Shapes Quotes - Page 16

• Looking around, I thought the human species was in fine shape and tried to think of something more beautiful than women and couldn't come up with a thing. The propagation of the species was a dance of total joy.

  Pat Conroy

  Beautiful, Thinking, Joy

  Pat Conroy (1995). “Beach Music”, Nan A. Talese

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• Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape?

  Lucy Grealy

  Giving, Doe, Definitions

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• But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.

  Margaret Atwood

  Thinking, Liquid, Transparency

  Margaret Atwood (1989). “Cat's Eye”, Bantam

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• Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Desire, Waking Life, World

  Cormac McCarthy (2010). “Cities of the Plain”, p.285, Pan Macmillan

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• You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?

  John Steinbeck

  Ocean, Light, Dust

  John Steinbeck (2008). “Sweet Thursday”, p.110, Penguin

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• A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.

  Dylan Thomas

  Art, Writing, Creativity

  Dylan Thomas, Daniel Jones (1992). “On the Air with Dylan Thomas: The Broadcasts”, p.61, New Directions Publishing

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• The idea occurred to him when he was twenty. At first it was only a vague idea, a question looming — what should I do? — with an answer taking shape: nothing.

  Georges Perec

  Ideas, Twenties, Answers

  Georges Perec (1987). “Life, a user's manual: fictions”, Collins Harvill Press

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• I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing…. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.

  Margaret Atwood

  Real, Dark, Night

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• ...she took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstacy in the air. Where to begin?--that was the question at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must run; the mark made.

  Virginia Woolf

  Running, Simple, Air

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• [her] mind blackens. The blackness is not a thought, but if it could be pressed into a thought, if a chemical from a dropper could be dripped onto it causing its color and essence to become visible, it would take the shape of this sentence: Why does no one want me?

  Steve Martin

  Color, Essence, Mind

  Steve Martin (2001). “Shopgirl”, Wheeler Pub Incorporated

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• No, women like you don't write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Writing, Dark, Hair

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• Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Moving, Choices, Bidding

  Cormac McCarthy (2007). “No Country for Old Men”, p.259, Vintage

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• Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? Polonius: By the mass, and ‘tis like a camel, indeed. Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel. Polonius: It is backed like a weasel. Hamlet: Or like a whale? Polonius: Very like a whale.

  William Shakespeare

  Clouds, Whales, Camels

  'hamlet' (1601) act 3, sc. 2, l. [400]

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• The object of Art is to give life a shape.

  William Shakespeare

  Life, Art, Giving

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• If you shut your eyes and are a lucky one, you may see at times a shapeless pool of lovely pale colours suspended in the darkness; then if you squeeze your eyes tighter, the pool begins to take shape, and the colours become so vivid that with another squeeze they must go on fire.

  James M. Barrie

  Eye, Fire, Darkness

  James M. Barrie (2013). “Peter Pan (Peter and Wendy) (Annotated Edition)”, p.78, Jazzybee Verlag

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• He tried to smile, but it was just a shape his mouth made.

  Melissa Bank

  Mouths, Made

  Melissa Bank (2000). “The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing”, p.136, Penguin

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• When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.

  John Green

  Teenage, Stupid, Real

  John Green (2008). “Looking for Alaska”, p.161, Penguin

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• Happy Valentines Day to those who have found love, in whatever shape or form, and to those who are still hunting, don't give up. If you feel bad, send yourself a card. You must be worth it.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Love, Valentines Day, Giving Up

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• The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.

  William Shakespeare

  Strong, Eye, Science

  'A Midsummer Night's Dream' (1595-6) act 5, sc. 1, l. 7

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• If God existed (a question concerning which Jubal maintained a meticulous intellectual neutrality) and if He desired to be worshiped (a proposition which Jubal found inherently improbable but conceivably possible in the dim light of his own ignorance), then (stipulating affirmatively both the above) it nevertheless seemed wildly unlikely to Jubal to the point of reductio ad absurdum that a God potent to shape galaxies would be titillated and swayed by the whoop-te-do nonsense the Fosterites offered Him as "worship.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Ignorance, Light, Intellectual

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• I am human. Like all humans, I do not remember my birth. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers to the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the begging from the shape of later events. - Vida Winter

  Diane Setterfield

  Children, Winter, Events

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.357, Simon and Schuster

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• The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it -- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.

  C. S. Lewis

  Keys, Doors, Hands

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• The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ takes the slums out of people, and then they take themselves out of the slums. The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature.

  Ezra Taft Benson

  Faith, Men, People

  "Born of God". Ezra Taft Benson's address at the General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, www.lds.org. October 1985.

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• We are each given a block of marble when we begin a lifetime, and the tools to shape it into sculpture. We can drag it behind us untouched, we can pound it to gravel, we can shape it into glory. Examples from every other life are left for us to see, lifeworks finished and unfinished, guiding and warning. Near the end our sculpture is nearly finished, and we can smooth and polish what we started years before. We can make our progress then, but to do it we must see past the appearances of age.

  Richard Bach

  Block, Past, Years

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• Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need not mention it. Why speak of time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments, as they pass, into warmth and action?

  Ray Bradbury

  Needs, Nests, Flesh

  Ray Bradbury (1962). “Something wicked this way comes”, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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