Clif's quotes

(showing 1-40 of 40)

"The hardest thing about adolescence is that everything seems too big. There's no way to get context or perspective, ..... Pain and joy without limits. No one can live like that forever, so experience finally comes to our rescue. We come to know what we can endure, and also that nothing endures."
— Sara Paretsky (Bleeding Kansas)

tags: adolescence, endurance, experience, inspirational
3 people liked it

"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Act 5, scene 5, 19–28 "
— William Shakespeare (Macbeth)

331 people liked it

"A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune"
— William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury)

tags: misfortune, time
6 people liked it

"If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that blows and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us."
— Mary Shelley (Frankenstein)

tags: profound
3 people liked it

"Oil they would buy from anyone. From Satan."
— Christopher Buckley (Florence of Arabia: A Novel)

tags: buy, oil, satan
1 person liked it

"When you really know somebody you can’t hate them. Or maybe it’s just that you can’t really know them until you stop hating them."
— Orson Scott Card (Speaker for the Dead)

tags: hate, know
12 people liked it

"... you should first follow the plow if you want to dance the harvest jig."
— Ken Follett (World Without End)

tags: work
7 people liked it

"For somehow this is tyranny's disease, to trust no friends."
— Aeschylus (Prometheus Bound)

tags: disease, friends, trust, tyranny
5 people liked it

"Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

tags: failure, success
29 people liked it

"Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them."
— Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers)

tags: behavior, cultural, legacies
13 people liked it

"Sadly, American teenagers are to a weightless vacuum as seat cushions are to polyurethane foam -"
— Marisha Pessl (Special Topics in Calamity Physics)

tags: teenagers
5 people liked it

"Not returning phone calls is the severest form of torture in the civilized world."
— Marisha Pessl (Special Topics in Calamity Physics)

tags: phone, torture
12 people liked it

"Conversing with children is a fine art.... An art form that demands large amounts of both honesty and misdirection. Or maybe discretion is a better word."
— Miriam Toews (The Flying Troutmans)

tags: children, conversing
2 people liked it

"Honest people don't hide their deeds."
— Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

tags: honesty
4 people liked it

"They had applied their doubts to the very head that had introduced doubt as a tool for advancing knowledge. And in the end they gave the head a nod."
— Russell Shorto (Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason)

tags: doubt, head, knowledge
1 person liked it

"Cogito ergo sum.
(I think, therefore I am.)"
— René Descartes

tags: cogito, think
54 people liked it

"We are graced with a godlike ability to transcend time and space in our minds but are chained to death."
— Russell Shorto (Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason)

tags: death, godlike, minds, transcend
1 person liked it

"Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed."
— Gillian Flynn (Sharp Objects: A Novel)

tags: illness, sick, women
2 people liked it

"Tourette's is just one big lifetime of tag, really. The world (or my brain---same thing) appoints me it, again and again. So I tag back. Can it do otherwise? If you've ever been it you know the answer."
— Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn)

tags: tourette-s
3 people liked it

"...what a fascinating mix a hospital can be of people in a huge hurry and people too slow to get out of their way."
— Josh Bazell (Beat the Reaper: A Novel)

tags: hospital
2 people liked it

"He's a sturdy fellow, bald as a hen's egg, and like all engineers, practical as a pensioner."
— Steven Pressfield (The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great)

tags: engineer, practical
1 person liked it

"This man has conquered the world! What have you done?"
The philosopher replied without an instant's hesitation, "I have conquered the need to conquer the world."
— Steven Pressfield (The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great)

tags: conquer, need
7 people liked it

"Fame Imperishable and glory that will never die -- that is what we march for!"
— Steven Pressfield (The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great)

tags: fame, glory
1 person liked it

"Worrying was painful .... but compared to the alternative, a privilege"
— Laura Moriarty (The Rest of Her Life)

tags: worry
1 person liked it

"Since the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, and a host of others have shown that this religious dimension can be experienced and communicated apart from any religious context. But that is no reason for closing my heart to Job's cry, or to Jeremiah's, or to the Second Isaiah. I do not read them as mere literature; rather, I read Sophocles and Shakespeare with all my being, too."
— Walter Kaufmann (Faith of a Heretic)

tags: literature, religious
2 people liked it

"Diagramming made language seem friendly, like a dog who doesn't bark, but, instead, trots over to greet you, wagging its tail."
— Kitty Burns Florey (Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences)

tags: diagram, grammer
1 person liked it

"Keep moving. Have a goal, One day you will arrive at a place that is better than the place where you were, even if it is only in your head."
— Linda Bloodworth Thomason (Liberating Paris: A Novel)

tags: goal
1 person liked it

"To love another person is to see the face of God."
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

84 people liked it

"Jim he couldn't see no sense in the most of it, but he allowed we was white folks and knowed better than him;"
— Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)

tags: sense, white
1 person liked it

"Nothing raises the national temperature more than a VACANCY sign hanging from the colonnaded front of the Supreme Court. "
— Christopher Buckley (Supreme Courtship)

tags: court, supreme, temperature
1 person liked it

"How many times had those awful words - "I know what I'm doing" - been uttered throughout history as prelude to disaster? "
— Christopher Buckley (Supreme Courtship)

tags: disaster
3 people liked it

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

72 people liked it

"Catherine Le Vendeur," he asked sententiously, "have you known this man carnally?"
"No father," Catherine answered. "But, with your kind permission, I would very much like to."
— Sharan Newman (Death Comes As Epiphany: A Catherine LeVendeur Mystery)

tags: carnal
2 people liked it

"Childhood is the one story that stands by itself in every soul."
— Ivan Doig (The Whistling Season)

tags: childhood, soul
2 people liked it

"Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut."
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

64 people liked it

"Maybe if God gives you a handicap, he makes sure you've got a few extra doses of humor to take the edge off."
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

tags: humor
11 people liked it

"The solar system is off center and consequently man is too ..."
— Harlow Shapley (Through Rugged Ways to the Stars)

tags: man, solar, system
1 person liked it

"Some piously record 'In the beginning God', but I say 'In the beginning hydrogen'."
— Harlow Shapley

tags: beginning, god, hydrogen
1 person liked it

"The freely roaming and unpoliced dinosaurs, I like to remember, had no plumbing."
— Harlow Shapley (Of Stars and Men: Human Response to an Expanding Universe)

1 person liked it

"What an unreliable thing is time--when I want it to fly, the hours stick to me like glue. And what a changeable thing, too. Time is the twine to tie our lives into parcels of years and months. Or a rubber band stretched to suit our fancy. Time can be the pretty ribbon in a little girl's hair. Or the lines in your face, stealing your youthful colour and your hair. .... But in the end, time is a noose around the neck, strangling slowly."
— Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance)

tags: time
2 people liked it

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