Absorbing Quotes - Page 2

Ambitious, absorbing, and poignantly moving.

Joyce Carol Oates

Moving, Ambitious

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When you want a thing deeply, earnestly and intensely, this feeling of desire reinforces your will and arouses in you the determination to work for the desired object. When you have a distinct purpose in view, your work becomes of absorbing interest. You bend your best powers to it; you give it concentrated attention; you think of little else than the realization of this purpose; your will is stimulated into unusual activity, and as a consequence you do your work with an increasing sense of power.

Grenville Kleiser

Perseverance, Determination, Thinking

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There are some things you can give another person, and some things you cannot give him, except as he is willing to reach out and take them, and pay the price of making them a part of himself. This principle applies to studying, to developing talents, to absorbing knowledge, to acquiring skills, and to the learning of all the lessons of life.

Richard L. Evans

Life Lesson, Pay The Price, Skills

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Laila Lalami has fashioned an absorbing story of one of the first encounters between Spanish conquistadores and Native Americans, a frightening, brutal, and much-falsified history that here, in her brilliantly imagined fiction, is rewritten to give us something that feels very like the truth.

Salman Rushdie

Native American, Giving, Encounters

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The artist has to be something like a whale swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs.

Romare Bearden

Swimming, Artist, Whales

Myron Schwartzman, Romare Bearden (1990). “Romare Bearden, his life & art”, Harry N. Abrams

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Sleeping in Eden is intense and absorbing from the very first page. Written in lovely prose, two seemingly different storylines collide in a shocking conclusion.

Heather Gudenkauf

Sleep, Two, Eden

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When I was 18 I was just absorbing everything around me: whatever happens, happens. I was so naive and willing to ride whatever wave life threw at me.

Paul Wesley

Wave, Whatever Happens Happens, Willing

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When you stand and overcome a significant setback, you'll find an increasing inner confidence and self-assurance that has been created by conquering defeat. Absorbing and overcoming this kind of punishment engenders a sober, steely toughness that results in a hardened sense of independence and a personal belief that you can take on anything, survive and win.

Bill Walsh

Winning, Self, Punishment

Bill Walsh, Steve Jamison, Craig Walsh (2009). “The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership”, p.32, Penguin

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With speed skating, it's like doing one-legged squats over and over again, with that one leg absorbing more than 80 percent of your weight. It takes an enormous amount of strength, and you're in such a weird position.

Apolo Ohno

Skating, Weight, Legs

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Clever, witty and absorbing, Amortality is a much-needed anatomy of our profound malaise about ageing. Its charms will never fade.

David Baddiel

Witty, Clever, Profound

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You are well equipped with an incredible potential for absorbing knowledge. Let your imagination, the key to learning and memory, unleash that brain power and propel you along at ever-increasing speeds. It’s not an exclusive path with access granted only to those with a special gift for learning. It is, instead, available to everyone who has a brain. Anything’s possible.

Dominic O'Brien

Memories, Keys, Imagination

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Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering - because you can't take it in all at once.

Audrey Hepburn

Education, Book, Thinking

"Audrey Hepburn : A Bio-bibliography". Book by David Hofstede, 1994.

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The passion for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world. It slaps the theory of natural selection in the face. It is the most absorbing of occupations. The least satisfying of desires. A nameless excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man. You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic and unreliable - but teach him, inoculate him with chess.

H. G. Wells

Passion, Artist, Men

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Anyone who realises what Love is, the dedication of the heart, so profound, so absorbing, so mysterious, so imperative, and always just in the noblest natures so strong, cannot fail to see how difficult, how tragic even, must often be the fate of those whose deepest feelings are destined from the earliest days to be a riddle and a stumbling-block, unexplained to themselves, passed over in silence by others.

Edward Carpenter

Strong, Block, Heart

Edward Carpenter “The Intermediate Sex”, Routledge

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Sometimes it's moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive. And then there's music, and girls, and drugs, and homeless people who've read Pauline Kael, and wah-wah pedals, and English potato chip flavors, and I haven't even read Martin Chuzzlewit yet... There's plenty out there.

Nick Hornby

Girl, Real, Hard Times

"A Long Way Down". Book by Nick Hornby, May 7, 2005.

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And we'd had this stupid scene on the street, and even that was kind of cool, because sometimes it's moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive.

Nick Hornby

Real, Stupid, Hard Times

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Absorbing the fact that sometimes, people do cut you slack and forgive you and want you anyway. Sometimes they do. And when they do, even if it's not a happy ending, it is delicious

E. Lockhart

Cutting, People, Forgiving

E. Lockhart (2016). “Ruby Oliver 3: The Treasure Map of Boys”, p.174, Bonnier Publishing Fiction Ltd.

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Shelby believed that love was like a solar eclipse - breathtakingly beautiful, absorbing, and capable of rendering you blind. She had not necessarily gone out of her way to avoid a relationship, but she hadn't wanted on either. It was called falling in love for a reason - because, inevitably, you crashed at the bottom.

Jodi Picoult

Beautiful, Falling In Love, Gone

Jodi Picoult (2003). “Second Glance”, p.632, Simon and Schuster

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Life, Steffi has learned, carries on around the pain, making room for it, absorbing it until it becomes part of the daily fabric, wrapping itself around you and lodging itself in your heart.

Jane Green

Pain, Heart, Fabric

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Some of the most relaxing weekends I have ever enjoyed were those I spent quietly with a sense of all work to date completed, and an absorbing mystery.

Aung San Suu Kyi

Weekend, Mystery, Enjoyed

Aung San Suu Kyi (1997). “Letters From Burma:”

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The cycle hit the beach and spun out. Emma went into a rolling crouch as she flew free of it, keeping her elbows in, pushing the air hard out of her lungs. She turned her head as she hit the sand, slapping her palms down to roll herself forward, absorbing the impact of the fall through her arms and shoulders, her knees folding up into her chest. The stars wheeled crazily overhead as she spun, sucking in her breath as her body slowed its rolling. She came to a stop on her back, her hair and clothes full of sand and her ears full of the sound of the wildly crashing ocean.

Cassandra Clare

Beach, Stars, Fall

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Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life──the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within──can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

George Eliot

Grief, Struggle, Fall

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The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person—every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern. We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need. The Church is one of those living forces.

Pope Benedict XVI

Support, Suffering, Church

Encyclical Letter "Deus Caritas Est" of the Supreme Pontiff Benedict XVI, w2.vatican.va. December 25, 2005.

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I've always been afraid of video games - not afraid that I wouldn't like them, but that I would like them too much, and that after mere seconds in front of any particularly bright and absorbing game, I would abandon all ambition, turn into a mouth-breathing zombie, and develop a wide, sofa-shaped rear end.

Susan Orlean

Ambition, Breathing, Games

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The ability to work hard for days on end without losing focus is a talent. The ability to keep absorbing new information after many hours of study is a talent.

Garry Kasparov

Success, Hard Work, Focus

"Garry Kasparov On 'Chess Metaphors': The Chess Master And The Computer". Garry Kasparov's review of Diego Rasskin-Gutman's book "Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind" (2005), www.huffingtonpost.com. March 24, 2010.

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