Passages Quotes - Page 18

• What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.

  John Irving

  Love, Wind, People

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• Like the diminishing beauty returns for a facially paralyzed Botox addict, the more forcefully we attempt to stop the passage of time, the less available we are to the very moment we seek to preserve.

  Douglas Rushkoff

  Botox, Return, Moments

  Douglas Rushkoff (2013). “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now”, p.8, Penguin

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• I grew up in the Methodist church and taught Sunday school, and one of my favorite passages of scripture is, 'in as much as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.'' Matthew 25:40.

  Elizabeth Warren

  School, Sunday, Church

  "Elizabeth Warren's Speech at the Democratic National Convention". www.realclearpolitics.com. September 5, 2012.

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• In the heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they'd never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy.

  James Surowiecki

  Country, Heart, Done

  "State of the Unions". www.newyorker.com. January 17, 2011.

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• There aren't a lot of opportunities for that rite of passage that makes you a man. War is one of them, and violent sports are another.

  Sylvester Stallone

  Sports, War, Opportunity

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• You are life, inventing form. No more can you die on sword or years than you can die on doorways through which you walk, one room into another. Every room gives its word for you to speak, every passage its song for you to sing.

  Richard Bach

  Song, Years, Giving

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• The tree the tempest with a crash of wood
  Throws down in front of us is not to bar
  Our passage to our journey's end for good,
  But just to ask us who we think we are.

  Robert Frost

  Journey, Thinking, Tree

  Robert Frost (1963). “Selected poems”

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• The child had indeed shut up but all the questions that had accumulated on his tongue circulated in his mouth, moved through the passages of his nose and climbed up from there to tickle into his teardrop ducts, so in his moss green pupils, curious, insistent, accusing sparks of questions continued to light up and fade away like fireflies flitting about on summer nights.

  Elif Safak

  Summer, Children, Firefly

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• I looked at Lucas with the pang that a parent feels when he knows his child will be hurt and that it's no one's fault and that to try to preempt the rites of passage is an act of contempt for the child's courage.

  James Lee Burke

  Hurt, Children, Parent

  James Lee Burke (2011). “Heartwood”, p.370, Island Books

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• The worse the passage the more welcome the port.

  Thomas Fuller

  Welcome, Port

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• If I could, I would stop the passage of time. But hour follows on hour, minute on minute, each second robbing me of a morsel of myself for the nothing of tomorrow. I shall never experience this moment again.

  Guy de Maupassant

  Tomorrow, Moments, Hours

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• To history therefore I must refer for answer, in which it would be an unhappy passage indeed, which should shew by what fatal indulgence of subordinate views and passions, a contest for an atom had defeated well founded prospects of giving liberty to half the globe.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Passion, Views, Giving

  Thomas Jefferson (1951). “The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: 18 June, 1779 to 30 September, 1780”

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• If there should chance to be any mathematicians who, ignorant in mathematics yet pretending to skill in that science, should dare, upon the authority of some passage of Scripture wrested to their purpose, to condemn and censure my hypothesis, I value them not, and scorn their inconsiderate judgement.
  De Revolutionibus Coelestibus

  Nicolaus Copernicus

  Skills, Judgement, Ignorant

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• You will find yourself among people. There is no help for this nor should you want it otherwise. The passages where no one waits are dark and hard to navigate. The wet walls touch your shoulders on each side. When the trees were there I cared that they were there. And now they are gone, does it matter? The passages where no one waits go on and give no promise of an end. You will find yourself among people, Faces, clothing, teeth and hair and words, and many words When there was life, I said that life was wrong. What do I say now? You understand?

  Paul Bowles

  Wall, Dark, Hair

  Paul Bowles (1994). “The Portable Paul and Jane Bowles”, Penguin Group USA

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• somehow, with the passage of time, and the dealines that life imposes, surrending became the right thing to do

  Randy Pausch

  Passage Of Time, Things To Do, Right Thing

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• Baudelaire writes: In certain almost supernatural inner states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle, however ordinary, that we have before our eyes, and which becomes the symbol of it." Here we have a passage that designates the phenomenological direction I myself pursue. The exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Eye, Writing, Depth

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• What must strike any intelligent witch or wizard on studying the so-called history of the Elder Wand is that every man who claims to have owned it has insisted that it is "unbeatable," when the known facts of its passage through many owners' hands demonstrate that has it not only been beaten hundreds of times, but that it also attracts trouble as Grumble the Grubby Goat attracted flies.

  J. K. Rowling

  Intelligent, Men, Hands

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• From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.

  Alberto Manguel

  Book, Fire, Hands

  Alberto Manguel (2011). “The Library at Night”, p.220, Vintage Canada

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• The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition. (Written in 1949, 22 years before the World Trade Center was completed.)

  E. B. White

  New York, Islands, Years

  Here Is New York (1949)

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• There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading -- that is a good life.

  Annie Dillard

  Sweet, Good Life, Reading

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• Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever.

  Graham Greene

  Pain, Night, Light

  Graham Greene (1971). “The Power and the Glory”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• When the passage "All men are born free and equal," when that passage was being written were not some of the signers legalised owners of slaves?

  Herman Melville

  Men, Slavery, Born

  Herman Melville (1963). “Billy Budd, and other prose pieces, edited by R. W. Weaver”

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• The work of adult life is not easy. As in childhood, each step presents not only new tasks of development but requires a letting go of the techniques that worked before. With each passage some magic must be given up, some cherished illusion of safety and comfortably familiar sense of self must be cast off, to allow for the greater expansion of our distinctiveness.

  Gail Sheehy

  Letting Go, Self, Safety

  Gail Sheehy (1977). “Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life”, Bantam

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• If you mean you think it is my job to go into the secret passage first, O Thorin Thrain’s son Oakenshield, may your beard grow ever longer,” he said crossly, “say so at once and have done!

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Jobs, Mean, Son

  J.R.R. Tolkien (2012). “The Hobbit”, p.114, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• And when long years and seasons wheeling brought around that point of time ordained for him to make his passage homeward, trials and dangers, even so, attended him even in Ithaca, near those he loved.

  Homer

  Love, Years, Long

  Homer (1998). “The Odyssey: The Fitzgerald Translation”, p.2, Macmillan

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