Shapes Quotes - Page 17

• Up to a point a person’s life is shaped by environment, heredity, and changes in the world about them. Then there comes a time when it lies within their grasp to shape the clay of their life into the sort of thing they wish it to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune or the quirks of fate. Everyone has the power to say, "This I am today. That I shall be tomorrow.

  Louis L'Amour

  Life, Lying, Fate

  127 Copy quote

• Rain! whose soft architectural hands have power to cut stones, and chisel to shapes of grandeur the very mountains.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Nature, Rain, Adventure

  Henry Ward Beecher (1862). “Eyes and ears”, p.49

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Maybe I'd never see him again... maybe he'd gone for good... swallowed up, body and soul, in the kind of stories you hear about... Ah, it's an awful thing... and being young doesn't help any... when you notice for the first time... the way you lose people as you go along ... the buddies you'll never see again... never again... when you notice that they've disappeared like dreams... that it's all over... finished... that you too will get lost someday... a long way off but inevitably... in the awful torrent of things and people... of the days and shapes... that pass... that never stop.

  Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  Dream, Long, People

  23 Copy quote

• Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Events, Patterns, Facts

  Cormac McCarthy (2013). “The Border Trilogy”, p.219, Pan Macmillan

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.

  Martha Graham

  Dance, Believe, Learning

  "The Routledge Dance Studies Reader". Book by Alexandra Carter and Janet O'Shea, p. 96, 1998.

  117 Copy quote

  Show source

• He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

  William Faulkner

  Pride, Talking, Long

  William Faulkner (1954). “The Best of Faulkner”

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• The social mould civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies.

  Thomas Hardy

  Stars, Real, Passion

  Jude the Obscure pt. 4, ch. 1 (1896)

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• One thing he discovered with a great deal of astonishment was that music held for him more then just pleasure. There was meat to it. The grouping of sounds, their forms in the air as they rang out and faded, said something comforting to him about the rule of Creation. What the music said was that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not always be just tangle and drift, but have a shape, an aim. It was a powerful argument that life did not just happen.

  Charles Frazier

  Powerful, Air, Comforting

  6 Copy quote

• The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Flower, Dark, Flames

  Cormac McCarthy (2007). “The Road”, p.40, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The need of black conservatives to gain the respect of their white peers deeply shapes certain elements of their conservatism. In this regard, they simply want what most people want, to be judged by the quality of their skills, not by the color of their skin. But the black conservatives overlook the fact that affirmative action policies were political responses to the pervasive refusal of most white Americans to judge black Americans on that basis.

  Cornel West

  Color, Skills, White

  7 Copy quote

• To plot is to live. […] We start out lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that's not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control. Even after death, most particularly after death, the search continues. Burial rites are an attempt to complete the scheme, in ritual. Picture a state funeral, Jack. It is all precision, detail, order, design. The nation holds its breath. - (WN 292)

  Don DeLillo

  Order, Design, Funeral

  5 Copy quote

• A crow may put on human shape or crow shape, but we remain crows,” he replied firmly. “Hawks, too, are the same, whether they are born in human nests or hawk ones. The nestlings must always be protected. Since you have chosen to protect these, I and mine will protect you.

  Tamora Pierce

  Crow, May, Nests

  Tamora Pierce (2014). “Trickster's Duet”, p.275, Random House Books for Young Readers

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• This is the awe-inspiring universe of magic: There are no atoms, only waves and motions all around. Here, you discard all belief in barriers to understanding. You put aside understanding itself. This universe cannot be seen, cannot be heard, cannot be detected in any way by fixed perceptions. It is the ultimate void where no preordained screens occur upon which forms may be projected. You have only one awareness here—the screen of the magi: Imagination! Here, you learn what it is to be human. You are a creator of order, of beautiful shapes and systems, an organizer of chaos.

  Frank Herbert

  Beautiful, Order, Imagination

  "Heretics of Dune. Chapter: The Atreides Manifesto, Bene Gesserit Archives". Book by Frank Herbert, 1984.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Let's say that when I was a little baby, and all my bones soft and malleable, I was put in a small Episcopal cruciform box and so took my shape. Then, when I broke out of the box, the way a baby chick escapes an egg, is it strange that I had the shape of a cross? Have you ever noticed that chickens are roughly egg-shaped?

  John Steinbeck

  Baby, Eggs, Littles

  John Steinbeck (2008). “The Winter of Our Discontent”, p.108, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It just changes shape.

  Sheri Reynolds

  Energy, Physics, Destroyed

  6 Copy quote

• The last days are not for the faint of heart or the spiritually out of shape.

  Sheri L. Dew

  Heart, Lasts, Last Day

  12 Copy quote

• Then there came a faraway, booming voice like a low, clear bell. It came from the center of the bowl and down the great sides to the ground and then bounced toward her eagerly. 'You see I am fate,' it shouted, 'and stronger than your puny plans; and I am how-things-turn-out and I am different from your little dreams, and I am the flight of time and the end of beauty and unfulfilled desire; all the accidents and imperceptions and the little minutes that shape the crucial hours are mine. I am the exception that proves no rules, the limits of your control, the condiment in the dish of life.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Dream, Fate, Voice

  7 Copy quote

• But a few choosing to venture deeper into the painful corridors of their affliction, found after a while that they could now grind and polish ever more exotic surfaces, hyperboloidial and even stranger, eventually including what we must term ‘imaginary’ shapes (which some preferred to term invisible).

  Thomas Pynchon

  Exotic, Affliction, Venture

  5 Copy quote

• Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seeds of rapacious licence and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.

  Charles Dickens

  Crush, Yield, Humanity

  Charles Dickens, General Press (2016). “A Tale of Two Cities: A Story of the French Revolution”, p.339, GENERAL PRESS

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Well. Then we had the irises, rising beautiful and cool on their tall stalks, like blown glass, like pastel water momentarily frozen in a splash, light blue, light mauve, and the darker ones, velvet and purple, black cat's ears in the sun, indigo shadow, and the bleeding hearts, so female in shape it was a surprise they'd not long since been rooted out. There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.

  Margaret Atwood

  Beautiful, Cat, Heart

  Margaret Atwood (1986). “The Handmaid's Tale”, p.153, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  35 Copy quote

  Show source

• Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

  George Orwell

  Together Again, Mind, Pieces

  George Orwell (1983). “1984”, p.573, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• The ear participates, and helps arrange marriages; the eye has already made love with what it sees. The eye knows pleasure, delights in the body's shape: the ear hears words that talk about all this. When hearing takes place, character areas change; but when you see, inner areas change. If all you know about fire is what you have heard see if the fire will agree to cook you! Certain energies come only when you burn. If you long for belief, sit down in the fire! When the ear receives subtly; it turns into an eye. But if words do not reach the ear in the chest, nothing happens.

  Rumi

  Character, Eye, Fire

  Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (Maulana), Jelaluddin Rumi, Kabir Helminski, Andrew Harvey (2005). “The Rumi Collection: An Anthology of Translations of Mevlâna Jalâluddin Rumi”, p.46, Shambhala Publications

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• A particular train of thought persisted in, be it good or bad, cannot fail to produce its results on the character and circumstances. A man cannot directly choose his circumstances, but he can choose his thoughts, and so indirectly, yet surely, shape his circumstances.

  James Allen

  Inspirational, Character, Men

  James Allen (1923). “As a Man Thinketh”, p.13, New Line Publishing

  29 Copy quote

  Show source

• It seems to me, that this, too, is how memory works. What we remember of what was done to us shapes our view, molds us, sets our stance. But what we remember is past, it no longer exists, and yet we hold on to it, live by it, surrender so much control to it. What do we become when we put down the scripts written by history and memory, when each person before us can be seen free of the cultural or personal narrative we've inherited or devised? When we, ourselves, can taste that freedom.

  Rebecca Walker

  Memories, Past, Views

  10 Copy quote

• My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated.

  Edward Said

  Men, Silence, Made

  109 Copy quote