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the thing QUOTES

the thing QUOTES

81 " I loved my mother too,' I said. 'I still do. That's the thing - it never goes away, even if the person does. "

― Anna Carey , Eve (Eve, #1)

82 " And the thing about trying to cheat death is that, in the end, you still lose. "

― Robyn Schneider , Extraordinary Means

83 " But that's the thing with death. The whisper of it descent travels fast and wide, and people must've know I'd become a corpse because nobody even came to view the body. "

― Gayle Forman , Where She Went (If I Stay, #2)

84 " There are a million things in this world that can end you, that can in one second obliterate the life you work so hard to keep alive. Our lives are structured around not dying. Eating, sleeping, looking both ways before you cross the street. It's all, all of it, to keep us safe from the thing that we know is going to get us anyway. It doesn't even make sense, if you think about it. It's the world's biggest joke. Our entire lives are set up around not dying, knowing all the while that it's the one thing we can't avoid. "

― Rebecca Serle , When You Were Mine

85 " Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about. "

― Thomas McGuane

86 " The sound is gone. There's nothing left but the insomniac throbbing of crickets. Crickets in the garden, the courtyard, the back courtyard. Close, domestic, identifiable. And those out in the country. Between all of them they raise, little by little, a wall that will keep out the thing that lies waiting for the tiniest crack of silence to steal through. The thing that is feared by all those who are sleepless, those who walk through the night, those who are lonely, children. That thing. The voice of the dead. "

87 " Instead, I opened my eyes to find the thing in front of my face, wafting dead horse breath across my chin and up my nose, its mouth like a gaping maw; its eyes, two giant wormholes, twisting and bending with some apparitional substance that could have been space and time if I’d known anything about physics. "

― Shannon Celebi , 1:32 P.M. (Small Town Ghosts)

88 " Do the thing you love to do. Hank Williams died at the ripe old age of twentynine. Stevie Ray Vaughan at thirty-five. Jesus at thirtythree. Don’t think you’re special and the Lord’s gonna bless you with time. "

― , Paradise

89 " Showing off is more ridiculous in instances where the thing that is being shown off was bought on credit. "

― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

90 " since the thing perhaps is
to eat flowers and not to be afraid "

― E.E. Cummings , E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962 (Revised, Corrected, and Expanded Edition)

91 " No duties. I don’t have to be profound.
I don’t have to be artistically perfect.
Or sublime. Or edifying.
I just wander. I say: ‘You were running,
That’s fine. It was the thing to do.’
And now the music of the worlds transforms me.
My planet enters a different house.
Trees and lawns become more distinct.
Philosophies one after another go out.
Everything is lighter yet not less odd.
Sauces, wine vintages, dishes of meat.
We talk a little of district fairs,
Of travels in a covered wagon with a cloud of dust behind,
Of how rivers once were, what the scent of calamus is.
That’s better than examining one’s private dreams.
And meanwhile it has arrived. It’s here, invisible.
Who can guess how it got here, everywhere.
Let others take care of it. Time for me to play hooky.
Buena notte. Ciao. Farewell. "

― Czesław Miłosz

92 " I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words. "

― Jeanette Winterson , Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

93 " Never fear the thing you feel--
Only by love is life made real "

― Sara Teasdale , Love Songs

94 " Language signifies when instead of copying thought it lets itself be taken apart and put together again by thought. Language bears the sense of thought as a footprint signifies the movement and effort of a body. The empirical use of already established language should be distinguished from its creative use. Empirical language can only be the result of creative language. Speech in the sense of empirical language - that is, the opportune recollection of a preestablished sign – is not speech in respect to an authentic language. It is, as Mallarmé said, the worn coin placed silently in my hand. True speech, on the contrary - speech which signifies, which finally renders " l'absente de tous bouquets" present and frees the sense captive in the thing - is only silence in respect to empirical usage, for it does not go so far as to become a common noun. Language is oblique and autonomous, and if it sometimes signifies a thought or a thing directly, that is only a secondary power derived from its inner life. Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense. "

95 " Being in a hurry. Getting to the next thing without fully entering the thing in front of me. I cannot think of a single advantage I've ever gained from being in a hurry. But a thousand broken and missed things, tens of thousands, lie in the wake of all the rushing.... Through all that haste I thought I was making up time. It turns out I was throwing it away. "

― Ann Voskamp , One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are

96 " So as I shivered, naked and damp, in front of the bathroom mirror, I raised my eyes skyward. " I hope we're still okay." I got no answer, but then, I didn't really expect one. Answer or not, it didn't matter. That's the thing about faith, I guess. "

97 " An ironic religion -- one that never claims to be absolutely true but only professes to be relatively beautiful, and never promises salvation but only proposes it as a salubrious idea. A century ago there were people who thought art was the thing that could fuse the terms of this seemingly insuperable oxymoron, and no doubt art is part of the formula. But maybe consumerism also has something to teach us about forging an ironic religion -- a lesson about learning to choose, about learning the power and consequences, for good or ill, of our ever-expanding palette of choices. Perhaps . . . the day will come when the true ironic religion is found, the day when humanity is filled with enough love and imagination and responsibility to become its own god and make a paradise of its world, a paradise of all the right choices. "

― Alex Shakar , The Savage Girl

98 " Levi," Maria called. " Come back. We're not finished yet." He paused" What, Maria?" " You asked me what I believe in? I believed in you." He nodded his head sadly. " Yes, you did. And before you met me, you believed in nothing. But that's the thing with belief, Maria. It's easy to believe in something when it doesn't require anything from you. It's much harder, though, when the object of your belief requires something of you or asks for something you don't want to give. That's when real belief occurs. "

99 " After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world. "

― Philip Pullman

100 " The thing I write will be the thing I write. "

― Steve Shilstone