Sirens Quotes - Page 2

• SIREN, n. One of several musical prodigies famous for a vain attempt to dissuade Odysseus from a life on the ocean wave. Figuratively, any lady of splendid promise, dissembled purpose and disappointing performance.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Life, Ocean, Musical

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.215, University of Georgia Press

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• The stage is more beholding to love than the life of man. For as to the stage, love is ever matter of comedies and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much mischief, sometimes like a Siren, sometimes like a Fury.

  Francis Bacon

  Love, Men, Tragedy

  Francis Bacon (2015). “Bacon's Essays: Top Essays”, p.17, 谷月社

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• The purely Great
  Whose soul no siren passion could unsphere,
  Thou nameless, now a power and mixed with fate.

  James Russell Lowell

  Passion, Fate, Soul

  James Russell Lowell (2016). “Delphi Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell (Illustrated)”, p.794, Delphi Classics

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• I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Body, Tangible, Sensuality

  Fernando Pessoa, Richard Zenith (1996). “Book of Disquietude”, Carcanet Press Limited

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• My rhyming skills got you climbing hills, I'll travel through your mind into your spine like siren drills.

  Eminem

  Climbing, Skills, Mind

  "Song: 'Infinite'". 1996.

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• what makes us so afraid is the thing we half see, or half hear, as in a wood at dusk, when a tree stump becomes an animal and a sound becomes a siren. And most of that fear is the fear of not knowing, of not actually seeing correctly.

  Edna O'Brien

  Fear, Animal, Knowing

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• Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Mistake, Writing, Moon

  Kurt Vonnegut (2007). “The Sirens of Titan”, p.41, Dial Press

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• A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Love, Life, Inspiring

  FaceBook post by Kurt Vonnegut from Nov 05, 2014

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• If anyone asks you if you’re taken,” I said, “the answer is yes.” “I think I can live with that,” he promised. “Good,” I said. “Because you don’t want to see me be cross.” “Too late.” “Shut up and dance, Walt.” “Shut up and dance, Walt.” We did—with the music of a psychotic griffin screaming behind us, and the sirens and horns of Brooklyn wailing below. It was quite romantic.

  Rick Riordan

  Taken, Thinking, Too Late

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• Now its raining its pouring the old man is snoring now I lay me down to sleep I hear the sirens in the street all my dreams are made of chrome I have no way to get back home I’d rather die before I wake like Marilyn Monroe and throw my dreams out in the street and the rain make ‘em grow

  Tom Waits

  Dream, Rain, Home

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• The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Motivational, Song, Atheist

  Christopher Hitchens (2007). “The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever”, p.480, Da Capo Press

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• I try to avoid Twitter. I occasionally can't resist the siren call of email.

  Diablo Cody

  Trying, Email

  "Diablo Cody Talks YOUNG ADULT, the EVIL DEAD Remake, SWEET VALLEY HIGH, Her Directorial Debut, and a Lot More". Interview with Steve 'Frosty' Weintraub, collider.com. December 16, 2011.

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• The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.

  Ralph Ellison

  Trying, Empty, Clock

  Ralph Ellison (2010). “Invisible Man”, p.328, Vintage

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• Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city.

  William Carlos Williams

  Moving, Rain, Dark

  William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.174, New Directions Publishing

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• Of pure poetry there are two kinds, that which mirrors the beauty of the world in which our bodies are, and that which builds the more mysterious kingdoms where geography ends and fairyland begins, with gods and heroes at war, and the sirens singing still, and Alph going down to the darkness from Xanadu.

  Lord Dunsany

  War, Hero, Two

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• Italy's siren call lures us more and more.

  Frances Mayes

  Lure

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• Tomorrow I will curse the dawn, but there will be other, earlier nights, and the dawns will be no longer hell laid out in alarms and raw bells and sirens.

  Sylvia Plath

  Depression, Night, Dawn

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.66, Anchor

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• The Hollywood sirens are shrieking, while down some search lit alley runs some lost belief.

  Joni Mitchell

  Running, Art, Media

  Song: The Windfall, Album: Night Ride Home

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• We've had 20 years of mass murders throughout which I have repeatedly told CNN and our other media, if you don't want to propagate more mass murders, don't start the story with sirens blaring. Don't have photographs of the killer. Don't make this 24/7 coverage. Do everything you can not to make the body count the lead story, not to make the killer some kind of anti-hero. Do localize the story to the affected community and make it as boring as possible in every other market. Because every time we have intense saturation coverage of a mass murder, we expect to see one or two more within a week.

  Park Dietz

  Hero, Media, Years

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• Scheherazade, of course, was always in the back of my mind, because she's also a storyteller identified as female who tells a lot of anti-female stories. There's a parade in The Arabian Nights of sorceresses, adulteresses, ghouls, sirens, harridans.

  Marina Warner

  Night, Ghouls, Mind

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The siren south is well enough, but New York, at the beginning of March, is a hoyden we would not care to miss--a drafty wench, her temperature up and down, full of bold promises and dust in the eye.

  E. B. White

  New York, Eye, Dust

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• There was too much noise. Sirens from police cars and ambulances. Shouts from the crowd on the street eighteen floors below. Traffic from other streets and all of the noises of San Francisco. Mostly, though, there were the voices. Whispering to him. Reminding him of the dark things he had done - all of the little things he had forgotten, all of the big things he had tried to forget. Mostly they reminded him of his biggest secret, a betrayal of trust and friendship long ago. He squeezed his eyes shut as if that could somehow keep the voices away.

  Don Bassingthwaite

  Friendship, Betrayal, Eye

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• ...for the first time in my life, a voice went off in my head:'You have no power over what happens in your life. Drugs dictate exactly what you're going to do. You've taken your hands off the steering wheel, and you're going wherever the drug world takes you.' That had never changed. The feeling would well up inside of me, and no matter how much I loved my girl or my band or my friends or my family, when that siren song 'Go get high now' started playing in my head, I was off.

  Anthony Kiedis

  Girl, Song, Taken

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• For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and provide for it.

  Patrick Henry

  Truth, Honesty, Integrity

  Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death, delivered 23 March 1775 at Henrico Parrish Church St, Richmond Virginia, Second Virginia Convention

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• And nevertheless I have loved certain of my masters, and those strangely intimate though elusive relations existing between student and teacher, and the Sirens singing somewhere within the cracked voice of him who is first to reveal a new idea. The greatest seducer was not Alcibiades, afterall, it was Socrates.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Teacher, Voice, Ideas

  Marguerite Yourcenar (1954). “Memoirs of Hadrian”, New York, Farrar

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