Brian > Brian's Quotes

“Great readers (are) those who know early that there is never going to be time to read all there is to read, but do their darnedest anyway.”
― Larry McMurtry, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond

“A life, remembered, is a series of photographs and disconnected short films.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“There are certain qualities of light that blur the years.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it? Perhaps soon humanity would simply flicker out, but Kristen found this thought more peaceful than sad. So many species had appeared and later vanished from this earth; what was one more?”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“I made strength from everything that had happened to me, so that in the end even the final tragedy could not defeat me. And that is what Ultima tried to teach me, that the tragic consequences of life can be overcome by the magical strength that resides in the human heart. --Antonio”
― Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima

“The body is not important. It is made of dust; it is made of ashes. It is food for the worms. The winds and the waters dissolve it and scatter it to the four corners of the earth. In the end, what we care most for lasts only a brief lifetime, then there is eternity. Time forever. Millions of worlds are born, evolve, and pass away into nebulous, unmeasured skies; and there is still eternity. Time always. The body becomes dust and trees and exploding fire, it becomes gaseous and disappears, and still there is eternity. Silent, unopposed, brooding, forever… But the soul survives. The soul lives on forever. It is the soul that must be saved, because the soul endures.”
― Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima

“Behind all seen things lies something vaster; everything is but a path, a portal or a window opening on something other than iteself. ”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

“To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to feel shame at the sight of what seems to be unmerited misery. It is to take pride in a victory won by one's comrades. It is to feel, when setting one's stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

“The first stars tremble as if shimmering in green water. Hours must pass before their glimmer hardens into the frozen glitter of diamonds. I shall have a long wait before I witness the soundless frolic of the shooting stars. In the profound darkness of certain nights I have seen the sky streaked with so many trailing sparks that it seemed to me a great gale must be blowing through the outer heavens. ”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

“I picked up one and then a second and then a third of these stones, finding them at about the rate of one stone to the acre. And here is where my adventure became magical, for in a striking foreshortening of time that embraced thousands of years, I had become the witness of this miserly rain from the stars. the marvel of marvels was that there on the rounded back of the planet, between this magnetic sheet and those stars, a human consciousness was present in which as in a mirror that rain could be reflected.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

“To love is not to look at one another, it is to look, together, in the same direction.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

“One cannot live any longer on refrigerators, on politics, on balance-sheets and cross-word puzzles. One cannot live any longer without poetry, colour and love.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

“Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the asronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars