Thousand Quotes - Page 36

• History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood -- read the speeches of Mussolini -- at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation. (82)

  Don DeLillo

  Believe, Blood, Missing

  Don DeLillo (2015). “Underworld: Picador Classic”, p.84, Pan Macmillan

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• They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Nature, Animal, Imagination

  Rebecca Solnit (2006). “A Field Guide to Getting Lost”, p.97, Penguin

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• Old stories would tell how Weavers would kill each other over aesthetic disagreements, such as whether it was prettier to destroy an army of a thousand men or to leave it be, or whether a particular dandelion should or should not be plucked. For a Weaver, to think was to think aesthetically. To act - to Weave - was to bring about more pleasing patterns. They did not eat physical food: they seemed to subsist on the appreciation of beauty.

  China Mieville

  Appreciation, Army, Men

  "Perdido Street Station". Book by China Mieville, 2000.

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• The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out "stop!" When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.

  Bertolt Brecht

  Summer, Rain, Fall

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• All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days . . .nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.

  John F. Kennedy

  Inspirational, Life, Change

  Inaugural address, 20 Jan. 1961

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• So it's back once more, back up the slope. Why do they always ruin my rope with their cuts? I felt so ready the other day, Had a real foretaste of eternity In my guts. Spoonfeeding me yet another sip from life's cup. I don't want it, won't take any more of it. Let me throw up. Life is medium rare and good, I see, And the world full of soup and bread, But it won't pass into the blood for me, Just goes to my head. It makes me ill, though others it feeds; Do see that I must deny it! For a thousand years from now at least I'm keeping a diet.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Real, Cutting, Blood

  Rainer Maria Rilke, Walter W. Arndt (1989). “The Best of Rilke: 72 Form-true Verse Translations with Facing Originals, Commentary, and Compact Biography ; Translated by Walter Arndt ; Foreword by Cyrus Hamlin”, p.25, UPNE

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• Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.

  Charles Bukowski

  Suicide, Wall, Drinking

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• I believe in God... but I don't believe in religion. Religion is used to manipulate and punish. Used in a thousand ways for profit for even in the church, money is still the 'real' God.

  Virginia C. Andrews

  Real, Believe, Church

  Virginia C. Andrews (1984). “Seeds of yesterday”, Pocket

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• Ordinarily my mom just sunk deeper into her corner of the couch and ignored it. She had succesfully ignored a quarter of a century of entropy and decay, had sat peacefully crunching popcorn and drinking soda while the house fell down around us. If I had to guess the number of books she read during that time, I would place the number at somewhere in the neighborhood of forty thousand.

  Haven Kimmel

  Mom, Drinking, Book

  Haven Kimmel (2002). “A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland Indiana”, p.163, Broadway Books

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• It is the act of reading itself that I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn't stale, that hasn't been breathed by my family a thousand times already.

  Nick Hornby

  Reading, Opportunity, Air

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• And behind it lies not blind chance but a principle that works to help us understand, a thousand "coincidences" and friends come to show us the way when the problem seems too hard to solve alone. Problems for overcoming. Freedom for proving. And, as long as we believe in our dream, nothing by chance.

  Richard Bach

  Dream, Lying, Believe

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• You’ll find your one-in-a-million. But you’re sharp enough to know there’s no point in sludging through the first nine hundred, ninety-nine thousand, and ninety-nine to get to him.

  Kaye Gibbons

  Ninety Nine, Firsts, Enough

  Kaye Gibbons (1993). “Charms for the Easy Life”, p.69, Penguin

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• I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love, make up my sum.

  William Shakespeare

  Brother, Hamlet And Ophelia, Tempest

  'Hamlet' (1601) act 5, sc. 1, l. [291]

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• Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?

  William Shakespeare

  Song, Imagination, Gorges

  'Hamlet' (1601) act 5, sc. 1, l. [201]

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• Words were all he knew; they possessed and overwhelmed him, as if they were a thousand white cats with whom he shared a one-room apartment.

  Mark Helprin

  Cat, White, Rooms

  Mark Helprin (1989). “Winter's Tale”, Pocket Books

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• Think of being curled up and floating in a darkness. Even if you could think, even if you had an imagination, would you ever imagine its opposite, this miraculous world the Asian Taoists call the "Ten Thousand Things"? And if the darkness just got darker? And then you were dead? What would you care? How would you eve know the difference?

  Denis Johnson

  Thinking, Opposites, Differences

  Denis Johnson (2009). “Jesus' Son: Stories”, p.57, Macmillan

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• One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Wall, Moon, Sun

  Khaled Hosseini (2008). “A Thousand Splendid Suns”, p.347, A&C Black

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• I would like to see anyone, prophet, king or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time.

  Neil Gaiman

  Kings, Cat, Owning A Pet

  "A Dream of a Thousand Cats". Comic book by Neil Gaiman, The Sandman series, issue #18, 1990.

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• It is still news to her that passion could steer her wrong though she went down, a thousand times strung out across railroad tracks, off bridges under cars, or stiff glass bottle still in hand, hair soft on greasy pillows, still it is news she cannot follow love (his burning footsteps in blue crystal snow) & still come out all right.

  Diane di Prima

  Passion, Glasses, Hair

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• The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.

  Mark Twain

  Inspirational, Life, Atheist

  "Letters from the Earth" (1940)

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• Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into the nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.

  Thomas Wolfe

  Time, Night, Texas

  Thomas Wolfe (2016). “Look Homeward, Angel”, p.4, Thomas Wolfe

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• Come away, come away, Death, And in sad cypress let me be laid; Fly away, fly away, breath, I am slain by a fair cruel maid. My shroud of white stuck all with yew, O prepare it! My part of death no one so true did share it. Not a flower, not a flower sweet, On my black coffin let there be strewn: Not a friend, not a friend greet My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown. A thousand thousand sighs to save, lay me O where Sad true lover never find my grave, to weep there!

  William Shakespeare

  Sweet, Flower, White

  'Twelfth Night' (1601) act 2, sc. 4, l. 51

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• There was a discordant hum of human voices! There was a loud blast as of many trumpets! There was a harsh grating as of a thousand thunders! The fiery walls rushed back! An outstretched arm caught my own as I fell, fainting, into the abyss. It was that of General Lasalle. The French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Wall, Army, Hands

  Edgar Allan Poe (2012). “Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Poetry and Tales”, p.339, Broadview Press

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• If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Inspirational, Beauty, Nature

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.9, Library of America

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• Mama used to say, you have to know someone a thousand days before you can glimpse her soul.

  Shannon Hale

  Wisdom, Soul, Glimpse

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