Abyss Quotes - Page 10

• The bliss of the elect in heaven would not be perfect unless they were able to look across the abyss and enjoy the agonies of their brethren in eternal fire.

  Pope Gregory I

  Fire, Agony, Perfect

  "A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, Volume 1". Book by Henry Charles Lea, 1887.

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• I am imbued with the notion that a Muse is necessarily a dead woman, inaccessible or absent; that a poetic structure - like the canon, which is only a hole surrounded by steel - can be based only on what one does not have; and that ultimately one can write only to fill a void or at the least to situate, in relation to the most lucid part of ourselves, the place where this incommensurable abyss yawns within us.

  Michel Leiris

  Writing, Doe, Steel

  Michel Leiris, Richard Howard (1992). “Manhood: A Journey from Childhood Into the Fierce Order of Virility”, p.105, University of Chicago Press

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• Deconstruction seems to offer a way out of the closure of knowledge. By inaugurating the open-ended indefiniteness of textuality-by thus 'placing in the abyss' (mettre en abime), as the French expression would literally have it-it shows us the lure of the abyss as freedom. The fall into the abyss of deconstruction inspires us with as much pleasure as fear. We are intoxicated with the prospect of never hitting bottom

  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

  Fall, Expression, Inspire

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• The listener must be gripped and whether he likes it or not, drawn into the flight path of the sounds without special training being necessary. The sensual shock must be just as forceful as when one hears a clap of thunder or looks into a bottomless abyss

  Iannis Xenakis

  Sensual, Training, Special

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• We looked into the abyss if the gold price rose further. A further rise would have taken down one or several trading houses, which might have taken down all the rest in their wake. Therefore at any price, at any cost, the central banks had to quell the gold price, manage it. It was very difficult to get the gold price under control but we have now succeeded. The US Fed was very active in getting the gold price down. So was the U.K.

  Eddie George

  Taken, Rose, House

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• America has become one of the foremost countries in regard to the depth of the abyss which lies between the handful of arrogant multimillionaires who wallow in filth and luxury, and the millions of working people who constantly live on the verge of pauperism.

  Vladimir Lenin

  Country, Lying, Luxury

  "Letter To American Workers". Pravda, No. 178, August 22, 1918. Collected Works, Volume 28, p. 62 - 75, www.marxists.org.

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• Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology, and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It's a problem we face every time we consider the creation of intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity - a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied - and the world will pass beyond our understanding.

  Vernor Vinge

  Technology, Understanding, World

  Vernor Vinge (2002). “The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge”, p.44, Macmillan

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• Blue is the insides of something mysterious and lonely. I'd look at fish and birds, thinking the sky and water colored them. The first abyss is blue. An artist must go beyond the mercy of satin or water-from a gutty hue to that which is close to royal purple. All seasons and blossoms inbetween. Lavender. Theatrical and outrageous electric. Almost gray. True and false blue. Water and oil. The gas jet breathing in oblivion. The unstruck match. The blue of absence. The blue of deep presence. The insides of something perfect.

  Yusef Komunyakaa

  Lonely, Thinking, Artist

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• We live in such constant nearness to the abyss of past time that the moment is endlessly sucked into.

  John Jeremiah Sullivan

  Past, Moments, Constant

  John Jeremiah Sullivan (2011). “Pulphead: Essays”, p.267, Macmillan

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• To confess your sins to God is not to tell [God] anything [God] doesn't already know. Until you confess them, however, they are the abyss between you. When you confess them, they become the bridge.

  Frederick Buechner

  Bridges, Sin, Knows

  Frederick Buechner (1973). “Wishful thinking: a theological ABC.”, Harper San Francisco

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• It is a stern fact of history that no nation that rushed to the abyss ever turned back. Not ever, in the long history of the world. We are now on the edge of the abyss. Can we, for the first time in history, turn back? It is up to you.

  Taylor Caldwell

  Long, Up To You, World

  "Honoria". Essay by Taylor Caldwell (1957), republished in "The New American", Volume 19, No. 20, October 6, 2003.

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• An abyss seems to have opened between the intellectual cosmopolites of culture and the people, hungry for word and meaning.

  Meridel Le Sueur

  People, Intellectual, Culture

  Meridel Le Sueur, Elaine Hedges (1990). “Ripening: Selected Work”, p.231, Feminist Press at CUNY

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• It is in dreams that I have known the real clutch of stark, hideous, maddening, paralysing fear. My infant nightmares were classics, & in them there is not an abyss of agonising cosmic horror that I have not explored. I don't have such dreams now - but the memory of them will never leave me. It is undoubtedly from them that the darkest & most gruesome side of my fictional imagination is derived.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Dream, Memories, Real

  Letter to Harry O. Fischer (late February 1937), in "Selected Letters V, 1934-1937" edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, (pp. 416-417), 1976.

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• I wish there were shortcuts to wisdom and self-knowledge: cuter abysses or three-day spa wilderness experiences. Sadly, it doesn't work that way. I so resent this.

  Anne Lamott

  Wisdom, Self, Wish

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• To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt.

  William James

  Faith, Doubt, Leap

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• God gave the sea the danger and the abyss, but it was in it that He mirrored the sky.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Mirrors, Sea, Sky

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• There is no drop of water in the ocean, not even in the deepest parts of the abyss, that does not know and respond to the mysterious forces that create the tide.

  Rachel Carson

  Nature, Ocean, Water

  Rachel Carson (1989). “The Sea Around Us”, p.149, Oxford University Press, USA

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• The grand canyon which yawns between the writer's concept of what he wants to capture in words and what comes through is a cruel abyss.

  Fannie Hurst

  Want, Canyons, Grand Canyon

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• We are a great capitalist society, that works most of the time. We do need to take better care of our people and fix the access, cost, and quality of healthcare. But we need to act intelligently. We needed the intervention of government to keep the economy from falling into an abyss, but we must now encourage the creation of business - not burden it.

  James A. Champy

  Fall, People, Quality

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• The love of fame is too high and delicate a feeling in the mind to be mixed up with realities, it is a solitary abstraction. * * * A name "fast anchored in the deep abyss of time" is like a star twinkling in the firmament, cold, silent, distant, but eternal and sublime; and our transmitting one to posterity is as if we should contemplate our translation to the skies.

  William Hazlitt

  Stars, Reality, Sky

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• A book may lie dormant for fifty years or for two thousand years in a forgotten corner of a library, only to reveal, upon being opened, the marvels or the abysses that it contains, or the line that seems to have been written for me alone. In this respect the writer is not different from any other human being: whatever we say or do can have far-reaching consequences.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Lying, Book, Years

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• Democratic Rep. Charles Schumer of New York made a plea to Livingston, the incoming speaker. These new hearings, these new subpoenas wave a red flag that common sense and common wisdom are not welcome here, .. Mr. Livingston, this may be the first and most important task you will ever face as speaker. Lead us out of this abyss.

  Charles Schumer

  New York, Red Flags, Common Sense

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• I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.

  Frank Church

  Country, Technology, Agency

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• If I did not love what is present, if I could not cling to this enormous, safe parachute, I would long since have fallen into the abyss.

  Christian Morgenstern

  Long, Safe, Enormous

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• The damned are in the abyss of Hell, as within a woeful city, where they suffer unspeakable torments, in all their senses and members, because as they have employed all their senses and their members in sinning, so shall they suffer in each of them the punishment due to sin.

  Saint Francis de Sales

  Punishment, Cities, Suffering

  "Introduction to the Devout Life". Book by Saint Francis de Sales, Pt. 2, ch. 15, 1609.

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