Sp > Sp's Quotes

“Watch and pray,” he said. “Watch and pray. The day of judgment is at hand.”
― Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None

“Providence leaves the work of conviction and chastisement to us mortals—and the process is often fraught with difficulties. There are no short cuts.”
― Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None

“And he knew again that she was not saying everything she meant; in a kind of secret language she was telling him today something that he must remember and understand tomorrow”
― James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

“She probably called to see if you’re still alive,” Hoffa deadpanned. In a voice meant for everyone to hear, Kennedy said, “I’m still alive, dear. If you hear a big explosion, I probably won’t be.”
― Larry Tye, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon

“the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who saw Bobby Kennedy’s constellation of contradictions not as old versus new but as good versus bad. He called his schizophrenic senator the “Bobby twins,” explaining that “the Good Bobby is a courageous reformer. The Bad Bobby makes deals. The Good Bobby sent federal troops down south to enforce civil rights. The Bad Bobby appointed racist judges down South to enforce civil rights. The Good Bobby is a fervent civil libertarian. The Bad Bobby is a fervent wire tapper. The Good Bobby is ill at ease with liberals. The Bad Bobby is ill at ease with grownups.”
― Larry Tye, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon

“Dr. King’s fitting description of the good life, ‘a creative synthesis of opposites.’ ”
― Larry Tye, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon

“cautious, but it made Bobby more fatalistic. “Living every day is like Russian roulette,” he said. “There’s no way of protecting a country-stumping candidate. No way at all. You’ve just got to give yourself to the people and to trust them, and from then on it’s just that good old bitch, luck. Anyway, you have to have luck on your side to be elected President of the United States. Either it is with you or it isn’t. I am pretty sure there’ll be an attempt on my life sooner or later. Not so much for political reasons. I don’t believe that. Plain nuttiness, that’s all. There’s plenty of that around.” If he were elected, he added, he surely wouldn’t ride in the kind of bubble-topped, bulletproof limousine that LBJ used: “We can’t have that kind of country, where the President is afraid to go among the people.”
― Larry Tye, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon

“The murder of Emmett Till was reported in one of the very first banner headlines of the civil rights era and launched the national coalition that fueled the modern civil rights movement.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till

“Not everything that is faced can be changed,” Baldwin instructs, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till

“What does it mean when you remember something that you know never happened?”
― Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till

“Chicago activist Saul Alinsky sardonically defined integration as “the period of time between the arrival of the first black and the departure of the last white.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till

“Frederick Sullens, editor of the Jackson Daily News, predicted, “If a decision is made to send Negroes to school with white children, there will be bloodshed. The stains of that bloodshed will be on the Supreme Court steps.”68”
― Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till

“If we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive and probably won’t.”13”
― Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till

“The things they carried were largely determined by necessity.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“What they carried was partly a function of rank, partly of field specialty.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“What they carried varied by mission.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The things they carried were determined to some extent by superstition.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Ideally, every single fission reaction should trigger just one more fission in a neighboring atom, so that each successive generation of neutrons contains exactly the same number as the one before, and the reactor remains in the same critical state.”
― Adam Higginbotham, Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster

“generating a single watt of electricity requires more than 30 billion fissions every second.”
― Adam Higginbotham, Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster

“And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“Art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“that a work of art is very seldom limited to one exclusive meaning and not necessarily tending to a definite conclusion. And this for the reason that the nearer it approaches art, the more it acquires a symbolic character.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs for ever, but in the August light of abiding memories.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! … The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them—the ship; and so is their country—the sea.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“efficiency. But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer

“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to….”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer