Fugitive Quotes

• There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive.

  Eric Hoffer

  Passion, Shrinking, Literature

  Eric Hoffer (1996). “The Passionate State of Mind”

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• I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

  John Milton

  Running, Race, Dust

  Areopagitica (1644)

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• What I want from each and every one of you is a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in that area.

  Tommy Lee Jones

  Gas Stations, Target, Want

  "Fictional character: Deputy Marshal Samuel Gerard". "The Fugitive", www.imdb.com. July 29, 1993.

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• I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages.

  Bill Mauldin

  Funny, Motivation, Science

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• Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Art, Elements, Half

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• A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.

  George Santayana

  Happiness, Happy, Determination

  George Santayana (1945). “The Middle Span”

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• The ideal beauty is a fugitive which is never found.

  Joan Rivers

  Beauty, Makeup, Found

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• Fugitive slaves were rare then, and as a fugitive slave lecturer, I had the advantage of being the first one out.

  Frederick Douglass

  Firsts, Slave, Advantage

  Frederick Douglass (2016). “Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: The Illustrated Edition”, p.102, Zenith Press

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• We can constitutionally extirpate slavery at this time. But if we fail to do this, then unless we intend hereafter to violate the Constitution, we shall have a fugitive slave law in operation whenever the war is over.

  Jay Sekulow

  War, Law, Slavery

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• Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.

  Anne Michaels

  Ordinary, Matter, Moments

  Anne Michaels (2010). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.19, Emblem Editions

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• Once I was lost in a forest. I was so afraid. My blood pounded in my chest and I knew my heart's strength would soon be exhausted. I saved myself without thinking. I grasped the two syllables closest to me, and replaced my heartbeat with your name.

  Anne Michaels

  Heart, Thinking, Blood

  Anne Michaels (2009). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.115, A&C Black

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• Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.

  Anne Michaels

  Reading, Kissing, Veils

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• Assuredly we bring not innocence not the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.

  John Milton

  Trials, World, Innocence

  'Areopagitica' (1644) p. 12

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• The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.

  Anne Michaels

  Rain, Past, Shadow

  Anne Michaels (2010). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.17, Emblem Editions

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• There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.

  Anne Michaels

  Children, Grief, Believe

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• Every time I look in the mirror, God looks back.

  Liam Gallagher

  Mirrors, Looks, Cassius Clay

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• When you are alone - at sea, in the polar dark - an absence can keep you alive. The one you love maintains your mind. But when she's merely across the city, this is an absence that eats you to the bone.

  Anne Michaels

  Dark, Sea, Cities

  Anne Michaels (2009). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.55, A&C Black

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• When my parents were liberated, four years before I was born, they found that the ordinary world outside the camp had been eradicated. There was no more simple meal, no thing was less than extraordinary: a fork, a mattress, a clean shirt, a book. Not to mention such things that can make one weep: an orange, meat and vegetables, hot water. There was no ordinariness to return to, no refuge from the blinding potency of things, an apple screaming its sweet juice.

  Anne Michaels

  Gratitude, Sweet, Book

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• Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another.

  Anne Michaels

  Love, Looks, Landscape

  Anne Michaels (2010). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.82, Emblem Editions

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• I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.

  Anne Michaels

  Love Is, Thinking, Long Ago

  Anne Michaels (2010). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.116, Emblem Editions

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• Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both, like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what's between the lines, the mysterious implications.

  Anne Michaels

  Philosophy, Moving, Sacrifice

  Anne Michaels (2010). “Fugitive Pieces”, p.109, Emblem Editions

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• Remember to be submissive, thou art analien, a fugitive, and in need.

  Aeschylus

  Art, Needs, Remember

  Supplices, l.202 (translated by H Weir Smyth).

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• When I reflect upon what I have seen, what I have heard, what I have done, I can hardly persuade myself that all that frivolous hurry and bustle and pleasure of the world had any reality; and I look on what has passed as one of those wild dreams which opium occasions, and I by no means wish to repeat the nauseous dose for the sake of the fugitive illusion.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Life, Dream, Mean

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• But what's your ultimate goal, you'll say. That goal will become clearer, will take shape slowly and surely, as the croquis becomes a sketch and the sketch a painting, as one works more seriously, as one digs deeper into the originally vague idea, the first fugitive, passing thought, unless it becomes firm.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Ideas, Goal, Shapes

  Vincent van Gogh (2009). “Saint-Rémy-de-Provence - Auvers-sur-Oise, 1889-1890, [772-902]”

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• Not even for an hour can you bear to be alone, nor can you advantageously apply your leisure time, but you endeavor, a fugitive and wanderer, to escape from yourself, now vainly seeking to banish remorse by wine, and now by sleep; but the gloomy companion presses on you, and pursues you as you fly.

  Horace

  Sleep, Wine, Leisure

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