Substance Quotes - Page 15

• Travel, which had once charmed him, seemed, at length, unendurable, a business of color without substance, a phantom chase after his own dream's shadow.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Dream, Color, Shadow

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Echoes of the Jazz Age Collection: The Beautiful and Damned, Winter Dreams, The Great Gatsby, Babylon Revisited, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and many more”, p.241, e-artnow

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• In recent weeks, in true messianic style, it has come clear to her that her real identity is literally, the force of gravity. I am Gravity, I am That against which the Rocket must struggle, to which prehistoric wastes submit and are transmuted to the very substance of History.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Real, Struggle, Style

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• These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing - it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.

  Ian Mcewan

  Light, Darkness, Everyday

  Ian McEwan (2010). “Atonement”, p.163, Random House

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• He screamed. Mmm?' inquired the gentleman. I...I would never presume to interrupt you, sir. But the ground appears to be swallowing me up.' It is a bog,' said the gentleman, helpfully. It is certainly a most terrifying substance.

  Susanna Clarke

  Gentleman, Swallowing, Bogs

  Susanna Clarke, Portia Rosenberg (2005). “Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell”, p.602, A&C Black

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• The compelling thing about making art - or making anything, I suppose - is the moment when the vaporous, insubstantial idea becomes a solid there, a thing, a substance in a world of substances.

  Audrey Niffenegger

  Art, Ideas, World

  Audrey Niffenegger (2014). “The Time Traveler's Wife”, p.280, Simon and Schuster

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• I am a part of the part that at first was all, part of the darkness that gave birth to the light, that supercilious light which now disputes with Mother Night her ancient rank and space, and yet cannot succeed; no matter how it struggles, it sticks to matter and can't get free. Light flows from substance, makes it beautiful.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Beautiful, Mother, Struggle

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1941). “Goethe's Faust”

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• The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.

  Wendell Berry

  Inspiring, Reality, Agriculture

  Wendell Berry (2010). “Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food (Large Print 16pt)”, p.286, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Me thinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.

  Herman Melville

  Spiritual, Thinking, Air

  Herman Melville (1892). “Moby Dick”, p.40

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• the intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness if my mind's flight made it very difficult for me to believe once i was better, that the illness was one i should willingly give up....moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable reactions to what life has dealt....even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Depression, Giving Up, Believe

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• God is the highest good of the reasonable creature. The enjoyment of him is our proper; and is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied. To go to heaven, fully to enjoy God, is infinitely better than the most pleasant accommodations here. Better than fathers and mothers, husbands, wives, or children, or the company of any, or all earthly friends. These are but shadows; but the enjoyment of God is the substance. These are but scattered beams; but God is the sun. These are but streams; but God is the fountain. These are but drops, but God is the ocean.

  Jonathan Edwards

  Mother, Children, Husband

  Jonathan Edwards (1785). “The life and character of ... J. E. ... Together with a number of his sermons, etc”, p.381

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• She should have remembered her past experiences in the relationship wars and not let herself get so excited. Evidently her hormones had overruled her common sense and she had become drunk on ovarian wine, the most potent, sanity- destroying substance in the universe.

  Linda Howard

  War, Wine, Past

  Linda Howard (2012). “Mr Perfect”, p.186, Simon and Schuster

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• If she were religious, she would call it the soul. It is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences, though it runs like veins of brilliant metal through all three. It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance

  Michael Cunningham

  Running, Religious, Soul

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• In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the same thought. "I have come to this lonely place and here is this other," was the substance of the thing felt.

  Sherwood Anderson

  Lonely, Two, Darkness

  Sherwood Anderson (2012). “Winesburg, Ohio”, p.149, Courier Corporation

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• The web of marriage is made by propinquity, in the day to day living side by side, looking outward in the same direction. It is woven in space and in time of the substance of life itself.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Marriage, Space, Woven

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh (2002). “Wisdom from Gift from the Sea”, p.45, Peter Pauper Press, Inc.

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• True, I talk of dreams, Which are the children of an idle brain, Begot of nothing but vain fantasy, Which is as thin of substance as the air, And more inconstant than the wind, who woos Even now the frozen bosom of the north, And, being anger'd, puffs away from thence, Turning his side to the dew-dropping south.

  William Shakespeare

  Dream, Children, Air

  William Shakespeare, George Steevens (1828). “The dramatic works of William Shakespeare”, p.392

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• Faith and feelings are the warm marrow of evil. Unlike reason, faith and feelings provide no boundary to limit any delusion, any whim. They are virulent poison, giving the numbing illusion of moral sanction to every depravity ever hatched. Faith and feelings are the darkness to reason’s light. Reason is the very substance of truth itself. The glory that is life is wholly embraced through reason. In rejecting it, in rejecting reason, one embraces death.

  Terry Goodkind

  Light, Evil, Giving

  Terry Goodkind (2015). “Faith Of The Fallen”, p.366, Head of Zeus

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• And wasn't my mind also like another crib in the depths of which I felt I remained ensconced, even in order to watch what was happening outside? When I saw an external object, my awareness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, lining it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever directly touching its substance; it would volatize in some way before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body brought near a wet object never touches its moisture because it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation.

  Marcel Proust

  Spiritual, Order, Touching

  Marcel Proust (2003). “Swann's Way”, Viking Press

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• Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures... There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it.

  Sigmund Freud

  Pain, Powerful, Disappointment

  Sigmund Freud, Peter (AFT) Gay, Christopher Hitchens (2010). “Civilization and Its Discontents”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

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• Why is it that sometimes our prayers seem not to be answered? This is a manifestation of the Buddha's wisdom, so that we can deepen our prayers, become stronger people, live more profound lives and secure deeper, more lasting good fortune. If our slightest prayer was answered immediately, we would become lazy and degenerate. And we could not hope to build a life of great dignity and substance.

  Daisaku Ikeda

  Prayer, People, Profound

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• I began to wonder whether anything truly existed, whether reality wasn't an unformed and gelatinous substance only half-captured by my senses....If that were true, each of us was living in absolute isolation. The thought terrified me. I was consoled by the idea that I could take that gelatin and mold it to create anything I wanted...At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of the imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.

  Isabel Allende

  Reality, Ideas, Blood

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• The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had an eternal value and the substance of which was divine had been given back to me today by this friend of mine who taught me dancing.

  Hermann Hesse

  Dancing, World, Sacred

  Hermann Hesse (2013). “Steppenwolf: A Novel”, p.154, Macmillan

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• For you must know, gentlemen, that when the mariner is dosed, he likes to know that he has been dosed: with fifteen grains or even less of this valuable substance scenting him and the very air about him there can be no doubt of the matter; and such is the nature of the human mind that he experiences a far greater real benefit than the drug itself would provide, were it deprived of its stench.

  Patrick O'Brian

  Real, Air, Drug

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• He felt full of a dense and sour substance that was blocking his chest, and it wasn't grief. After all those years, life now seemed like no more than a trap, a maze, not even a maze, just a room that was all walls, no door.

  Etgar Keret

  Wall, Block, Grief

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• Society. The same society, I might add, that dictates that little girls should always be sugar and spice and everything nice, which encourages them not to be assertive. And that, in turn, then leads to low self-esteem, which can lead to eating disorders and increased tolerance and acceptance of domestic, sexual, and substance abuse." "You get all that from a pink Onesie?" Leah said after a moment.

  Sarah Dessen

  Girl, Nice, Self Esteem

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• We are in the dark places of the earth," said Madman. "Where all the ancient and most dangerous secrets are kept. There are Old Things down here, sleeping all around us, in the earth and in the living rock, and in the spaces between spaces. Keep your voices down. Some of these old creatures sleep but lightly, and even their dreams can have force and substance in our limited world. We have come among forgotten gods and sleeping devils, from the days before the world settled down and declared itself sane.

  Simon R. Green

  Dream, Sleep, Dark

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