Reaching Quotes - Page 38

• It may be true that he travels farthest who travels alone, but the goal thus reached is not worth reaching.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Goal, May, Being True

  Theodore Roosevelt (1899). “The Rough Riders: An Autobiography”, p.592, Library of America

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• Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Memories, Opportunity, Men

  FaceBook post by Gabriel García Márquez from Jun 16, 2013

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• Inching one's way along a steep cliff in the dark: on reaching the highway, one breathes a sigh of relief. Just when one can't take any more, one sees the moonlight. Beauty that seems to infuse itself into the heart: I know about that

  Banana Yoshimoto

  Heart, Dark, Sigh Of Relief

  Banana Yoshimoto, Megan Backus (1979). “Three Plays”, p.60, Grove Press

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• ...the habit of falling hardens the body, reaching the ground, to in itself, is a relief.

  Jose Saramago

  Fall, Relief, Body

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• That’s why it is important to enjoy the journey not just the destination. In this world, we will never arrive at a place where everything is perfect and we have no more challenges. As admirable as setting goals and reaching them maybe, you can’t get so focused on accomplishing your goals that you make the mistake of not enjoying where you are right now.

  Joel Osteen

  Mistake, Journey, Perfect

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• If I kept saying it; if I kept reaching out. My accident really taught me just one thing: the only way to go on is to go on. To say 'I can do this' even when you know you can't.

  Stephen King

  Goes On, Way, Taught

  Stephen King (2008). “Duma Key: A Novel”, p.495, Simon and Schuster

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• The desert seems to be a brown wasteland of dry, prickly scrub whose only purpose is to serve as a setting for the majestic saguaros. Then, little by little, the plants of the desert begin to identify themselves: the porcupiny yucca, the beaver tail and prickly pear and barrel cacti, buckhorn and staghorn and devil's fingers, the tall, sky-reaching tendrils of the ocotillo.

  Jerry Spinelli

  Sky, Devil, Dry

  Jerry Spinelli (2012). “The Stargirl Collection”, p.60, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

  John Keats

  Mean, Men, Doubt

  Letter to George and Thomas Keats, 21 Dec. 1817

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• That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

  Barack Obama

  Jobs, War, Home

  First Presidential Inaugural Address, Delivered 20 January 2009

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• There will be all these fifty-year-old women wearing hot pants and squeezing themselves into pretzel shapes and then there will be me. Just reaching for my toes like they're China. 'Hello there! You're so far away, I can't get to you! Can you even hear me?

  E. Lockhart

  Years, Hot, Shapes

  E. Lockhart (2014). “The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks”, p.143, Hot Key Books

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• Talk—half-talk, phrases that had no need to be finished, abstractions, Chinese bells played on with cotton-tipped sticks, mock orange blossoms painted on porcelain. The muffled, close, half-talk of soft-fleshed women. The men she had embraced, and the women, all washing against the resonance of my memory. Sound within sound, scene within scene, woman within woman—like acid revealing an invisible script. One woman within another eternally, in a far-reaching procession, shattering my mind into fragments, into quarter tones which no orchestral baton can ever make whole again.

  Anais Nin

  Memories, Men, Orange

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• She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Struggle, Might, Desperate

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Everything Is Illuminated”, p.79, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claws.

  Elizabeth Kostova

  Facts, Sometimes, Claws

  Elizabeth Kostova (2008). “The Historian”, Little, Brown

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• He [Iggy] started reaching for things around the table, and his hand landed on Total. “You’re black.” “I prefer canine-American,” said Total.

  James Patterson

  Hands, Black, Tables

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• It’s funny. I met a man once who did a lot of mountain climbing. I asked him which was harder, ascending or descending? He said without a doubt descending, because ascending you were so focused on reaching the top, you avoided mistakes. The backside of a mountain is a fight against human nature,” he said. “You have to care as much about yourself on the way down as you did on the way up.

  Mitch Albom

  Mistake, Fighting, Men

  Mitch Albom (2007). “For One More Day”, p.96, Hachette UK

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• Lux’s frequent forged excuses from phys. Ed. She always used the same method, faking the rigid t’s and b’s of her mother’s signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the two beseeching L’s reaching out for each other over the ditch of the u and barbed-wire x.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Mother, Two, Wire

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• Being a writer is part of a noble tradition, as is being a musician – the last egalitarian and open associations. No matter what happens in terms of fame and fortune, dedication to writing is a marching-step forward from where you were before, when you didn’t care about reaching out to the world, when you weren’t hoping to contribute, when you were just standing there doing some job into which you had fallen.

  Anne Lamott

  Jobs, Writing, Dedication

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• She turned her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and solitude, which the vast expanse of water, meeting and melting with the moonlit sky, conveyed to her excited fancy. As she swam she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself.

  Kate Chopin

  Sky, Space, Water

  Kate Chopin (1899). “The Awakening”, p.71

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• What is to be gained if we are so intent in reaching out to the unchurched that we then unchurch the reached?

  David F. Wells

  Reach Out, Ifs

  David F. Wells (2008). “The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World”, p.55, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• You are to consider that a certain melancholy and often a certain irascibility accompany advancing age: indeed it might be said that advancing age equals ill-temper. On reaching the middle years a man perceives that he is no longer able to do certain things, that what looks he may have had are deserting him, that he has a ponderous great belly, and that however much he may yet burn he is no longer attractive to women; and he rebels. Fortitude, resignation and philosophy are of more value than any pills, red, white or blue.

  Patrick O'Brian

  Philosophy, Men, Blue

  Patrick O'Brian (2011). “The Truelove (Vol. Book 15) (Aubrey/Maturin Novels)”, p.15, W. W. Norton & Company

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• What makes the voice pathetic is that it doesn't know what kind of people it's reaching. Us. No one hears it, except us. This Age wanted heroes. It got us instead: carefully constructed, but immobile. Subtle but, unfit to take up the burden of the times. It happens. A whole generation of washouts. History says stand up, and we totter and collapse, weeping, moved, but not sufficient.

  Tony Kushner

  Hero, Voice, People

  Tony Kushner (1994). “A Bright Room Called Day”, p.67, Theatre Communications Group

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• It's hard to hold the hand of anyone who is reaching for the sky just to surrender

  Leonard Cohen

  Hands, Sky, Surrender

  Song: The Stranger Song, 1967

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• The king lifted a hand to her cheek and kissed her. It was not a kiss between strangers, not even a kiss between a bride and groom. It was a kiss between a man and his wife, and when it was over, the king closed his eyes and rested his forehead in the hollow of the queen's shoulder, like a man seeking respite, like a man reaching home at the end of the day.

  Megan Whalen Turner

  Kings, Queens, Home

  "The King of Attolia". Book by Megan Whalen Turner, 2006.

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• Perhaps it was only that the sense of reaching out to something larger than yourself gives you some feeling that there is something larger - and there really has to be, because plainly you aren't sufficient to the situation.

  Diana Gabaldon

  Giving, Feelings, Situation

  Diana Gabaldon (2009). “An Echo in the Bone: A Novel”, p.35, Delacorte Press

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• You are an ocean in a drop of dew, all the universes in a thin sack of blood. What are these pleasures then, these joys, these worlds that you keep reaching for, hoping they will make you more alive?

  Rumi

  Ocean, Blood, Joy

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