thwarting QUOTES

1 " And watch two men washing clothes,
one makes dry clothes wet. The other makes wet clothes dry. they seem to be thwarting each other, but their work is a perfect harmony.

Every holy person seems to have a different doctrine and practice, but there's really only one work. "

― Rumi

2 " No, it was simply that I was uninterested in making, as I saw it, a Xerox of some old emotional state. I was in my mid-thirties, with a marriage more or less behind me. I was no longer vulnerable to curiosity's enormous momentum. I had nothing new to murmur to another on the subject of myself and not the smallest eagerness about being briefed on Danielle's supposedly unique trajectory—a curve described under the action, one could safely guess, of the usual material and maternal and soulful longings, a few thwarting tics of character, and luck good and bad. A life seemed like an old story. "

― Joseph O'Neill , Netherland

3 " The merely conscious being does not have a preference for continued life. Perhaps while having a pleasurable experience it has a preference for that experience to continue, or while having a painful experience it has a preference for that experience to end, but it will not have any preferences for the long-term future, and the desires it has do not survive periods of sleep or temporary unconsciousness, because unlike a self-aware being, it has no conception of its own future existence after a period of sleep. Thus if we are concerned only about the thwarting of preferences, for a merely conscious being, painless killing and administering an anesthetic seem to be equivalent. Killing does not thwart any more desires than putting the being to sleep. The being will be able to continue to satisfy its preferences after it awakes, but from the being's subjective perspective it is as if a new being, with new preferences, came into existence. "

― Peter Singer , Practical Ethics

4 " Literary history and the present are dark with silences . . . I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silences--what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)--that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot. "

5 " Sabotage isolated them from their home, thwarting any hope of outside help. Frantic, unreliable sightings of frightening things – horrible things - led to chaos. The crew, terrified, opted to die fighting and went hunting for their attacker. Kaine’s only regret was that they found it.
It killed them all.
Systematically. "

― Christina Engela , Demonspawn

6 " Those ruffians, the Gods, shan't have it all their own way,-- her notion being that the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting and spoiling human lives were seriously put out if, all the same, you behaved like a lady. "

― Virginia Woolf , Mrs. Dalloway

7 " Where envy is unavoidable it must be used as a stimulus to one’s own efforts, not to the thwarting of the efforts of rivals. "

― Bertrand Russell , Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

8 " Perhaps the best function of parenthood is to teach the young creature to love with safety so that it may be able to venture unafraid when later emotion comes the thwarting of the instinct to love is the root of all sorrow and not sex only but divinity itself is insulted when it is repressed. To disapprove to condemn-the human soul shrivels under barren righteousness. "

9 " It never pays to deal with the flyweights of the world. They take far too much pleasure in thwarting you at every turn. "