Shapes Quotes - Page 16

• Memory warps time, as it does the sights and sounds and smells of reality; for what shapes it is emotion, which can twist what seems clear, just as the surface of a pond seems to bend the stick thrust into the water.

  Sherwood Smith

  Memories, Reality, Sight

  Sherwood Smith (1997). “Crown Duel”, p.182, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• He was weary of himself, of cold ideas and brain dreams. Life a poem? Not when you went about forever poetizing about your own life instead of living it. How innocuous it all was, and empty, empty, empty! This chasing after yourself, craftily observing your own tracks--in a circle, of course. This sham diving into the stream of life while all the time you sat angling after yourself, fishing yourself up in one curious disguise or another! If he could only be overwhelmed by something--life, love, passion--so that he could no longer shape it into poems, but had to let it shape him!

  Jens Peter Jacobsen

  Dream, Love Life, Passion

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• Once I heard my mother say that each of us lives in a separate universe, one we have dreamed into being. We love pople when their dream coincides with ours, the way two cutout designs laid one on top of the other might match. But dream worlds are not static like cutouts; sooner or later they change shape, leading to misunderstanding, loneliness and loss of love.

  Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  Mother, Dream, Loneliness

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• So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned. And that's what a poem does. Poems match sounds up the way you matched them when you were a tiny kid, using that detachable front phoneme.

  Nicholson Baker

  Kids, Curves, Brain

  Nicholson Baker (2009). “The Anthologist: A Novel”, p.111, Simon and Schuster

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• The visions we offer our children shape the future.

  Carl Sagan

  Children, Vision, Offers

  Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan (2011). “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space”, p.90, Ballantine Books

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• What follows is more about books than it is about me, but nonetheless it is my inward autobiography, for the words we take into ourselves help to shape us.

  Francis Spufford

  Book, Inward, Helping

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• Keeping you safe keeps me in shape.

  Ilona Andrews

  Safe

  Ilona Andrews (2009). “Magic Strikes”, p.237, Penguin

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• That’s how stories happen — with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

  Haruki Murakami

  Thinking, Twists, Stories

  FaceBook post by Haruki Murakami from Nov 17, 2013

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• When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.

  Graham Greene

  Hate, Eye, Men

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

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• The things that we preceive as beautiful may be different, but the actual characteristics we ascribe to beautiful objects are similar. Think about it. When something strikes us as beautiful, it displays more presence and sharpness of shape and vividness of color, doesn't it? It stands out. It shines. It seems almost iridescent compared to the dullness of other objects less attractive.

  James Redfield

  Beautiful, Thinking, Color

  James Redfield (2009). “Celestine Insights - Limited Edition of Celestine Prophecy and Tenth Insight”, p.31, Hachette UK

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• He took something out of his jacket and handed it to her. It was a long thin dagger in a leather sheath. The hilt of the dagger was set with a single red stone carved in the shape of a rose. She shook her head. "I wouldn't even know how to use that--" He pressed it into her hand, curling her fingers around it. "You'd learn." He dropped his voice. "It's in your blood." She drew her hand back slowly. "All right." "I could give you a thigh sheath to put that in," Isabelle offered. "I've got tons." "CERTAINLY NOT," said Simon.

  Cassandra Clare

  Blood, Hands, Voice

  Cassandra Clare (2015). “City of Bones: TV Tie-in”, p.214, Simon and Schuster

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• The Lord shapes the back to bear the burden placed upon it.

  Thomas S. Monson

  Bears, Lord, Burden

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• I've learned two things in my life. One that love is the beginning and end of all meaning. And two that it is the same thing whatever shape our souls have taken on this journey. Love is love. Is love.

  Clive Barker

  Taken, Journey, Love Is

  FaceBook post by Clive Barker from Oct 20, 2012

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• A bruise, blue in the muscle, you impinge upon me. As bone hugs the ache home, so I'm vexed to love you, your body the shape of returns, your hair a torso of light, your heat I must have, your opening I'd eat, each moment of that soft-finned fruit, inverted fountain in which I don't see me.

  Li-Young Lee

  Love You, Home, Light

  Li-Young Lee, “The City In Which I Loved You”

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• How we shape our understanding of others' lives is determined by what we find memorable in them, and that in turn is determined not by any potentially accurate overview of another's personality but rather by the tension and balance that exist in our daily relationships.

  Tom Robbins

  Memorable, Personality, Understanding

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues”, p.23, Bantam

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• Power has for so long been a male construct that it distorted the shape of the first women who tried it on, only to find themselves in a sort of straitjacket.

  Stacy Schiff

  Long, Males, Firsts

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• Still, these days when I daydream about the movie, I don't think about the big picture. It's more fun for me to think of little things that would add to the movie. I like to think the powers that be would let me amuse myself with some small things in order to shut me up while they re-write the screenplay to turn Kvothe into a lesbian, shape-changing unicorn.

  Patrick Rothfuss

  Fun, Writing, Thinking

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• My one-time roommate Claire had inherited the house from her uncle, and when she went off to bigger and better things, she’d left it in my care. And it needed a lot of it. Most importantly, it needed a new roof. There was a worrying stain on the ceiling of my bedroom that had started out roughly the shape of Rhode Island, but now looked more like North Carolina. Another few more days of rain and it was going to be Texas. And then it wouldn’t be anything at all because the battered old shingles were going to cave in on my head.

  Karen Chance

  Uncles, Rain, Rhode Island

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• It's only a story, you say. So it is, and the rest of life with it - creation story, love story, horror, crime, the strange story of you and I. The alphabet of my DNA shapes certain words, but the story is not told. I have to tell it myself. What is it that I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end. I can change the story. I am the story. Begin.

  Jeanette Winterson

  New Beginnings, Dna, Rest Of Life

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• I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in.

  William Shakespeare

  Giving, Imagination, Ambitious

  'Hamlet' (1601) act 3, sc. 1, l. [124]

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• In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves; it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Fall, Clouds, Wind

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “A Wizard of Earthsea”, p.40, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• It is grievous for a man to leave behind him a shadow in his own shape.

  Victor Hugo

  Men, Shadow, Behinds

  Victor Hugo (1980). “Les misérables”, Viking Pr

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• Hey, which one of them is supposed to be your boyfriend?” Stark asked me. Even in the terrible shape he was in, he caught my glance with his. His voice was scratchy, and he sounded scarily weak, but his eyes sparkled with humor. I am!” Heath and Erik said together.

  P. C. Cast

  Eye, Voice, Your Boyfriend

  P. C. Cast, Kristin Cast (2009). “Tempted: A House of Night Novel”, p.3, St. Martin's Griffin

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• Morning drew on apace. The air became more sharp and piercing, as its first dull hue: the death of night, rather than the birth of day: glimmered faintly in the sky. The objects which had looked dim and terrible in the darkness, grew more and more defined, and gradually resolved into their familiar shapes. The rain came down, thick and fast; and pattered, noisily, among the leafless bushes.

  Charles Dickens

  Morning, Rain, Night

  Charles Dickens (2016). “Oliver Twist”, p.173, Pan Macmillan

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• Limited by the world, which I oppose, jagged by it, I shall be all the more handsome and sparkling as the angles which wound me and give me shape are more acute and the jagging more cruel.

  Jean Genet

  Giving, World, Handsome

  Jean Genet, Edmund White (1993). “The selected writings of Jean Genet”, Ecco Pr

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