Fierce Quotes - Page 23

• Every day, the dispensing of existence.... Its face is fierce and distant and ancient.

  Martin Amis

  Faces, Ancient, Existence

  Martin Amis (1991). “Time's arrow, or, The nature of the offence”, Vintage

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• I had always been considered such a nonentity where human relations were concerned that the idea that I might have an influence, even a corrupting influence ... penetrated my heart with a fierce little sting of pleasure.

  Louis Auchincloss

  Heart, Ideas, Littles

  Louis Auchincloss (2002). “The Rector of Justin: A Novel”, p.116, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Life on earth is hard. Competition for the necessities of life is fierce. How ridiculous to believe that the law of harsh survival would not be true elsewhere, or that it would be negated by the progress of technology in an advanced civilization.

  Greg Bear

  Believe, Technology, Civilization

  Greg Bear (2014). “The Forge of God”, p.246, Open Road Media

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• Before my diagnosis [cancer] I was a competitor but not a fierce competitor. When I was diagnosed, that turned me into a fighter.

  Lance Armstrong

  Cancer, Diagnosis, Fighter

  "Lance Armstrong's interview with Oprah Winfrey: the transcript". Interview with Oprah Winfrey, www.telegraph.co.uk. January 18, 2013.

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• These poems possess intelligence, erudition, gravitas and urgency. Serious and moving in voice and ambition, this passionately lyrical and articulate work reminds me very much of the capacious, fierce and intelligent work of Adrienne Rich.

  Tony Hoagland

  Moving, Ambition, Intelligent

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• The introduction of Christianity, which, under whatever form, always confers such inestimable benefits on mankind, soon made a sensible change in these rude and fierce manners.

  Edmund Burke

  Rude, Benefits, Christianity

  Edmund Burke (1963). “Edmund Burke: Selected Writings and Speeches”, p.87, Transaction Publishers

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• I have a fierce eating disorder that has survived even bariatric surgery. I got even fatter after that! Hey, maybe fat people are just trying to get closer to others, did anybody ever that of that?!

  Roseanne Barr

  People, Eating Disorder, Trying

  Roseanne Barr (2012). “Roseannearchy: Dispatches from the Nut Farm”, p.116, Simon and Schuster

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• The blowback against a bailout of Lehman would have been fierce. It is often forgotten, but the prevailing wisdom the day after Lehman fell was that its collapse was a good thing.

  Andrew Ross Sorkin

  Forgotten, Good Things, Prevailing

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• We hail the return of the day of thy birth,
  Fair Columbia! washed by the waves of two oceans
  Where men from the farthest dominions of earth
  Rear altars to Freedom, and pay their devotions;
  Where our fathers in fight, nobly strove for the Right,
  Struck down their fierce foemen or put them to flight;
  Through the long lapse of ages, that so there might be
  An asylum for all in the Land of the Free.

  Abraham Coles

  Freedom, Father, Ocean

  Abraham Coles (1880). “The microcosm, and other poems”

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• Blood Dazzler is Patricia Smith's impassioned lyric chronicle of a beloved city in peril, a city whose people were left to die before us all, a people who were the heart of our country and lifeblood of our culture. After rising water, winds and abandonment, after our failure and neglect, comes this symphony of utterance from the ruins: many-voiced, poignant, sorrowful and fierce. This is poetry taking the full measure of its task.

  Carolyn Forche

  Country, Heart, Wind

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• A fierce literary woman with a penchant for married men, Margaret Fuller was ultimately torn between motherhood and her final career as a political reporter.

  Susan Cheever

  Motherhood, Men, Careers

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• In American Romances, her new book of essays, Rebecca Brown has a voice that is full of pop references, family stories, and the fruits of a lifetime of -- in her perfect phrase - extreme reading. The voice is a hoot, and it is dead serious. This is writing with exquisite control, fully up to the task Brown takes on of playing a fierce game of beach ball with deep problems of American (and personal) history and identity.

  Susan Stinson

  Beach, Book, Reading

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• Camping has become one of my most beloved pastimes. I take a fierce delight in swinging a pak o my back or into a canoe and heading for the hills or lakes. In my opinion, camping can be the greatest expression of free will, personal independence, innate ability, and resourcefulness possible today in our industrialized, urbanized existence. Regardless of how miserable or how splendid the circumstances, the sheer experience of camping seems a total justification for doing it.

  Anne LaBastille

  Lakes, Expression, Independence

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• In language at once stark and delicate, Suki Kim shatters the polemic of North and South Korea. She couples an investigative reporter's fierce desire to strip away the fiction of the Hermit Kingdom with an immigrant's insatiable hunger for an emotional home, no matter how troubled and no matter how impossible.

  Monique Truong

  Couple, Home, Emotional

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• In his fierce, bold determination to see the lives of modern-day slaves up close, Benjamin Skinner reminds me of the British abolitionist of two hundred years ago, Zachary Macaulay, who once traveled on a slave ship across the Atlantic, taking notes. Skinner goes everywhere, from border crossings to brothels to bargaining sessions with dealers in human beings, to bring us this vivid, searing account of the wide network of human trafficking and servitude which spans today's globe.

  Adam Hochschild

  Determination, Years, Two

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• We know what boredom is: it is a dull
  Impatience or a fierce velleity,
  A champing wish, stalled by our lassitude,
  To make or do. In the strict sense, of course,
  We invent nothing, merely bearing witness
  To what each morning brings again to light

  Richard Wilbur

  Morning, Light, Boredom

  Richard Wilbur (2006). “Collected Poems 1943-2004”, p.83, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Marriage is a fierce battle before which the two partners ask heaven for its blessing, because loving each other is the most audacious of enterprises; the battle is not slow to start, and victory, that is to say freedom, goes to the cleverest.

  Honore de Balzac

  Love, Marriage, Blessing

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• Among people I have met, the few whom I would term “great” all share a kind of unquestioned, fierce dedication; an utter lack of doubt about the value of their activities (or at least an internal impulse that drives through any such angst); and above all, a capacity to work (or at least to be mentally alert for unexpected insights) at every available moment of every day of their lives.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Life, Work, Dedication

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• The anti-suffragist talk of sheltering women from the fierce storms of life is a lot of cant. I have no patience with it. These storms beat on woman just as fiercely as they do on man, and she is not trained to defend herself against them.

  Susan B. Anthony

  Men, Storm, Hardship

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• Walk in this faithless grass with studious tread,
  Lest mice, weasels, germane beasts, too soon
  The tall hat and eyes, the fierce feet, for dead
  Descry, and fix you prone in their revelling moon.

  Allen Tate

  Eye, Moon, Feet

  Allen Tate (2014). “Collected Poems, 1919-1976”, p.91, Macmillan

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• The struggle against the Houthis inside Yemen is fierce. For years, powerful Yemeni tribes received money from Saudi Arabia. Now the Saudis back the Sunni tribes opposed to the Houthis with cash and arms. And then there is al-Qaida.

  Safa Al Ahmad

  Powerful, Struggle

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• I'm thinking of writing a children's story about a leaf on a tree who arrogantly insists he's a self-made, independent leaf. Then one day a fierce wind blows him off his branch and to the ground below. As his life slowly ebbs away, he looks up at the magnificent old tree that had been his home and realizes that he had never been on his own. His entire life he had been part of something bigger and more beautiful than anything he could have imagined. In a blinding flash, he awakens from the delusion of self. Then an arrogant, self-centered kid rakes him up and bags him.

  Chuck Lorre

  Beautiful, Children, Kids

  "The Big Bang Theory (TV Series) The Thanksgiving Decoupling". www.imdb.com. 2013.

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• Fierce warres and faithfull loves shall moralize my song.

  Edmund Spenser

  Song

  Edmund Spenser, Carol V. Kaske (2006). “The Faerie Queene, Book One”, p.3, Hackett Publishing

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• The confusion of spirit and body is quite understandable in a culture where spirit is concretized in magnificent skyscrapers, where cathedrals have become museums for tourists, where woman-flesh-devil are associated, and nature is raped for any deplorable excuse. Dieting with fierce will-power is the masculine route; dieting with love of her own nature is the feminine. Her only real hope is to care for her own body and experience it as the vessel through which her Self may be born.

  Marion Woodman

  Real, Museums, Self

  "The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter". Book by Marion Woodman, 1980.

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• Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Heart, Fire, Desire

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2008). “Lavinia”, p.66, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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