Sheer Quotes - Page 17

• Even the disappointing diffusion of a sheer curtain can suggest the most colorful bouquet of unspeakable secrets.

  Chris Ware

  Secret, Bouquets, Disappointing

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• The movie, by sheer speeding up of the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configurations and structure.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Movie, Creativity, Media

  Marshall McLuhan (1964). “Understanding media: the extensions of man”

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• Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.

  Terry Eagleton

  Art, Ideas, Looks

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• Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Writing, Stories, Levitation

  "Gabriel Garcia Marquez: What I've Learned" by Cal Fussman, www.esquire.com. April 18, 2014.

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• Keep it kickwriting at all costs too, that is, write only what kicks you and keeps you overtime awake from sheer mad joy.

  Jack Kerouac

  Writing, Mad, Joy

  Jack Kerouac (1991). “On the road”, Penguin USA

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• If I were a Roman Catholic, I should turn a heretic, in sheer desperation, because I would rather go to heaven than go to purgatory.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Heaven, Catholic, Desperation

  Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1873). “The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit: Sermons Preached and Revised”, p.57

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• The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power - thirty-two billion dollars a year - used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat.

  Michael Pollan

  Government, Years, Two

  Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.91, Penguin

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• Personally, I have been very impressed by the slow food movement. It is about celebrating the culture of food, of sharing the extraordinary knowledge, developed over millennia, of the traditions involved with quality food production, of the sheer joy and pleasure of consuming food together. Especially within the context of family life, this has to be one of the highest forms of cultural activity.

  Prince Charles

  Family, Knowledge, Joy

  "Organics Interview". Interview With Joanne Shoebridge, www.abc.net.au. September 25, 2005.

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• There is a way in which the collective knowledge of mankind expresses itself, for the finite individual, through mere daily living . . . a way in which life itself is sheer knowing.

  Laurens van der Post

  Life, Knowing, Individuality

  Laurens Van der Post (1979). “Venture to the interior”, Harcourt

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• I’ve learned what ‘classical’ means. It means something that sings and dances through sheer joy of existence.

  Gustav Holst

  Mean, Joy, Musical

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• O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
  Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.

  Gerard Manley Hopkins

  Fall, Men, Mind

  "No worst, there is none" l. 9 (written 1885)

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• Women get consumed. Not surprising, considering the sheer amount of traffic a woman's body experiences. Tampons and speculums. Cocks, fingers, vibrators and more, between the legs, from behind, in the mouth.

  Gillian Flynn

  Body, Legs, Mouths

  Gillian Flynn (2012). “The Novels of Gillian Flynn: Sharp Objects, Dark Places”, p.198, Broadway Books

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• Hopes have precarious life.
  They are oft blighted, withered, snapped sheer off
  In vigorous growth and turned to rottenness.

  George Eliot

  Hope, Growth, Vigorous

  George Eliot (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated)”, p.4195, Delphi Classics

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• It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.

  Toni Morrison

  Heartbreak, Long, Missing

  Toni Morrison (1987). “Sula”

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• I do not believe that our relationship to the earth is liable to change for the better until it gets catastrophically worse. Our record indicates that we can walk with our eyes wide open straight into sheer destruction if there is a profit on the way-and that seems to me to be what we are doing now. I have no great expectation that human cussedness will somehow be quickly modified and turned into generosity or that humanity's care of the earth will improve much. But I do go around planting trees on the campus.

  Joseph Sittler

  Believe, Eye, Generosity

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• When you consider the opportunity and power He had to really do a job, and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead, His sheer incompetence is almost staggering.

  Joseph Heller

  Funny, God, Jobs

  Joseph Heller (1999). “Catch-22: A Novel”, p.172, Simon and Schuster

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• I could buy that she would murder me in a fit of rage, poison me out of flaming jealousy, or bomb my car out of sheer, stubborn pique. But she would never do it and feel nothing.

  Jim Butcher

  Car, Poison, Bombs

  Jim Butcher (2002). “Summer Knight: Book four of The Dresden Files”, p.309, Penguin

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• Looking at suicide—the sheer numbers, the pain leading up to it, and the suffering left behind—is harrowing. For every moment of exuberance in the science, or in the success of governments, there is a matching and terrible reality of the deaths themselves: the young deaths, the violent deaths, the unnecessary deaths

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Suicide, Pain, Reality

  Kay Redfield Jamison (2011). “Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide”, p.310, Vintage

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• These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light - the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.

  David Foster Wallace

  Fall, Sleep, Soul

  "Infinite Jest". Book by David Foster Wallace, February 1, 1996.

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• Because I never have any definite destination. This ship is not for going to places, but for getting away from them. When I stop at a port, it's only for the sheer pleasure of leaving it. I always think: here's one more place that can't hold me.

  Ayn Rand

  Thinking, Leaving, Ships

  Ayn Rand (2005). “The Fountainhead”, p.421, Penguin

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• ...these stories are a kind of beacon. By making stories full of empathy and amusement and the sheer pleasure of discovering the world, these writers reassert the fact that we live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.

  Ira Glass

  Empathy, Joy, Stories

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• Really, Rachel looked like a sun, bright and exuding energy, holding us two moons in a parallel orbit by the sheer force of her will.

  Maggie Stiefvater

  Moon, Two, Energy

  Maggie Stiefvater (2014). “Shiver Series (Shiver, Linger, Forever, Sinner)”, p.31, Scholastic Inc.

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• One must be careful with words. Words turn probabilities into facts and by sheer force of definition translate tendencies into habits.

  Fay Weldon

  Definitions, Facts, Habit

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• In the last resort, sheer insight is the greatest asset of all.

  Herbert Butterfield

  History, Lasts, Assets

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• Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.

  Anne Sexton

  Dark, Giving, Skins

  Anne Sexton (2001). “Transformations”, p.38, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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