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guests QUOTES

guests QUOTES

1 " It was too perfect to last,' so I am tempted to say of our marriage. But it can be meant in two ways. It may be grimly pessimistic - as if God no sooner saw two of His creatures happy than He stopped it ('None of that here!'). As if He were like the Hostess at the sherry-party who separates two guests the moment they show signs of having got into a real conversation. But it could also mean 'This had reached its proper perfection. This had become what it had in it to be. Therefore of course it would not be prolonged.' As if God said, 'Good; you have mastered that exercise. I am very pleased with it. And now you are ready to go on to the next. "

― C.S. Lewis , A Grief Observed

2 " Transient guests are we. "

3 " I thought this would be the end of your antics. There are three hundred guests sitting in the church and suddenly you believe you can fly? "

4 " This is what people were looking at all day? How embarrassing! I looked like Quasimodo! My guests were exceptional actors. "

5 " Nothing is ever truly gone... Not for me, nor for any human being. We can only go forward, unless we are guests in some enchantment that is not is ours. We are condemned to an endless present, and we can never go back-the source of all our joy, and all our sorrow." -Hem at Zelika's grave "

6 " The bed we loved in was a spinning world of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seaswhere we would dive for pearls. My lover’s wordswere shooting stars which fell to earth as kisseson these lips; my body now a softer rhymeto his, now echo, assonance; his toucha verb dancing in the centre of a noun.Some nights, I dreamed he’d written me, the beda page beneath his writer’s hands. Romanceand drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,dribbling their prose. My living laughing love -I hold him in the casket of my widow’s headas he held me upon that next best bed. "

7 " You never know these days. Uninvited guests may force you to take an unplanned trip to an unknown destination "

8 " When the rich give a party and the meal is finished, a man carries round amongst the guests a wooden image of a corpse in a coffin, carved and painted to look as much like the real thing as possible, and anything from 18 inches to 3 foot long; he shows it to each guest in turn, and says: " Look upon this body as you drink and enjoy yourself; for you will be just like it when you are dead." [Herodotus ‘Histories’, II 82] "

9 " The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will. "

― Czesław Miłosz

10 " THIS IS WHYHe will never be given to wonder muchif he was the mouth for some cruel forcethat said it. But if he were(this will comfort her) less than one momentout of millions had he meant it. So many years and so many turnsthey had swerved around the subject.And he will swear for many morethe kitchen and everything in it vanished --the oak table, their guests, the refrigerator doorhe had been surely propped against--all changed to rusted ironwork and ashexcept in the center in her linen caftan:she was not touched.He remembers the silence before he spokeand her nodding a little,as if in the meat of this gray wastehere was the signalfor him to speak what they had long agreed,what somewhere they had prepared together.And this one moment in the desert of ashstretches into forever.They had been having a dinner party.She had been lonely. A friend asked her almost jokingif she had ever felt really crazy,and when she started to unwind her answerin long, lovely sentences like scarves within herhe saw this was the waythey could no longer talk together.And that is when he said it,in front of the guests,because he couldn't bear to hear her.And this is why the guests have leftand she screams as he comes near her. "

11 " The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky. "

― Haruki Murakami , What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

12 " You can argue that it's a different world now than the one when Matthew Shepard was killed, but there is a subtle difference between tolerance and acceptance. It's the distance between moving into the cul-de-sac and having your next door neighbor trust you to keep an eye on her preschool daughter for a few minutes while she runs out to the post office. It's the chasm between being invited to a colleague's wedding with your same-sex partner and being able to slow-dance without the other guests whispering. "

― Jodi Picoult , Sing You Home

13 " But you have said it too often, Mr. Benedict!" said Mrs. Perumal in an imperious tone that was quite out of character. " And if you continue in this vein, I'm afraid we'll be compelled to cut our visit short. Surely there are other establishments that would host an entire troup of guests - indefinitely and without reward - and not feel obliged to apologize for it! "

14 " Thus looked at from outside, these guests
--in this dead-and-alive dining room, of this dead-and-alive house, of this dead-and-alive street, of this dead-and-alive little town--in grey, dead winter of the deadliest part of the most deadly war in history--thus seen from a detached point of view, they presented an extraordinary spectacle. "

― Patrick Hamilton , The Slaves of Solitude

15 " The family was serious about education; after dinner, Fred was known to issue volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to his children and guests for a little light reading. "

― , The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely: Australia's Prime Ministers

16 " Even choosing the perfect dinner wine loses its earth-shattering importance if your guests happen to be cannibals, and you, the unsuspecting entree. "

― Lois Greiman , Unzipped (A Chrissy McMullen Mystery, #1)

17 " The moment when mortality, ephemerality, uncertainty, suffering, or the possibility of change arrives can split a life in two. Facts and ideas we might have heard a thousand times assume a vivid, urgent, felt reality. We knew them then, but they matter now. They are like guests that suddenly speak up and make demands upon us; sometimes they appear as guides, sometimes they just wreck what came before or shove us out the door. We answer them, when we answer, with how we lead our lives. Sometimes what begins as bad news prompts the true path of a life, a disruptive visitor that might be thanked only later. Most of us don’t change until we have to, and crisis is often what obliges us to do so. Crises are often resolved only through anew identity and new purpose, whether it’s that of a nation or a single human being. "

― Rebecca Solnit , The Faraway Nearby

18 " A few days earlier, in front of his guests at his own birthday celebration, this man had started smashing his own crockery and tearing his and his wife's clothes, because he was not offered enough vodka; then he went on to break every stick of furniture in his house and smash all the windows, and he did it all for the " beauty" of the gesture, as Mr. Karamazov had just now. "

19 " When Benjamin Franklin, the famous inventor and publisher, was serving as the American ambassador to France, he often impressed French intellectual with the wisdom of his remarks. At one dinner, the question was raised, " What human condition deserves the most pity?" Each of the guests responded, but the answer that is still remembered is Benjamin Franklins's: " A lonesome man on a rainy day who does not know how to read. "

20 " Thanksgiving at Sea" Most of us will enjoy Thanksgiving Day ashore in the comfort of our home but some will be at sea, because they are working on some boat, barge or ship. Others will be out on the brine by design as passengers, now considered guests on cruise ships. What came to mind however, was my father who was a ship’s cook in the 1920’s, and the stories he shared with us. Best as I can tell, the year must have been somewhere around 1924 when his ship was in Shanghai, which is now China’s biggest city. Tied up at a rickety dock on the Huangpu River, he could see the famed waterfront promenade lined with the now famed colonial-style buildings. The time had come to butcher one of the penned goats, brought along for this expressed purpose. Being on a German freighter, Thanksgiving Day had no special meaning but stew made of goat meat was always a treat for the crew. Fast forward to the present… almost every single cruise ship at sea or in a foreign port, will celebrate Thanksgiving Day with a marvelous turkey dinner, plus joyful entertainment. Whether you celebrate the day with your significant other, or take along an entire gang of friends and family; Thanksgiving Day at sea will be far from the lonely day it once was. Holidays, including Thanksgiving are always especially festive at sea. "