Orphan Quotes - Page 5

• In an ideal world, we would have been orphans. We felt like orphans and we felt deserving of the pity that orphans get, but embarrassingly enough, we had parents.

  Miranda July

  Parent, World, Pity

  Miranda July (2008). “No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories”, p.63, Simon and Schuster

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• In the time since the Baudelaire parents' death, most of the Baudelaire orphans' friends had fallen by the wayside, an expression wich here means "they stopped calling, writing, and stopping by to see any of the Baudelaires, making them lonely". You and I, of course, would never do this to any of our grieving acquaintances, but it is a sad truth that when someone has lost a loved one, friends sometimes avoid the person, just when the presence of friends is most needed.

  Daniel Handler

  Lonely, Writing, Mean

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• There's no shortage of orphans in 19th-century literature, but it's hard to find a single happy, communicative, functional parental relationship in the whole of 'Great Expectations,' even among the minor characters.

  David Nicholls

  Character, Widows And Orphans, Expectations

  "David Nicholls: Adapting Great Expectations for the screen". www.theguardian.com. November 16, 2012.

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• We come crawling through these cracks, orphans, lobotomies; if you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything. Whole rotten world come down and break. Let me spread my legs.

  Kathy Acker

  Cracks, Rotten, World

  Kathy Acker (1996). “Pussy, King of the Pirates”, Acker, Kathy

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• For me Oliver Twist is a political novel. It is a furious critique of the treatment of orphans and poor children who were forced to spend their early lives in ghastly institutions.

  Henning Mankell

  Children, Widows And Orphans, Political

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• These esoteric, intellectual debates-I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation.

  Chris Christie

  Intellectual, Widows, Want

  "2016 May Seem Just Around The Corner For Political Rivals". "Morning Edition" with David Greene, www.npr.org. July 31, 2013.

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• A woman always has her man, but the man unconsciously leans on his roots, his heritage. He feels like an orphan without his parents.

  Raj Kapoor

  Men, Roots, Parent

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• When you're in your twenties in a new city where no one's from here, we're all sort of orphans. The only people that you can count on our bunch of people that you work with and that you know. You're only as good as the reliability of that latticework.

  Dave Eggers

  Cities, People, Twenties

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• I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.

  Norman Mailer

  Children, Real, War

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• In Ronan's hand, the mask was as thin as a sheet of paper, still warm from Adam's gasped breaths. Orphan Girl buried her face in his side, her body shaking with sobs. Her tiny voice was muffled: "Tollerere me a hic, tollerere me a hic..." Take me away from here, take me away from here.

  Maggie Stiefvater

  Girl, Voice, Hands

  Maggie Stiefvater (2013). “The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, Book 2)”, p.118, Scholastic Inc.

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• I think we're creating a situation that's incredibly dangerous. There's a lot of chat at the moment about the war on terror and whilst there are many causes for acts of terrorism, what kind of society are you creating if you allow civil society in Africa to die and create millions upon millions of orphans? Where are they going to go? What kind of cults, what kind of militias, what's going to happen? The accession of violence in those countries, the possibility of that, to me is very terrifying.

  Emma Thompson

  Country, War, Thinking

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• The white man's God cannot love our people or He would protect them. They seem to be orphans who can look nowhere for help. How then can we be brothers?

  Chief Seattle

  God, Brother, Men

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• The global HIV/AIDS epidemic is an unprecedented crisis that requires an unprecedented response. In particular it requires solidarity - between the healthy and the sick, between rich and poor, and above all, between richer and poorer nations. We have 30 million orphans already. How many more do we have to get, to wake up?

  Kofi Annan

  Fighting, Epidemics, Aids Epidemic

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• Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. ... The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years.

  David Foster Wallace

  Writing, Artist, Years

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• It would be more in keeping with the intention of the noblest man in this world if our two Christian churches, instead of annoying Negroes with missions which they neither desire nor understand, would kindly, but in all seriousness, teach our European humanity that where parents are not healthy it is a deed pleasing to God to take pity on a poor little healthy orphan child and give him father and mother, than themselves to give birth to a sick child who will only bring unhappiness and suffering on himself and the rest of the world.

  Adolf Hitler

  Christian, Mother, Religious

  Adolf Hitler (1971). “Mein Kampf”, Mariner Books

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• What kind of victory is it when someone is left defeated? What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy. What is a war criminal? Was not war itself a crime against God and humanity, and, therefore, were not all those who sanctioned, engineered and conducted wars, war criminals? The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. Non-cooperation with evil is a sacred duty.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Strong, War, Differences

  Non-Violence in Peace and War (1942) vol. 1, ch. 142

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• This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Hate, War, Home

  Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence, Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

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• An orphan's curse would drag to hell, a spirit from on high; but oh! more horrible than that, is a curse in a dead man's eye!

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Death, Eye, Men

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1854). “The complete works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an introductory essay upon his philosophical and theological opinions”, p.237

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• I’ve discovered a new affliction; it’s called Orphan Black Eyes. When people ask me what I’m working on and I tell them Orphan Black…they usually clutch a part of my body and their eyes go wide and a little crazy. People are MAD for this show. As am I.

  Michelle Forbes

  Crazy, Eye, People

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• That's it then. Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans, no more merciful beheadings, and call off Christmas.

  Alan Rickman

  Kitchen, Thieves, Robin Hood

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• Cross-generational sex is the phenomenon in which young girls are given material goods in exchange for sex. All girls are vulnerable to it, particularly orphans.

  Ashley Judd

  Girl, Sex, Vulnerable

  "Ashley Judd: The Good Fight". Interview with Lucy Kaylin, www.marieclaire.com. November 13, 2006.

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• Politicians step up and say, "This is what were going to do: we're going to set aside 450 million dollars for a mentorship program for orphaned youth," and so on and so forth, and it sounds great in this romanticized vision of what these alleged leaders are going to do for the alleged meek. But it doesn't examine: why are these kids orphans?

  Mr. Lif

  Kids, Leader, Vision

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• Before I began The Cider House Rules, I thought I wanted to write about a father-son relationship that was closer, more conflicted, and ultimately more loving, than most. Then I began to think of a relationship between an old orphanage director and an unadoptable orphan - a kid who goes out into the world and fails and keeps coming back, so that the old guy ends up with someone he's got to keep.

  John Irving

  Father, Kids, Writing

  Interview with Suzanne Herel, www.motherjones.com. May/June 1997.

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• If you know anything about James Whitcomb Riley, you know that Little Orphan Annie is one of the most fantastic characters who ever lived in America before Charlie Chaplin.

  Marguerite Young

  Character, America, Littles

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• There are no words to describe the pain of burying a child, and specifically there is no word to label their new, lifelong status. If you lose a spouse, you are a widow; if you lose a parent, you are an orphan. But what about when you lose a child? How do you name something you cannot comprehend?

  Lisa Belkin

  Children, Pain, Grieving

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