Paradox Quotes - Page 15

• The further on we go, the more meaning there is, but the less articulable. You live your life and the older you get- the more specifically you harvest- the more precious becomes every ounce and spasm. Your life and times don’t drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less like a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret).

  Gregory Maguire

  Games, Live Your Life, Secret

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• The central paradox of motherhood is that while our children become the absolute center of our lives, they must also push us backout in the world.... But motherhood that can narrow our lives can also broaden them. It can make us focus intensely on the moment and invest heavily in the future.

  Ellen Goodman

  Children, Motherhood, Focus

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• The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when they make their tormentors suffer. In seeking the Bird's death to free himself, Louie had chained himself, once again, to his tyrant. During the war, the Bird had been unwilling to let go of Louie; after the war, Louie was unable to let go of the Bird.

  Laura Hillenbrand

  Letting Go, Pain, War

  Laura Hillenbrand (2010). “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption”, p.366, Random House

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• All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call "aware"--an almost untranslatable word meaning something like "beauty tinged with sadness.

  Gretel Ehrlich

  Sadness, Autumn, Meaning Something

  Gretel Ehrlich (1985). “The solace of open spaces”, Viking Pr

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• This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement - that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it - that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings.

  Walter Lippmann

  Freedom, Should Have, Humanity

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• Are we to assist it in gaining power in order to save our lives? Is that the paradox of our earthly situation?

  Philip K. Dick

  Order, Gaining Power, Life Is

  Philip K. Dick (2012). “The Man in the High Castle”, p.200, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one's life. That is the queasy paradox of the artistic life. It is the thing that, like love, removes one both painfully and deliciously from the ordinary shape of existence. It joins another queasy paradox: that life is an amazing, hilarious, blessed gift and that it is also intolerable.

  Lorrie Moore

  Art, Blessed, Writing

  "See What Can Be Done by Lorrie Moore - wit without malice" by Claire Messud, www.theguardian.com. June 2, 2018.

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• It is a strange paradox: Humans drown in the water, fish drown in the land.

  Javad Alizadeh

  Land, Water, Strange

  Humor & Caricature magazine, July 1995.

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• The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Dark, Night, Long

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• The novel...creates a bemusing effect. The short story, on the other hand wakes the reader up. Not only that, it answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Art, Hands, Stories

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• Paradox is the sharpest scalpel in the satchel of science. Nothing concentrates the mind as effectively, regardless of whether it pits two competing theories against each other, or theory against observation, or a compelling mathematical deduction against ordinary common sense.

  Hans Christian von Baeyer

  Two, Common Sense, Mind

  Hans Christian Von Baeyer (2004). “Information: The New Language of Science”, p.204, Harvard University Press

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• I don't believe in objectivity. I observe the observer's paradox every moment I'm filming. Your presence is changing everything; there's no mistaking it. And you have a responsibility.

  Lucy Walker

  Believe, Responsibility, Objectivity

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• A cat is a purring parcel of paradox, a cunning collection of contradictions. A cat is lazy and busy, dainty and savage, affectionate and aloof, greedy and finicky, sound asleep in one instant, and awake and stalking in the next. A cat is a limp puddle of softness, surrounding a steel-hard and ever-alert set of muscles. ... A cat has the face of a pansy flower, and is just as velvety. A cat holds infinity in her eyes, and your heart in her front paws.

  Leonore Fleischer

  Flower, Heart, Cat

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• The locus of the modern struggle with its enemy of death is clearly the body (not mind, society, or the afterworld). The body is the site of tragedy, the ultimate unresolvable paradox, for it is at once the source of life and of death.

  Margaret M. Lock

  Struggle, Mind, Enemy

  Margaret M. Lock (2002). “Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death”, p.203, Univ of California Press

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• The fact of simultaneously being Christian and having as my mother tongue Arabic, the holy language of Islam, is one of the basic paradoxes that have shaped my identity.

  Amin Maalouf

  Christian, Mother, Identity

  Amin Maalouf (2001). “In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong”, p.16, Arcade Publishing

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• As the humanities and liberal arts are downsized, privatized, and commodified, higher education finds itself caught in the paradox of claiming to invest in the future of young people while offering them few intellectual, civic, and moral supports.

  Henry Giroux

  Art, Offering, People

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• It is easy for desire to be caught like a bird in a net, its wings fouled and twisted, no longer free to cross back and forth between silence and word. Desire may also find itself so amputated by tradition and community that it wanders in a void with nothing to orient it, to shape or discipline it. Desire must find ways to navigate its bitter and sweet paradox: it moves toward but also always through and beyond every object.

  Wendy Farley

  Sweet, Moving, Wings

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• I don't like making didactic, pedagogical documentaries based on standard formulas of narration: I'm only interested in the ambitious French tradition of the documentaire de création where the film, if successful, is not about something but that something itself. The goal is to incorporate areas of risk and paradox that we associate with cinematic art.

  Damian Pettigrew

  Art, Successful, Goal

  Le Parisien, May, 2003.

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• Today, as we have seen, fascism and communism are discredited, but are replaced by a paraphilic consumer culture driven by fantasy, desperately in search of distractions and escalating sensations, and a fundamentalist culture wherein the rigors of a private journey are shunned in favor of an ideology that, at the expense of the paradoxes and complexities of truth, favors one-sided resolutions, black-and-white values, and a privileging of one's own complexes as the norm for others.

  James Hollis

  Black And White, Journey, Today

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• The only way I can access all my strength is to relax. ... The paradox is that you must learn to be relaxed while using all your power.

  Lynda Obst

  Relax, Way, Access

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• All my writing has been an effort to sort out the paradoxes of my life.

  Nancy Friday

  Writing, Effort, Has Beens

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• Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language. Kierkegaard too saw that there is this running up against something, and he referred to it in a fairly similar way (as running up against paradox). This running up against the limits of language is ethics.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Running, Men, Thinking

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• To a lot of Africans, seeing an animal is a something of a rarity. So it's a paradox of this sort of parallel life. A safari is an expensive experience and it's adjacent to a place where people are having a very tough time.

  Paul Theroux

  Animal, People, Tough Times

  Source: www.usatoday.com

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• It is a sad paradox that when male authors impersonate women ... they are said to be dealing with 'cosmic, major concerns' - but when we impersonate ourselves we are said to be writing 'women's fiction' or 'women's poetry.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Males, Fiction

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• The ocean is a place of paradoxes. It is the home of the great white shark, two-thousand-pound killer of the seas, and of the hundred-foot blue whale, the largest animal that ever lived. It is also the home of living things so small that your two hands might scoop up as many of them as there are stars in the Milky Way.

  Rachel Carson

  Stars, Ocean, Home

  Rachel Carson (2011). “Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson”, p.6, Beacon Press

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