Surface Quotes - Page 37

charm should be on the surface. It has no hidden use.

Ivy Compton-Burnett

Use, Charm, Should

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Passion alone could destroy passion. All the thinking in the world could not make so much as a dent in its surface.

Ellen Glasgow

Passion, Thinking, World

Ellen Glasgow, (2013). “In This Our Life”, p.174, Read Books Ltd

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The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence.

Simone Weil

Real, Civilization, Intellectual

Simone Weil (2015). “Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings”, p.156, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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Autumn comes to the sea with a fresh blaze of phosphorescence, when every wave crest is aflame. Here and there the whole surface may glow with sheets of cold fire, while below schools of fish pour through the water like molten metal.

Rachel Carson

Ocean, School, Autumn

Rachel Carson (2011). “The Sea Around Us”, p.32, Open Road Media

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The child's true constructive energy, a dynamic power, has remained unnoticed for thousands of years. Just as men have trodden the earth, and later tilled its surface, without thought for the immense wealth hidden in its depths, so the men of our day make progress after progress in civilized life, without noticing the treasures that lie hidden in the psychic world of infancy.

Maria Montessori

Children, Lying, Men

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Vermont tradition is based on the idea that group life should leave each person as free as possible to arrange his own life. This freedom is the only climate in which (we feel) a human being may create his own happiness. ... Character itself lies deep and secret below the surface, unknown and unknowable by others. It is the mysterious core of life, which every man or woman has to cope with alone, to live with, to conquer and put in order, or to be defeated by.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Lying, Character, Men

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Men seldom think deeply on subjects in which they have no choice of opinion: they are fearful of encountering obstacles to their faith--as in religion--and so are content with the surface.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Faith, Men, Thinking

Thomas Moore, Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1826). “Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan: In Two Volumes”, p.152

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One can be tired of Rome after three weeks and feel one has exhausted it; after three months one feels that one has not even scratched the surface of Rome; and after six months one wishes never to leave it.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Tired, Rome, Wish

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison (1989). “Italian Days”, p.343, Atlantic Monthly Press

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... freshness trembles beneath the surface of Everyday, a joy perpetual to all who catch its opal lights beneath the dust of habit.

Freya Stark

Light, Dust, Joy

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Once he became president, George [H.] Bush revealed a vein of Styrofoam and no matter how deep he tried to go, he always ended up bobbing on the surface. His inaugural speech was like being present at the death of language.

Kate Clinton

President, Matter, Styrofoam

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A letter is not a dialogue or even an omniscient exposition. It is a fabric of surfaces, a mask, a form as well suited to affectations as to the affections. The letter is, by its natural shape, self-justifying; it is one's own evidence, deposition, a self-serving testimony. In a letter the writer holds all the cards, controls everything about himself and about those assertions he wishes to make concerning events or the worth of others. For completely self-centered characters, the letter form is a complex and rewarding activity.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Character, Self, Wish

Elizabeth Hardwick (2011). “Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature”, p.195, New York Review of Books

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My photographs don't go below the surface. They don't go below anything. They're readings of the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues.

Richard Avedon

Reading, Photographer, Clue

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Surfaces simultaneously reveal and conceal.

John Paul Caponigro

Photographer

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Huge lemons, cut in slices, would sink like setting suns into the dusky sea, softly illuminating it with their radiating membranes, and its clear, smooth surface aquiver from the rising bitter essence.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Food, Cutting, Sea

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I felt I should have been the happiest person in the world. But I looked inside, and that happiness was only on the surface, not so deep. Beneath it was hollow. Up until that time, I had been thinking meditation was a joke, a fad and a waste of time.

David Lynch

Thinking, Should Have, Meditation

"His Mission to Change the World Through Meditation". Interview with Marianne Schnall, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 9, 2014.

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Surface cures are not going to get rid of the torment that's inside.

David Lynch

Cures, Torment

"His Mission to Change the World Through Meditation". Interview with Marianne Schnall, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 9, 2014.

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for man, woman, and child the tender, irregular, sensitive, living foot, which does not even stand with all its little surface on the ground, and which makes no base to satisfy an architectural eye, is, as it were, the unexpected thing. ... nothing makes a more helpless and unsymmetrical sign than does a naked foot.

Alice Meynell

Children, Eye, Men

Alice Meynell (2013). “The Essential Alice Meynell Collection”, p.452, eBookIt.com

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There is a lot of money to be made from miseducation, from the easy to read easy to learn textbooks, workbooks, teacher manuals, educational games and visual aids. The textbook business is more than a billion-dollar-a-year industry and some of its biggest profits come from 'audio-visual aids' - flash cards, tape cassettes, and filmstrips. No wonder the education industry encourages schools to focus on surface education.

Marva Collins

Education, Teacher, School

Marva Collins, Civia Tamarkin (1984). “Marva Collins Way”, Tarcher

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[When working on a book] I have an almost complete detachment from the world I live in, a sort of armor against distraction. I talk to people, move about, appear on the surface much as usual. But later on I have only a confused memory of what has happened during that period.

Mary Roberts Rinehart

Memories, Confused, Moving

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Beneath the surface of our daily life, in the personal history of many of us, there runs a continuous controversy between an Ego that affirms and an Ego that denies.

Beatrice Webb

Running, Ego, Personal History

Beatrice Webb, Beatrice Potter Webb (1979). “My Apprenticeship”, p.43, Cambridge University Press

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... Rembrandt is not a painter at all. He is a creator, who creates his beings, three dimensional living beings, on a two-dimensional flat surface which acts as a mute, and enforces silence on them.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Two, Silence, Three

Sylvia Townsend Warner, William Maxwell (1982). “Letters”

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Virtue, without the graces, is like a rich diamond unpolished--it hardly looks better than a common pebble; but when the hand of the master rubs off the roughness, and forms the sides into a thousand brilliant surfaces, it is then that we acknowledge its worth, admire its beauty, and long to wear it in our bosoms.

Jane Porter

Hands, Long, Grace

Sir Philip Sidney, Jane Porter (1807). “Aphorisms of Sir Philip Sidney: With Remarks”, p.104

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In a city you thought of all life as human life. You had to live in the heart of the woods to realize that humanity was a slight ripple on the surface of a flood of life that seeped into every vacant crack, flowed into every biological vacuum the moment it occurred.

Helen McCloy

Heart, Cities, Humanity

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most of our social and educational institutions are designed to weed out or make over people ... until we produce a world where everyone is a smart, quick-witted, aggressive person living on the surface of the mind without ever looking into the depths.

Helen McCloy

Weed, Educational, Smart

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There is no right and wrong way to paint except honestly or dishonestly. Honestly is trying for the bigger thing. Dishonestly is bluffing and getting through a smattering of surface representation with no meaning.

Emily Carr

Trying, Way, Painting

Emily Carr (2009). “Opposite Contraries: The Unknown Journals of Emily Carr and Other Writings”, p.76, D & M Publishers

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