Ears Quotes - Page 33

• It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.

  Edward Gibbon

  Memories, Writing, Practice

  Edward Gibbon, John Holroyd Earl of Sheffield (1837). “The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, Esq: With Memoirs of His Life and Writings”, p.97

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• The technical history of modern harmony is a history of growth of toleration by the human ear of chords that at first sounded discordant and senseless to the main body of contemporary professional musicians.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Music, Growth, Body

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• The morning stars sang together. And a person of delicate ear and nice judgment discussed the singing at length, and showed how and wherein one star differed from another, and which was great and which was not. And still the morning stars sang together.

  Thomas William Hodgson Crosland

  Morning, Stars, Nice

  Thomas William Hodgson Crosland (1907). “Little Stories”

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• The visible world is a daily miracle for those who have eyes and ears; and I still warm hands thankfully at the old fire, though every year it is fed with the dry wood of more old memories.

  Edith Wharton

  Memories, Eye, Fire

  Edith Wharton (1990). “Novellas and Other Writings”, Library of America

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• Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead! In peace there's nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility: But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger.

  William Shakespeare

  Friendship, Memorial Day, Peace

  'Henry V' (1599) act 3, sc. 1, l. 1

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• We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them; and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can't choose where to listen.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Eye, Looks, Interest In Life

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2006). “Gifts”, p.165, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes.

  Oscar Wilde

  Eye, Men

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde”, p.136, Wordsworth Editions

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• I know I can do it," Todd Downey said, helping himself to another ear of corn from the steaming bowl. "I'm sure that in time her death will be a mystery, even to me.

  Stephen King

  Corn, Helping, Mystery

  Stephen King (2016). “Four Past Midnight”, p.316, Simon and Schuster

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• We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.

  Charles Darwin

  Science, Men, Tails

  Charles Darwin (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of Charles Darwin (Illustrated)”, p.6833, Delphi Classics

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• Even then, more than a year earlier, there were neurons in her head, not far from her ears, that were being strangled to death, too quietly for her to hear them. Some would argue that things were going so insiduously wrong that the neurons themselves initiated events that would lead to their own destruction. Whether it was molecular murder or cellular suicide, they were unable to warn her of what was happening before they died.

  Lisa Genova

  Suicide, Years, Events

  Lisa Genova (2011). “Lisa Genova Box Set: Still Alice and Left Neglected”, p.17, Simon and Schuster

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• Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.

  Iris Murdoch

  Mean, Eye, Convince Us

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• What about your freedom?" he whispered in her ear over a minute later, bracing his hands palms down on the wall beside her head. He made no move to stop her as she stroked and petted every inch of that sinfully gorgeous chest, all hard muscle and gleaming skin overlaid with silky-rough strands of dark hair. "Idiot." She nipped his jaw with her teeth. "The only freedom I ever wanted was the right to love you.

  Nalini Singh

  Wall, Moving, Love You

  Nalini Singh, Maggie Shayne, Erin McCarthy, Jean Johnson, Lora Leigh (2010). “Paranormal Holiday Anthology Trio”, p.305, Penguin

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• he kissed me hard. "Promise me. Promise me you'll spend New Year's with me next year," he whispered into my ear.

  Gayle Forman

  New Year, Years, Promise

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• Into the silence rips a sound that makes me let go of Max's hand and cover my ears. It is like the strafe of a bullet, nails on a chalkboard, promises being broken. It's a note I have never heard - this chord of pure pain - and it takes a moment to realize it is coming from me.

  Jodi Picoult

  Letting Go, Pain, Rip

  Jodi Picoult (2014). “Sing You Home: A Novel”, p.25, Simon and Schuster

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• In a world of chance is there a better and a worse? We yield to a stranger's embrace or give ourselves to the waves; for the blink of an eyelid our vigilance relaxes; we are asleep; and when we awake, we have lost the direction of our lives. What are these blinks of an eyelid, against which the only defence is an eternal and inhuman wakefulness? Might they not be the cracks and chinks through which another voice, other voices, speak in our lives? By what right do we close our ears to them? (Susan Barton)

  J. M. Coetzee

  Yield, Voice, Giving

  J. M. Coetzee (2017). “Foe: A Novel”, p.25, Penguin

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• Everything is always a story, but the loveliest ones are those that get written and are not torn up and are taken to a friend as payment for listening, for putting a wise keyhole to the ear of my mind

  Janet Frame

  Wise, Taken, Listening

  Janet Frame (1951). “The lagoon: stories”

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• Too many of us take great pains with what we ingest through our mouths, and far less with what we partake of through our ears and eyes.

  Brandon Sanderson

  Pain, Eye, Mouths

  Brandon Sanderson (2010). “The Way of Kings”, p.136, Macmillan

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• Perfume companies ought to bottle the smell of crisp bacon. Forget pheromones. I’ll bet a woman with a little spot of bacon grease behind her ears would attract every male within a five-mile radius.

  Blaize Clement

  Smell, Grease, Males

  Blaize Clement (2007). “Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter: The First Dixie Hemingway Mystery”, p.78, Macmillan

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• In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate its indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus, the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new masters and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe.

  Karl Marx

  Revenge, Class, Sight

  Karl Marx, Frederick Engels (2005). “The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History's Most Important Political Document”, p.36, Haymarket Books

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• ...if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don't even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is-- excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms.

  Ray Bradbury

  Being Yourself, Fun, Eye

  Ray Bradbury (2015). “Zen in the Art of Writing”, p.12, HarperCollins UK

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• I spoke to ears that refused to hear.

  Ronald Reagan

  Spokes

  Ronald Reagan (1983). “A Time for Choosing: The Speeches of Ronald Reagan, 1961-1982”, Gateway Books

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• My daughter squealed again and both Bubba and I winced. It’s not an attractive sound, that. It’s high-pitched and it enters your ear canals like hot glass. No matter how much I love my daughter, I will never love her squealing. Or maybe I will. Maybe I do. Driving down 93, I realized once and for all, that I love the things that chafe. The things that fill me with stress so total I can’t remember when a block of it didn’t rest on top of my heart. I love what, if broken, can’t be repaired. What, if lost can’t be replaced. I love my burdens.

  Dennis Lehane

  Daughter, Stress, Block

  "Moonlight Mile". Book by Dennis Lehane, 2011.

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• Eyes blinded by the fog of things cannot see truth. Ears deafened by the din of things cannot hear truth. Brains bewildered by the whirl of things cannot think truth. Hearts deadened by the weight of things cannot feel truth. Throats choked by the dust of things cannot speak truth.

  Harold Bell Wright

  Heart, Eye, Thinking

  Harold Bell Wright (1910). “The uncrowned king”

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• The answer came to me before I'd even finished asking myself the question. I couldn't be Mason's girlfriend because when I imagined someone holding me and whispering dirty things in my ear, he had a Russian accent.

  Richelle Mead

  Girlfriend, Dirty, Asking

  Richelle Mead (2013). “Vampire Academy: The Complete Collection”, p.106, Penguin

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• A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate. The hour, some little time before sunset, and the place, the West Barricade, at the very spot where, a decade later, a proud tyrant raised an undying monument to the nation's glory and his own vanity.

  Baroness Orczy

  Hate, Passion, Sunset

  Baroness Orczy (2015). “The Scarlet Pimpernel”, p.5, Xist Publishing

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