Frantic Quotes - Page 2

• Men would make love with any number of women ... even total strangers, while females were selective. They were catering to the demands of one small egg. While males had millions of frantic sperms screaming: "Let us out, let us out!".

  Woody Allen

  Men, Eggs, Numbers

  Husbands and Wives, www.imdb.com. 1992.

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• In love, 'tis no other than frantic desire for that which flies from us.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Love, Desire

  Michel de Montaigne (2013). “Michel de Montaigne: Selected Essays”, p.28, Courier Corporation

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• What need had the businessman to scribble or philosophize when he dominated the imagination of his time and the frantic materialism that was his principle of existence had become the haunting central figure in contemporary life?

  Alfred Kazin

  Imagination, Principles, Needs

  Alfred Kazin (2013). “On Native Grounds: An Interpretation Of Modern American Prose Literature”, p.52, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• In the frantic search for an elusive 'cure,' few researchers stand back and ask a very basic question: why does cancer exist? What is its place in the grand story of life?

  Paul Davies

  Cancer, Doe, Stories

  "Cancer can teach us about our own evolution" by Paul Davies, www.theguardian.com. November 18, 2012.

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• The ecology of the valley was complex beyond our understanding, and it began to die as we went on manipulating it in ever more frantic ways. As it went dead and empty of the old life it became a place where no one wanted to live. In our right minds we want to seek out places that reek of complexity. Our drive to industrialize soured and undercut the intimacies that drew most people to country life in the first place.

  William Kittredge

  Country, Land, People

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• You see these dictators up on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. They're afraid of words and thought. ... They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words. ... A state of society where men may not speak their mind - where children denounce their parents to the police - where a businessman or small shopkeeper ruins his competitor by telling tales about his private opinion. Such a state of society cannot long endure if it is continually in contact with the healthy outside world.

  Winston Churchill

  Children, Men, Long

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• It is not proper to project our feelings onto things or to attribute our own sensations and passions to them. Can it also be improper to see in them a guide, a way of life? To learn the art of remaining motionless amid the agitation of the whirlwind, to learn to remain still and to be as transparent as this fixed light amid the frantic branches this may be a program for life.

  Octavio Paz

  Art, Passion, Light

  "The Monkey Grammarian". Book by Octavio Paz, Ch. 2, 1974.

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• I've got a folder full of rejection slips that I keep. Know why? Because those same editors are now calling my agent hoping I'll write a book or novella for them. Things change. A rejection slip today might mean a frantic call to your agent in six months.

  MaryJanice Davidson

  Book, Writing, Mean

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• Democracy, in its best state, is but the politics of Bedlam; while kept chained, its thoughts are frantic, but when it breaks loose, it kills the keeper, fires the building, and perishes.

  Fisher Ames

  Fire, Historical, Democracy

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• Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day's end. They were manifesting as the earth's bright-colored nerve endings, the sun's descent urging them into activity, filling them individually with life nectar, the life nectar then being passed into the world, out of each beak, in the form of that bird's distinctive song, which was, in turn, an accident of beak shape, throat shape, breast configuration, brain chemistry: some birds blessed in voice, others cursed; some squeaking, others rapturous.

  George Saunders

  Song, Blessed, Fall

  George Saunders (2013). “Tenth of December: Stories”, p.57, Random House

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• But when a man’s religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.

  Moby

  Men, Thinking, Earth

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• The meaning of words had no longer the same relation to things... Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true quality of man.

  Thucydides

  Wisdom, Men, Coward

  Thucydides (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Thucydides (Illustrated)”, p.199, Delphi Classics

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• As if goaded by a kind of frantic despair, I sketched these dirty, ragged little victims of the war with their bruised, lacerated minds and bodies, their matted hair and runny noses. Here my life as a painter began in earnest.

  Walter Keane

  War, Dirty, Hair

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• This was the first time he had seriously confronted what he was doing, and the force of that awareness came very abruptly - with a surging of his pulse and a frantic pounding in his head. He was about to gamble his life on that table, and the insanity of that risk filled him with a kind of awe.

  Paul Auster

  Gambling, Insanity, Risk

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• I think it's because we're looking for the meaning. Where is the meaning? We have mindless jobs, we take frantic vacations, deficit finance trips to the mall to buy more things that we think are going to fill these holes in our lives. Is it any wonder that we've lost our sense of direction?

  Matthew McConaughey

  Meaningful, Jobs, Thinking

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• But there was no hiding from Conscience. Not in new homes and new cars. In travel. In meditation or frantic activity. In children, in good works. On tiptoes or bended knee. In a big career. Or a small cabin. It would find you. The past always did. Which was why... it was vital to be aware of actions in the present. Because the present became the past, and the past grew. And got up, and followed you. And found you... Who wouldn't be afraid of this?

  Louise Penny

  Children, Home, Past

  Louise Penny (2009). “The Brutal Telling: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel”, p.372, Minotaur Books

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• Socialist ideology, like so many others, has two main dangers. One stems from confused and incomplete readings of foreign texts, and the other from the arrogance and hidden rage of those who, in order to climb up in the world, pretend to be frantic defenders of the helpless so as to have shoulders on which to stand.

  Jose Marti

  Confused, Reading, Order

  "Martí : Thoughts/Pensamientos" edited by Carlos Ripoll, 1994.

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• The crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and pale as if made of cheap green paper, broke under the weight of so much fruit; there was something frantic in such fertility, a crying-out like that of children frantic to please.

  John Updike

  Children, Tomatoes, Paper

  John Updike (2007). “The Witches of Eastwick”, p.8, Penguin UK

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• If I did not wear torn pants, orthopedic shoes, frantic disheveled hair, that is to say, if I did not tone down my beauty, people would go mad. Married men would run amuck.

  Brenda Ueland

  Running, Men, Hair

  Brenda Ueland (1993). “Strength to Your Sword Arm: Selected Writings”, Holy Cow Press

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• Then - as he was talking - a set of tail-lights going past lit up McMurphy's face, and the windshield reflected an expression that was allowed only because he figured it'd be too dark for anybody in the car to see, dreadfully tired and strained and frantic, like there wasn't enough time left for something he had to do.

  Ken Kesey

  Tired, Dark, Past

  Ken Kesey (2012). “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.231, Penguin

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• Tengo could hardly believe it-- that in this frantic, labyrinth-like world, two people's hearts-- a boy's and a girl's-- could be connected, unchanged, even though they hadn't seen each other for twenty years.

  Haruki Murakami

  Girl, Believe, Heart

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• I also saw a huge expansion of the Internet, with many major corporations, afraid of being left behind, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop World Wide Web sites in a frantic scramble to reach the vast new consumer market of Web use

  Dave Barry

  Expansion, Dollars, Use

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• For a long time I thought I could deal with my anger and hostility on my own. But I couldn't. I denied that it had affected me, and yet I was so frantic on the inside with other people: I needed to be constantly reassured.

  Kelly McGillis

  Anger, Long, People

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Students are too busy jumping through the next hurdle in the résumé race to figure out what they really want. They are too frantic tasting everything on the smorgasbord to have life-altering encounters. They have a terror of closing off options. They have been inculcated with a lust for prestige and a fear of doing things that may put their status at risk.

  David Brooks

  Jumping, Race, Lust

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• The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness of a sick room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy, because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Christian, Laughter, Angel

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