we'd make one marvelous man. He asks nothing better than to be in my company or that of my wicked, divine friends, and I'm vastly tickled by the compliment. He's virgin, about eight foot tall, and built by the same firm that did Stonehenge

  John le Carre

  Men, Eight, Feet

  "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy". www.imdb.com. 1979.

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• It was the work of the quiet mountains, this torrent of purity at my feet.

  Jack Kerouac

  Feet, Mountain, Purity

  Jack Kerouac (1986). “The Dharma Bums”, p.225, Penguin

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• Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety, and the quiet mind. Spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavours. If it may not, give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temparate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune, and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Wrath, Giving, Brave

  Robert Louis Stevenson, Roger Robinson (2004). “Robert Louis Stevenson: His Best Pacific Writings”, p.113, Univ. of Queensland Press

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• lucid and quiet his voice hovered above the listeners, like a light, like a starry sky.

  Hermann Hesse

  Light, Sky, Voice

  Hermann Hesse (2007). “Siddhartha”, Fine Communications

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• She refused to think of Neil, brave and quiet, whose reward for a heroic rescue was to be slowly devoured by strange cave balloons.

  Brandon Mull

  Thinking, Brave, Caves

  Brandon Mull, Brandon Dorman (2009). “Grip of the Shadow Plague”, p.260, Simon and Schuster

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• We are all a volume on a shelf of a library, a story unto ourselves, never possibly described with one word or even very accurately with thousands. A person is never as quiet or unrestrained as they seem, or as bad or good, as vulnerable or as strong, as sweet or as fiesty; we are thickly layered, page upon lying page, behind simple covers. And love - it is not the book itself, but the binding. It can rip us apart or hold us together.

  Deb Caletti

  Love, Life, Sweet

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• It's so quiet this high up, the feeling you get is that you're one of those space monkeys. You do the little job you're trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don't understand any of it, and then you just die.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Jobs, Space, Feelings

  Chuck Palahniuk (2005). “Fight Club: A Novel”, p.12, W. W. Norton & Company

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• But I do like churches. The way it feels inside. It feels good when you just sit there, like you're in a forest and everything's really quiet, expect there's still this sound you can't hear.

  Tim O'Brien

  Feel Good, Church, Sound

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