Home > Topic > what point
1 " At what point is normal natural? "
― , The Girl on the Trail
2 " At what point does " one day" become today? "
3 " At what point do you give up - decide enough is enough? There is only one answer really. Never. "
― Tabitha Suzuma , Forbidden
4 " I recognized my work for what it was--as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes, or cheap jewellry? "
― Graham Greene , The End of the Affair
5 " There are two kinds of people. One kind, you can just tell by looking at them at what point they congealed into their final selves. It might be a very nice self, but you know you can expect no more suprises from it. Whereas, the other kind keep moving, changing... They are fluid. They keep moving forward and making new trysts with life, and the motion of it keeps them young. In my opinion, they are the only people who are still alive. You must be constantly on your guard against congealing. "
― Gail Godwin , The Finishing School
6 " What I feel now doesn't matter at all? But at what point am I entitled to say to myself, what I am feeling now is valid? After all, Anna-' Here Tommy turned to face her: 'one can't go through one's whole life in phases. There must be a goal somewhere.' His eyes gleamed out hatred; and it was with difficulty that Anna said: 'If you're suggesting that I've reached a goal, and I'm judging you from some superior point, then it's not true.''Phases,' he insisted. 'Stages. Growing pains.''But I think that's how women see-people. Certainly their own children. In the first place, there's always been nine months of not knowing whether the baby would be a girl or a boy. Sometimes I wonder what Janet would have been like if she'd been born a boy. Don't you see! And then babies go through one stage after another, and then they are children. When a woman looks at a child she sees all the things he's been at the same time. When I look at Janet sometimes I see her as a small baby and I feel her inside my belly and I see her as various sizes of small girl, all at the same time.' Tommy's stare was accusing and sarcastic, but she persisted: 'That's how women see things. Everything in a sort of continuous creative stream-well, isn't it natural we should? "
― Doris Lessing , The Golden Notebook
7 " All good art is political. Between the lines of every book, the author implants messages for the unsuspecting reader. If not, what point does it serve? "
― Chloe Thurlow , Katie in Love
8 " Don't lock yourself away from those who care about you because you think you'll hurt them - or they'll hurt you. What point is there in being human if you don't let yourself feel anything? "
― Sabaa Tahir , A Torch Against the Night (An Ember in the Ashes, #2)
9 " Music has become more pervasive and portable than ever. But it feels less previous in the bargain. I don't want to confuse artistic and commercial value, but it's just a fact that some kid who rips an album for free isn't going to give it the same attention he would if it cost him ten bucks. At what point does convenience become spiritual indolence? I realize this makes me sound like an old fart, but sometimes I get nostalgic for the days when the universe of recorded sound wasn't at our fingertips, when we had to hunt and wait and - horror of horrors - do without, when our longing for a particular record or song made it feel sacred. "
― Steve Almond , Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us
10 " At what point in your life do you say I have had enough... money, food, clothes, these possessions that we keep killing one another for even power and dominance? One advice, look at your age and declare that my age dictates I start doing this thing, I should stop doing this and that, I should say this and not that... in essence grow your brain to reason. Just like that. "
― Robert Kodingo
11 " At what point do you no longer need other people to support the decisions you’ve made about your own reality? "
12 " ...although the reason for the existence of women is obvious enough, nobody has any real idea what point there is in being a man. Men have however, made many attempts to justify their existence. "
― Steve Jones , The Language of Genes
13 " She found herself wondering at what point in her life she had ceased to be Gulliver and had become the strings holding him to the ground. "
― Erica Bauermeister , Joy for Beginners
14 " There’s an immense dramatic possibility in describing that universe. The books, for me, were an enormous relief in that sense of how they were written to allow primary emotion, elemental emotion, to matter enormously but to give the thing an extraordinary flow so you don’t notice at what point that you’re actually overwhelmed by this. There’s no showiness, at all. It’s the opposite of showiness. I think, if it was a painting, it could be very grey abstract, almost, with some lines and very, very beautiful. But you wouldn’t have a notion of where the beauty was.(Talking about the short stories of Alistair MacLeod, who he discovered while working on The Modern Library.) "
― Colm Tóibín , The Modern Library : The Two Hundred Best Novels in English Since 1950
15 " The ‘fact’ of my actions frequently collide with the ‘fiction’ of my words. And at what point will I live what I say, so I will avoid what I do? "
― Craig D. Lounsbrough
16 " Kraus asks the question of Freudian analysis: What would be enough? At what point would talking about one’s problems for x hours a week, be sufficient to bring one to a state of “normalcy”?The genius of Freudianism, Kraus writes, is not the creation of a cure, but of a disease—the universal, if intermittent, human sentiment that “something is not right,” elaborated into a state whose parameters, definitions, and prescriptions are controlled by a self-selecting group of “experts,” who can never be proved wrong.It was said that the genius of the Listerine campaign was attributable to the creation not of mouthwash, but of halitosis. Kraus indicts Freud for the creation of the nondisease of dissatisfaction. (See also the famous “malaise” of Jimmy Carter, which, like Oscar Wilde’s Pea Soup Fogs, didn’t exist ’til someone began describing it.) To consider a general dissatisfaction with one’s life, or with life in general as a political rather than a personal, moral problem, is to exercise or invite manipulation. The fortune teller, the “life coach,” the Spiritual Advisor, these earn their living from applying nonspecific, nonspecifiable “remedies” to nonspecifiable discomforts.The sufferers of such, in medicine, are called “the worried well,” and provide the bulk of income and consume the bulk of time of most physicians. It was the genius of the Obama campaign to exploit them politically. The antecedent of his campaign has been called Roosevelt’s New Deal, but it could, more accurately, be identified as The Music Man. "
― David Mamet , The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture
17 " When you’ve had a psychotic breakdown it’s always so difficult making that decision. You meet someone new and you wonder how much you should tell them? You wonder what that person’s threshold of ‘strange’ is, and at what point in my story would I end up driving them away. That fear it’s always there in the back of your mind. Those details you never really even admitted to yourself, but that somehow have to be told just as much as they have to be buried deep down. "
― Cyma Rizwaan Khan , I See The Devil
18 " Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing? "
19 " The happiness of mankind, if it ever should come to pass, would still leave men asking: Why? What point to it? To what end? "
― William Barrett , The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization
20 " At what point do they believe what's been branded on their skin instead of just knowing who they are on the inside. "