Torn Quotes - Page 8

• We were essentially torn from the Gaian womb, thrust into the birth canal of history, and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism and all the rest of it.

  Terence McKenna

  Fall, Empires, World

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• Coition is a slight attack of apoplexy. For man gushes forth from man, and is separated by being torn apart with a kind of blow.

  Democritus

  Blow, Men, Torn Apart

  "Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels Fragmente Der Vorsokratiker", translated by Kathleen Freeman, Harvard University Press, (p. 150), 1948.

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• I plucked a honeysuckle where The hedge on high is quick with thorn, And climbing for the prize, was torn, And fouled my feet in quag-water; And by the thorns and by the wind The blossom that I took was thinn'd, And yet I found it sweet and fair.

  Dante Gabriel Rossetti

  Sweet, Climbing, Wind

  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Clive Wilmer (2014). “Selected Poems”, p.91, Routledge

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• The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley of ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment.

  Karl Marx

  Men, Self, Hands

  Karl Marx, Lawrence H. Simon (1994). “Marx: Selected Writings”, p.161, Hackett Publishing

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• Though this new forest grew mightily, elsewhere the mighty jungles fell. Elsewhere the coastal rain forests that furred the body of the world were torn and riven. Elsewhere the last of the old growth the last of the world's own garment were ripped away. It was in this time, now, that the mother of us all was stripped naked and left to die in shame of her children, she who had been robed in glory like this, adorned like this. I bent my head upon the roots and wept, sorrowing for the trees.

  Sheri S. Tepper

  Mother, Children, Rain

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• If I had foreseen Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I would have torn up my formula in 1905.

  Albert Einstein

  Hiroshima And Nagasaki, Formulas, Foreseen

  William Hermanns, Albert Einstein (1983). “Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man”, Branden Publishing Company

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• Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer and heard the rustling of the leaves and the warbling of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation. Polluted by crimes and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Summer, Cheer, Should Have

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• Anything that's really good, everybody wants to put their hands on. The multimedia puts their hands on it and everything happens that makes it global. Then people forget the roots of it and people forget why they care about it, and then it gets torn apart and turns so commercial that you don't even know what the essence of this art form is even about.

  Nas

  Art, Hands, Essence

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

  Virginia Woolf

  Writing, Attachment, Play

  "A Room of One's Own". Essay by Virginia Woolf (Chapter 3, pp. 43-44), October 24, 1929.

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• Riven and torn with cannon-shot, the trunks of the trees protruded bunches of splinters like hands, the fingers above the wound interlacing with those below.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Hands, Tree, Splinters

  Ambrose Bierce (2012). “Civil War Stories”, p.18, Courier Corporation

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• If our family was poor, of what did our poverty consist? If our clothes were torn the torn places only let in the sun and wind. In the winter we had no overcoats, but that only meant we ran rather than loitered.

  Sherwood Anderson

  Winter, Wind, Clothes

  Sherwood Anderson (1924). “A Story Teller's Story: The Tale of an American Writer's Journey Through His Own Imaginative World and Through the World of Facts, with Many of His Experiences and Impressions Among Other Writers--told in Many Notes--in Four Books--and an Epilogue”, p.5, University of Michigan Press

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• For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world... I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: "I will understand this, too, I will understand everything.

  Primo Levi

  Spring, Science, Law

  "The Periodic Table". Book by Primo Levi, 1975.

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• Know that it is a corpse who loves you and adores you and will never, never leave you!...Look, I am not laughing now, crying, crying for you, Christine, who have torn off my mask and who therefore can never leave me again!...Oh, mad Christine, who wanted to see me!

  Gaston Leroux

  Love You, Mad, Laughing

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• From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy.

  Sherwood Anderson

  Sadness, Boys, Men

  Sherwood Anderson (1995). “Winesburg, Ohio”, p.145, Courier Corporation

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• Sensuality often hastens the "Growth of Love" so much that the roots remain weak and are easily torn up.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Roots, Growth, Weak

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2009). “Basic Writings of Nietzsche”, p.276, Modern Library

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• People move because of the wear and tear of anxiety. Because of the gnawing feeling that no matter how hard they work their efforts will yield nothing, that what they build up in one year will be torn down in one day by others. Because of the impression that the future is blocked up, that *they* might do all right but not their children. Because of the feeling that nothing will change, that happiness and prosperity are possible only somewhere else.

  Yann Martel

  Children, Moving, Years

  Yann Martel (2012). “Life Of Pi, Illustrated”, p.119, Canongate Books

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• ..we wear the mask that grins and lies, it hides our cheeks and shades our eyes- this debt we pay to human guile; with torn and bleeding hearts we smile.

  Paul Laurence Dunbar

  Smile, Lying, Eye

  1895 'We Wear the Mask', stanza 1.

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• Trying to exhaust himself, Vaughan devised an endless almanac of terrifying wounds and insane collisions: The lungs of elderly men punctured by door-handles; the chests of young women impaled on steering-columns; the cheek of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights. To Vaughan, these wounds formed the key to a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind, like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse.

  J. G. Ballard

  Technology, Men, Keys

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• Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free.

  Rumi

  Inspirational, Dance, Spiritual

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• All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated....As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all....No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

  John Donne

  Book, Men, Islands

  1624 Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation no.17.

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• I'm like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he's cold, and his clothes are torn, and he's ashamed, but he's not unhappy.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Men, Clothes, Unhappy

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• Amanda took the torn page from Maniac. To her, it was the broken wing of a bird, a pet out in the rain.

  Jerry Spinelli

  Rain, Wings, Broken

  Jerry Spinelli (1991). “Maniac Magee”

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• If God had not permitted the people of Jerusalem to be torn asunder and driven them from the land, but had let them keep it after before, no one could convince them that they are not God`s chosen people.

  Martin Luther

  Land, People, Jerusalem

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• But what happens when her beauty is torn from her like a cover from a book? Will he care to read her then, although her pages speak of nothing but love for him?

  Pearl S. Buck

  Book, Her Beauty, Care

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• From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew; that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.

  Ian Mcewan

  Simple, Obvious Things, Perspective

  "Atonement". Book by Ian Mcewan, www.sfgate.com. 2001.

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