Columns Quotes - Page 6

• The medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is just as physical or bodily an art as dancing.

  Robert Pinsky

  Art, Air, Dancing

  Robert Pinsky (2014). “The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide”, p.8, Macmillan

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Listen: there was once a king sitting on his throne. Around Him stood great and wonderfully beautiful columns ornamented with ivory, bearing the banners of the king with great honour. Then it pleased the king to raise a small feather from the ground, and he commanded it to fly. The feather flew, not because of anything in itself but because the air bore it along. Thus am I, a feather on the breath of God.

  Hildegard of Bingen

  Beautiful, Kings, Ivory

  287 Copy quote

• And, in the future, while the dumb show of bohemianism plays itself out in the cookie cutter shape of the politically correct martyr/victim, aesthetic terrorists will not involve themselves in the dubious rewards of celebrity. The best of them will work alone, already a part of the enemy camp, and in chameleon-like style master the fifth-column algorithms to subvert the ancient regime. We won't know them by their name but their compensation will be to affect the outcome of the planet. Until then, there's a lot of work to be done.

  Adam Parfrey

  Play, Names, Dumb

  6 Copy quote

• A man is as young as his spinal column.

  Joseph Pilates

  Men, Pilates, Young

  28 Copy quote

• I took a sheet of paper, divided it into debt and credit columns on the arguments for and against God and immortality. On Christmas Eve I wrote 'bankrupt' at the foot. And it was on Christmas morning 1895, after I had celebrated three Masses, while the bells of the parish church were ringing out the Christmas message of peace, that, with great pain, I found myself far out from the familiar land--homeless, aimlessly drifting. But the bells were right after all; from that hour on I have been wholly free from the nightmare of doubt that had lain on me for ten years.

  Joseph McCabe

  Morning, Pain, Feet

  4 Copy quote

• Where London's column, pointing at the skies, Like a tall bully, lifts the head, and lies.

  Alexander Pope

  Lying, Sky, Bully

  Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson (1822). “The poems of Alexander Pope”, p.108

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose. (introduction to Gladiator, Book League Monthly, 1930)

  Philip Wylie

  Book, League, May

  5 Copy quote

• To celebrate growing older, I once wrote the 45 lessons life taught me. It is the most-requested column I've ever written.

  Regina Brett

  Life Lesson, Growing, Lessons

  6 Copy quote

• This boa, the American columns, are being besieged between Basra and other towns north, west, south and west of Basra… Now even the American command is under siege. We are hitting it from the north, east, south and west. We chase them here and they chase us there. But at the end we are the people who are laying siege to them. And it is not them who are besieging us.

  Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf

  People, Baghdad, East

  7 Copy quote

• Clip your year-end column and put it away for 10 years. See if you don’t feel like an idiot when you reread it.

  Steve Albini

  Years, Year End, Idiot

  "Volume 14 (November 2003)" by Nathan Rabin, www.avclub.com. August 17, 2010.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The transformation of disease, as exemplified by the case of diabetes, is a valuable and elegant concept that serves to remind us that the tally sheet for medical science must carry a column for debit as well as credit.

  Deborah Butterfield

  Healthy, Credit, Medical Science

  12 Copy quote

• Public life, politics and industry should all of them be within our sphere of influence.... If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity! If better ideas on mental health are to progress and spread we, as the salesmen, must lose our identity... Let us all, therefore, very secretly be 'fifth columnists.'

  John Rawlings Rees

  Family, Thinking, Ideas

  7 Copy quote

• There should be a new way to record standings in this league; one column for wins, one for losses and one for gifts.

  Gene Mauch

  Sports, Loss, Winning

  6 Copy quote

• To my surprise I found that when other top players in the precomputer age (before 1995, roughly) wrote about games in magazines and newspaper columns, they often made more mistakes in their annotations than the players had made at the board.

  Garry Kasparov

  Mistake, Player, Games

  Garry Kasparov (2010). “How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom”, p.95, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A line from one of my 1997 columns - 'Do one thing every day that scares you' - is now widely attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, though I have yet to see any evidence that she ever said it and I don't believe she did. She said some things about fear, but not that thing.

  Mary Schmich

  Believe, Scare, Lines

  Mary Schmich (2012). “The Best of Mary Schmich: Selected Writings by the Chicago Tribune's Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary”, p.362, Agate Digital

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The vast army of McClellan spread out before me. The marching columns extended back as far as eye could see in the distance. It was a grand and glorious spectacle, and it was impossible to look at it without admiration.

  Daniel Harvey Hill

  War, Distance, Eye

  8 Copy quote

• It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't.

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Humorous, Hunting, Ideas

  "Ring for Jeeves". Book by P. G. Wodehouse, 1953.

  55 Copy quote

  Show source

• For the first lesson, I want you to play over every column of Modern Chess Openings, including the footnotes. And for the next lesson, I want you to do it again.

  Bobby Fischer

  Play, Lessons, Want

  7 Copy quote

• All day long I add up columns of figures and make everything balanced. I come home. I sit down. I look at a Kandinsky and it's wonderful.

  Solomon R. Guggenheim

  Art, Home, Long

  27 Copy quote

• I read a column by George Will that SCARFACE should be rated X because parents were taking their children to see it. So what? Why should the motion-picture industry be responsible for our morality? Dad says to Mom, `SCARFACE is in town.' `What's it about?' `Human scum who kill each other over cocaine deals.' `Sounds great! Let's take the kids!'

  Ian Shoales

  Mom, Children, Dad

  Ian Shoales (1985). “I gotta go: the commentary of Ian Shoales”, Perigee

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• No one writes a story like Lydia Davis. In the years since she began publishing her lyrical, extremely short fiction, she has quietly become one of the most impactful influences on American writers, even if they don't know it. That's largely because she makes economy seem so easy. You could read several of her stories into a friend's voicemail box before you were cut off (and you should). You could fit one of her stories in this column. Some you could write on your palm.

  Jonathan Messinger

  Writing, Cutting, Years

  4 Copy quote

• The authour who imitates his predecessors only by furnishing himself with thoughts and elegances out of the same general magazine of literature, can with little more propriety be reproached as a plagiary, than the architect can be censured as a mean copier of Angelo or Wren, because he digs his marble out of the same quarry, squares his stones by the same art, and unites them in columns of the same orders.

  Samuel Johnson

  Art, Mean, Writing

  Samuel Johnson (1828). “The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752”, p.278

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Usually, I take a hike for a while after submitting a column to Townhall. Too much of my insensitivity can cause emotional problems among proggies, and I am, after all, a compassionate man.

  Neal Boortz

  Men, Emotional, Too Much

  4 Copy quote

• The Gulf Stream waters of Woody Guthrie's famous song were strung with columns of oil that were several miles long.

  James Lee

  Song, Oil, Long

  4 Copy quote

• Indeed, while Nature is wonderfully inventive of new structures, her conservatism in holding on to old ones is still more remarkable. In the ascending line of development she tries an experiment once exceedingly thorough, and then the question is solved for all time. For she always takes time enough to try the experiment exhaustively. It took ages to find how to build a spinal column or brain, but when the experiment was finished she had reason to be, and was, satisfied.

  John M. Tyler

  Nature, Science, Brain

  7 Copy quote