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21 " Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. "
― Diane Setterfield , The Thirteenth Tale
22 " As one tends to the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. I clean them, do minor repairs, keep them in good order. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so, for it must be very lonely being dead. "
23 " God be thanked for books! they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. "
24 " A library is a sacred place where the voices of the ancients can still be heard if we but give them the required silence. "
― James Rozoff
25 " Many outsiders clarified that they believe Christians have a right (even an obligation) to pursue political involvement, but they disagree with our methods and our attitudes. They say we seem to be pursuing an agenda that benefits only ourselves; that we expect too much out of politics; they question whether we are motivated by our economic status rather than faith perspectives when we support conservative politics; they claim we act and say things in an unchristian manner; they wonder whether Jesus would use political power as we do; and they are concerned that we overpowered the voices of other groups. "
― David Kinnaman , Unchristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity...and Why It Matters
26 " In these myriad ways, we carved out our lives in Los Angeles. Yet falling asleep was often an act of travel, taking me quickly by the hand so that I am instantly surrounded by verdant foliage, the ocean's emerald roar, the voices of Alice, Mala, our grandmother. Those most familiar and beloved of women.But there are also nightmares. Over and over I dream of a small house, a glittering lagoon, a mango tree, and a young girl. She stands before me and her large bruised eyes do not leave mine. When she unpins the sari fold at her shoulder and pulls it away from her, I see sunset-colored bruises on her delicate clavicles. When she undoes her sari blouse, I see the grenades tucked like extra breasts under her own. It is grotesque. I wake trembling, and her eyes stays with me for hours. "
― Nayomi Munaweera , Island of a Thousand Mirrors
27 " We spent time on Burma and the need for the military regime there to understand that they shouldn't fear the voices of people. And yet they do. "
― George W. Bush
28 " We, who are so schooled in the art of listening to the voices of others, can often hear our own voice only when we are alone. . . For many women, the first choice, then, is to give ourselves the necessary time and space in which to renew our acquaintance with our lost voice, to learn to recognize it, and to rejoice as we hear it express our truth. "
29 " Turn it beautiful. His words came faintly at first, but they came again and again, always softly, always with the insistence of an elder commanding wisdom. Turn it all to beauty. She walked to the rail. When she turned and sat upon it, she heard a sailor in the crowd murmur that she might play them a tune. She hoped he was right. She needed the voices to be wrong. Fin raised the instrument to the cleft of her neck and closed her eyes. She emptied her mind and let herself be carried back to her earliest memory, the first pain she ever knew: the knowledge that her parents didn’t want her. The despair of rejection coursed through her. It fathered a knot of questions that bound her, enveloped her. Waves of uncertainty and frailty shook her to the bones. Her body quivered with anger and hopelessness. She reeled on the edge of a precipice. She wanted to scream or to throw her fists but she held it inside; she struggled to control it. She fought to subjugate her pain, but it grew. It welled up; it filled her mind. When she could hold it no more, exhausted by defiance and wearied by years of pretending not to care, Bartimaeus’s words surrounded her. Got to turn it beautiful. She dropped her defenses. She let weakness fill her. She accepted it. And the abyss yawned. She tottered over the edge and fell. The forces at war within her raced down her arms and set something extraordinary in motion; they became melody and harmony: rapturous, golden. Her fingers coaxed the long-silent fiddle to life. They danced across the strings without hesitation, molding beauty out of the miraculous combination of wood, vibration, and emotion. The music was so bright she felt she could see it. The poisonous voices were outsung. Notes raged out of her in a torrent. She had such music within her that her bones ached with it, the air around her trembled with it, her veins bled it. The men around fell still and silent. Some slipped to the deck and sat enraptured like children before a travelling bard. "
― A.S. Peterson , Fiddler's Green (Fin's Revolution, #2)
30 " The Offices rerooted me in a tradition where, monk or not, I would always be at home. From long ago I knew the power of their repetition, the incantatory force of the Psalms. But they had an added power now. As a kid, the psalmist (or psalmists) had seemed remote to me, the Psalms long prayers which sometimes rose to great poetry but often had simply to be endured. For a middle-aged man, the psalmists' moods and feelings came alive. One of the voices sounded a lot like a modern New Yorker, me or people I knew: a manic-depressive type A personality sometimes up, more often down, sometimes resigned, more often pissed off, railing about his sneaky enemies and feckless friends, always bitching to the Lord about the rotten hand he'd been dealt. That good old changelessness. "
― Tony Hendra , Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul
31 " A leader cannot fall prey to the whims of the voices that shout the loudest, but must stand as a voice of reason in defense of the silent. "
32 " When I read a novel I am not here. I am transported to far-off places, my eyes unseeing of the words on the page, busy with a scene being played out in my mind's eye, with my ears engaged, hearing the voices carry from the pen to the present. What a lovely place to be-not here - Just Jane (Chapter Four Page 35) "
― Nancy Moser , Just Jane (Ladies of History, #2)
33 " And even with the book closed, the voices do not stop--there are echoes and reverberations that seem to leap off the pages and mischievously leave the novel tingling in our ears. "
― Azar Nafisi , Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
34 " One UniVerse for the LivingWhile palaces attest to the power of men,And monuments mark their wars,Little remains of the women who've been- Except for the sons that they bore.But the voices of women were baked into breadAnd later buttered with epicsWhile the souls of their daughtersStitched with fine threadBecame tapestries stored in attics.And all through the agesMen boasted like beastsErecting pillars of marble and stone,But still they found themselves only to beSculpted of flesh and bone.Philosophers pondered the nature of godsOutlawing temptations that plagued themAnd earning themselves, against all odds,The power to punish the pagans.By writing themselves into sacred booksThe clergymen sealed our fateTo follow decrees that have their rootsIn nothing but misguided hate.So, children of Adam and invisible Eve,challenge the wisdom of sages. Don’t be so sure sacred scrolls that you readAren't filled with human pages.Walk in the wilderness.Eat of the fruit. Don't let them buy you with wages.Plant your own garden.Drink of the wine.Learn how to be courageous.Hearts that are hardenedTo what is divineHave honored the dead too long.Search for the storiesBaked into breadAnd eat until you are strong. "
― , On the Eighth Day Adam Slept Alone: New Poems
35 " The past is recorded almost exclusively in the voices of elites and males, in the viewpoints of the wealthy and the powerful, in the visions of the literate and the educated. "
― John Dominic Crossan , The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant
36 " We are laying the foundation for some new, monstrous civilization. Only now do I realize what price was paid for building the ancient civilizations. The Egyptian pyramids, the temples and Greek statues—what a hideous crime they were! How much blood must have poured on to the Roman roads, the bulwarks, and the city walls. Antiquity—the tremendous concentration camp where the slave was branded on the forehead by his master, and crucified for trying to escape! Antiquity—the conspiracy of the free men against the slaves!.... If the Germans win the war, what will the world know about us? They will erect huge buildings, highways, factories, soaring monuments. Our hands will be placed under every brick, and our backs will carry the steel rails and the slabs of concrete. They will kill off our families, our sick, our aged. They will murder our children.And we shall be forgotten, drowned out by the voices of the poets, the jurists, the philosophers, the priests. They will produce their own beauty, virtue, and truth. They will produce religion. "
― Tadeusz Borowski , This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
37 " He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and humanity. Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena which he had before known but darkly - the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees, waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate things. "
― Thomas Hardy , Tess of the D'Urbervilles
38 " I stopped in front of a florist's window. Behind me, the screeching and throbbing boulevard vanished. Gone, too, were the voices of newspaper vendors selling their daily poisoned flowers. Facing me, behind the glass curtain, a fairyland. Shining, plump carnations, with the pink voluptuousness of women about to reach maturity, poised for the first step of a sprightly dance; shamelessly lascivious gladioli; virginal branches of white lilac; roses lost in pure meditation, undecided between the metaphysical white and the unreal yellow of a sky after the rain. "
― Emil Dorian , Quality of Witness: A Romanian Diary, 1937-1944
39 " i dreamt that i died. for an instant, all the voices in my head stood calm, and for a moment, my heart stopped panicking, and for once in my whole life, my cheeks dried from all the tears that were falling every night ... i thought to my self: how nice it is to be finally dead, i wish i did it sooner.my brother once told me that people who commit suicide are mostly doing it for attention. that's so wrong. i'm not asking for attention, nor sympathy. when i put that blade on my shaking skin alone in my room at 3 am, you should be sure that i'm not thinking of anyone and i'm not asking for anyone's attention. all i'm doing is pushing my self to stop the pain. you see, i don't want to die too, all i want is for the pain to stop and for me to smile like everyone else.yasuko amaya - the day i decided to be God - "
40 " Oh, why did nobody warn me?" cried Grimes in agony. " I should have been told. They should have told me in so many words. They should have warned me about Flossie, not about the fires of hell. I've risked them, and I don't mind risking them again, but they should have told me about marriage. They should have told me that at the end of that gay journey and flower-strewn path were the hideous lights of home and the voices of children. "