Plunge Quotes - Page 8

• Every Day Is for the Thief is a vivid, episodic evocation of the truism that you can't go home again; but that doesn't mean you're not free to try. A return to his native Nigeria plunges Cole's charming narrator into a tempest of chaos, contradiction, and kinship in a place both endearingly familiar and unnervingly strange. The result is a tale that engages and disturbs.

  Billy Collins

  Mean, Home, Trying

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• If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don't care for human beings.... What I am condemning is that one power, with a president [George W. Bush] who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust.

  Nelson Mandela

  Country, Thinking, America

  "Mandela: U.S. wants holocaust", www.cnn.com. January 30, 2003.

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• As soon as an opinion becomes common it is sufficient reason for men to abandon it and to uphold the opposite opinion until that in its turn grows old, and they require to distinguish themselves by other things. Thus if they attain their goal in some art or science, we must expect them soon to cast it aside to acquire some fresh fame, and this is partly the reason why the most splendid ages degenerate so quickly, and, scarcely emerged from barbarism, plunge into it again.

  Luc de Clapiers

  Art, Men, Opposites

  Jean de La Bruyère, Luc de Clapiers marquis de Vauvenargues (1903). “La Bruyère and Vauvenargues: Selections from the Characters, Reflexions and Maxims”

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• When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.

  Julian Barnes

  Country, Pain, Book

  "Julian Barnes: my life as a bibliophile". www.theguardian.com. June 29, 2012.

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• Farewell, my great one, my own, farewell, my pride, farewell, my swift, deep, dear river, how I loved your daylong splashing, how I loved to plunge into your cold waves.

  Boris Pasternak

  Farewell, Pride, Saying Goodbye

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• Love, like the cold bath, is never negative, it seldom leaves us where it finds us; if once we plunge into it, it will either heighten our virtues, or inflame our vices.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Love, Vices, Negative

  Charles Caleb Colton (1823). “Remarks on the Talents of Lord Byron and the Tendencies of Don Juan”, p.184

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• As long as I hold it as long as I use it, the knife lives, lives in order to take life, but it has to be commanded, it has to have me to tell it to kill, and it wants to, it wants to plunge and thrust and cut and stab and gouge, but I have to want it to as well, my will has to join with its will. I'm the one who allows it and I'm the one responsible.

  Patrick Ness

  Live Life, Cutting, Order

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• Their voices reach out into the empty yard, plunge deep into the hills, go right through the heart.

  Marguerite Duras

  Heart, Voice, Yards

  Marguerite Duras (1992). “Summer rain”, Scribner

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• A real man does not think of victory or defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams.

  Nabeshima Naoshige

  Dream, Real, War

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• If Tolstoy were alive today and working at Panopticon Insurance, he'd say that all insurance companies are the same, then throw himself through an eighteenth story window and plunge to his death in a hail of glass and shattered dignity" (70).

  Paul Neilan

  Glasses, Stories, Alive

  Paul Neilan (2007). “Apathy and Other Small Victories: A Novel”, p.70, Macmillan

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• It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.

  Abraham Maslow

  Hope, Motivation, Fear

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• These days grief seems like walking on a frozen river; most of the time he feels safe enough, but there is always that danger that he will plunge through.

  David Nicholls

  Grief, Rivers, Frozen

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• The fact is that the more we take flight upward [to God], the more our words are confined to the ideas we are capable of forming; so that now as we plunge into that darkness which is beyond intellect, we shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing.

  Pope Dionysius

  Christian, Running, Ideas

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• Government has come to be a trade, and is managed solely on commercial principles. A man plunges into politics to make his fortune, and only cares that the world shall last his days.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Liberty, Principles

  Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1888). “The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, L834-l872”

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• At the ancient pond the frog plunges into the sound of water

  Matsuo Basho

  Water, Sound, Ponds

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• I know what I'm asking. For you to find a needle in - God, not even a haystack. A needle in a tower of other needles." "Plunge your hand in a tower of needles," said Magnus, "and you are likely to cut yourself badly. Are you sure this is what you want?

  Cassandra Clare

  Cutting, Hands, Towers

  Cassandra Clare (2013). “Clockwork Prince”, p.40, Simon and Schuster

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• I gaze lovingly at "Hilal" a love that is reflected through time or what we imagine to be time, as in a mirror. She was never mine and never will be; that is how it is. We are both creators and creatures, but we are also puppets in God's hands, and there is a line we cannot cross, a line that was drawn for reasons we cannot know. We can approach and even dabble our toes in the river but we are forbidden to plunge in and let ourselves be carried along by the current.

  Paulo Coelho

  Rivers, Mirrors, Hands

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• There are many beautiful things in the world around us, but pearls can only be discovered in the depths of the sea; if we wish to posses spiritual pearls we must plunge into the depths, that is, we must pray, we must sink down into the secret depths of contemplation and prayer. Then we shall perceive precious pearls.

  Sadhu Sundar Singh

  Beautiful, Spiritual, Prayer

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• No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another. Love sets the imagination on fire, and, also, eventually, chars the imagination into a harder element: imagination cannot match love, cannot plunge so deep, or range so wide.

  James A. Baldwin

  Ignorance, Fire, Imagination

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• Let him who cannot be alone beware of community... Let him who is not in community beware of being alone... Each by itself has profound perils and pitfalls. One who wants fellowship without solitude plunges into the void of words and feelings, and the one who seeks solitude without fellowship perishes in the abyss of vanity, self-infatuation and despair.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Vanity, Self, Profound

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Samuel Wells (2015). “Life Together”, p.58, SCM Press

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• I search his eyes for the slightest sign of anything, fear, remorse, anger. But there's only the same look of amusement that ended our last conversation. It's as if he's speaking the words again. "Oh, my dear Miss Everdeen. I thought we had agreed not to lie to each other." He's right. We did. The point of my arrow shifts upward. I release the string. And President Coin collapses over the side of the balcony and plunges to the ground. Dead.

  Suzanne Collins

  Lying, Eye, Arrows

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• Discipleship is not limited to what you can comprehend – it must transcend all comprehension. Plunge into the deep waters beyond your own comprehension, and I will help you to comprehend even as I do. Bewilderment is the true comprehension. Not to know where you are going is the true knowledge. My comprehension transcends yours.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Deep Water, Helping, Where You Are

  "The Cost of Discipleship".

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• Time exists so that you can experience these flavors as deeply as possible. On the path of devotion, if you can experience even a glimmer of love, its possible to experience a little more love. When you experience that a little more, then the next degree of intensity is possible. Thus, love engenders love until you reach the point of saturation, when you totally merge with the divine love. this is what the mystics mean when they say that they plunge into the ocean of love to drown themselves.

  Deepak Chopra

  Spiritual, Ocean, Mean

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• Perhaps, perhaps this would be the one to pull me out of my plunge.

  Sylvia Plath

  Would Be

  Sylvia Plath (2011). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.35, Faber & Faber

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• Arrive at knowledge over small streamlets, and do not plunge immediately into the ocean, since progress must go from the easier to the more difficult.

  Thomas Aquinas

  Ocean, Progress, Easier

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