Disillusionment Quotes - Page 4

• In some deep place in her heart, Caroline had kept alive the silly romantic notion that somehow David Henry had once known her as no one else ever could. But it was not true. He had never even glimpsed her.

  Kim Edwards

  Father, Silly, Heart

  Kim Edwards (2006). “The Memory Keeper's Daughter: A Novel”, p.237, Penguin

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• There's truths you have to grow into.

  H. G. Wells

  Grows

  H. G. Wells (2013). “Delphi Collected Works of H. G. Wells (Illustrated)”, p.1049, Delphi Classics

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• She passed these years in a distant corner of her mind. A dry, barren field, out beyond wish and lament, beyond dream and disillusionment. There, the future did not matter. And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and it accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Life, Dream, Mistake

  Khaled Hosseini (2009). “A Thousand Splendid Suns”, p.161, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• There are some things in this world you rely on, like a sure bet. And when they let you down, shifting from where you've carefully placed them, it shakes your faith, right where you stand.

  Sarah Dessen

  Disappointment, World, Shifting

  Sarah Dessen (2004). “Someone Like You”, p.134, Penguin

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• I'm English, and as such I crave disappointment. That's why I buy Kinder Surprise. Horrible chocolate; nasty little toy: a double-whammy of disillusionment! Sometimes I eat the toy out of sheer despair.

  Bill Bailey

  Disappointment, Chocolate, Despair

  "Bewilderness". Documentary, Comedy, 2001.

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• Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.

  Jodi Picoult

  Growing Up, Kids, Thinking

  Jodi Picoult (2009). “My Sister's Keeper: A Novel”, p.358, Simon and Schuster

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• Certainly, Gandhi is not inferior to Christ in goodness and sanctity, and he surpasses him in touching humility. Gandhi is the prophet of hope in this age of pessimism and disillusionment. He is a promise of sanity in the madness induced by our world's heedless drinking at the fount of war.

  Sudhir Kakar

  War, Drinking, Humility

  Sudhir Kakar (2008). “The Seeker: A Novel”, p.76, Shambhala Publications

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• Celebration of Independence Day with great pomp and show was quite appropriate when we were fighting for independence which we had neither seen nor handled. Now we have handled it and we seem to be disillusioned. At least - I am, even if you are not. What are we celebrating today? Surely, not our disillusionment.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Fighting, Hypocrisy, Independence

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• Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

  Joan Didion

  Likes, Innocence, Ends

  1961 'On Self Respect', collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968).

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• But there are people who take salt with their coffee. They say it gives a tang, a savour, which is peculiar and fascinating. In the same way there are certain places, surrounded by a halo of romance, to which the inevitable disillusionment you experience on seeing them gives a singular spice. You had expected something wholly beautiful and you get an impression which is infinitely more complicated than any that beauty can give you. It is the weakness in the character of a great man which may make him less admirable but certainly more interesting. Nothing had prepared me for Honolulu.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Beautiful, Coffee, Character

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• The year 1776, celebrated as the birth year of the nation and for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was for those who carried the fight for independence forward a year of all-too-few victories, of sustained suffering, disease, hunger, desertion, cowardice, disillusionment, defeat, terrible discouragement, and fear, as they would never forget, but also of phenomenal courage and bedrock devotion to country, and that, too they would never forget.

  David McCullough

  Country, Fighting, Years

  David McCullough (2011). “David McCullough American History E-book Box Set: John Adams, 1776, Truman, The Course of Human Events”, p.643, Simon and Schuster

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• I... allowed my memory to journey back to the days when I was a boy of ten, full of health and optimism, when my wonder at the great game of living had yet to give way to disillusionment at its shabbiness.

  Ruskin Bond

  Memories, Boys, Journey

  Ruskin Bond (1988). “The Night Train at Deoli and Other Stories”, p.80, Penguin Books India

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• Why did I desert Labour? Total bloody disillusionment. The party was a corpse. It had no ideology, it became detached, old, spineless and needed to go.

  John le Carre

  Party, Desert, Needed

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• Illusions are hazardous, and so are disillusions.

  Mason Cooley

  Illusion, Disillusion

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• We spoke of ourselves as "emancipated" when we got the vote. Yet we are still slaves to the superficial and the superfluous. We are concerned with the length of our skirts, with the latest lipstick, with the newest thrill in hats. We are impressed by advertisements that insist we must be alluring; we must adopt a time-consuming coiffure, we must spend hours with the "beautician," we must attend fashion shows. As long as women are preoccupied with nonessentials we shall be afflicted with infantilism, passivity, and the eventual disillusionment that results from trivial, unproductive lives.

  Mary Barnett Gilson

  Fashion, Long, Thrill

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• No one revolution up to now has brought all that was expected of it by the masses. Hence the inevitability of a certain disillusionment, of a lowering of the activity of the vanguard, and consequently, of the growing importance of the rearguard. [Joseph] Stalin's faction has raised itself on the wave of reaction against the October revolution.

  Leon Trotsky

  October Revolution, Growing, Wave

  Source: www.marxists.org

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• No perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle, possible in human affairs, and any determined attempt to produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment and failure.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Practice, Perfect, Suffering

  1978 The Crooked Timber of Humanity,'The Decline of Utopian Ideals in the West'.

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• Aid my disillusionment, my friend!

  Herman Melville

  Sad, Aids, My Friends

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• Cynicism, disillusionment, and a dispiriting sense of purposeless has cast a shadow over American society seriously draining it of any language or vision that might imagine a different sort of society from the dysfunctional, militarizing, and deeply unequal social order that marked the current historical period.

  Henry Giroux

  Order, Historical, Vision

  "Higher Education Under Attack: An Interview With Henry A. Giroux". Interview with C. Cryn Johannsen, www.truth-out.org. April 22, 2011.

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• In middle age we are apt to reach the horrifying conclusion that all sorrow, all pain, all passionate regret and loss and bitter disillusionment are self-made

  Kathleen Norris

  Pain, Regret, Loss

  Kathleen Thompson Norris (1931). “Hands Full of Living: Talks with American Women”

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• Dreaming about being an actress, is more exciting then being one.

  Marilyn Monroe

  Inspiring, Dream, Disappointment

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• In Europe life retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have resulted—Balder, Persephone—but [in India] the retreat is from the source of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because disillusionment cannot be beautiful. Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form, and India fails to accommodate them.

  E. M. Forster

  Beautiful, Men, August

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• The average GOP presidential vote in these last five elections was 44.5 percent. In the last three, it was 48.1 percent. Give Romney an extra point for voter disillusionment with Obama, and a half-point for being better financed than his predecessors. It still strikes me as a path to narrow defeat.

  William Kristol

  Average, Giving, Presidential

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• A first lesson in the fragility of love and the preternatural cowardice of men. And out of this disillusionment and turmoil sprang Beli's first adult oath, one that would follow her into adulthood, to the States and beyond. I will not serve.

  Junot Diaz

  Men, Adults, Fragility

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• Nagging questions remain: Where is the line between making the most of one's potential and reaching for the unattainable? Where is the line between education as a tool and education as a kind of magic? The line is blurred and that is why when education fails, disillusionment is so bitter.

  Henry Anatole Grunwald

  Education, Teaching, Failure

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