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Reflection Quotes
"What the culture of get rich quick does to our people is Our young people look for quick answers and solutions."
22
"And then I walked out, straight through the twilight, treading the beaten earth. There were no dust clouds, no signs of anyone, but I paid no mind. I was my own lucky hand of solitaire. The desert landscape unchanging: a long, unwinding scroll that I would one day amuse myself by filling. I'm going to remember everything and then I'm going to write it all down. An aria to a coat. A requiem for a café. That's what I was thinking, in my dream, looking down at my hands."
22
"Dreams and restless thoughts came flowing to him from the river, from the twinkling stars at night, from the sun's melting rays. Dreams and a restlessness of the soul came to him."
21
"Woman's at best a contradiction still."
21
"We are all alone in this world, even in a crowd."
21
"I wonder if that's the perennial story of writers: you find the true light, you lose the true light, you find it again. And maybe again."
21
"Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains."
21
"We're so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past, like ancient stars that have burned out, are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about every day, too many new things we have to learn. New styles, new information, new technology, new terminology. But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone."
21
"Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love."
21
"Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won."
21
"It is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built 'The Breakers he damned himself."
21
"Everything comes down so pasteurizedeverything comes down 16 degreesthey say your amplifier is too loudturn your amplifier downare we high all alone on our kneesmemory is just hips that swinglike a clockthe past projects fantastic scenestic/toc tic/toc tic/tocfuck the clock!"
21
"We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother's voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don't go. Don't grow."
21
"We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not.... We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget."
21
"The thing that binds us together is that we have both lowered our expectations of life."
20
"The hallway felt like time itself, and Patricia Buckingham and I were standing at opposite ends-her looking back on all she'd seen, me wondering what lay ahead."
20
"Every cure for nostalgia is obsolete."
20
"I am sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining-- small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age."
20
"Most of the big shore places were closed now. And there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of the ferryboat across the sound. And as the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away till gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes, A fresh green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams. For a transitory, enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent. Face to face, for the last time in history, with something commensurate to its capacity for wonder."
20
"The sky didn't wonder where it was."
20
"Youth is like a fickle girlfriend. We can't understand or value her until she goes off with someone else, never to return."
20
"I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.From the back pages."
20
"Occasionally during the day, ask yourself: 'How am I doing today and what can I do to do a better job?"
20
"Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small."
19
"Time slowed as metal shards enveloped her like shattered glass. None pierced her of course, but it seemed as though she might be able to reach out and pluck one from the sky.She settled for stretching out an imagined hand, palm upturned, and letting a shard fall through it untouched like the ghost she had become."
19
"Well, I've had my fun; I've had it, he thought, looking up at the swinging baskets of pale geraniums. And it was smashed to atoms-his fun, for it was half made up, as he knew very well; invented, this escapade with the girl; made up, as one makes up the better part of life, he thought-making onself up; making her up; creating an exquisite amusement, and something more. But odd it was, and quite true; all this one could never share-it smashed to atoms."
19
"One thing I've always wondered-why did you enter that bikini contest when you were a teenager? Her face flushed with a mixture of anger and embarrassment. "How far back did you trace me? "Far enough. A pause. "You didn't answer my question. "And you didn't turn into a puff of smoke and disappear. The world is full of disappointments."
19
"But why, everybody asks, am I not blessed by fortune (or at least not as blessed as I would like to be)? Why have I not been favored like others who are less deserving? No one believes their misfortunes are attributable to any shortcomings of their own; that is why they must find a culprit."
19
"Judge, criticize, object before you decide to believe something; but once you believe, you're but an idiot if you need to be scrupulous any more."
19
"I can't stay No. 1 for fifty years, you know. We'll see what happens."
19
"It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone."
19
"She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach."
19
"Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much."
19
"If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance very various heroic and mean splendid and sordid infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme as great as a man some think even better."
19
"I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man "with a locomotive in his chest, and that's a fact," not the only youth with a million hungers and not one of them appeasable, not the only one who is lonely among multitudes, and does not know why."
19
"Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don't stop at your station."
19
"The unrecognized genius-that's an old story. Have you ever thought of a much worse one-the genius recognized too well? ... That a great many men are poor fools who can't see the best-that's nothing. One can't get angry at that. But do you understand about the men who see it and don't want it?"
19
"I will never forget feeling scared and vulnerable. I will never forget feeling the deep sad loss of so many lives. I will never forget the smell of the smoke that reached across the water and delivered a deep feeling of doom into my gut. I will never forget feeling the boosted sense of unity and pride. I will never forget seeing the courageous actions of so many men and women. I will never forget seeing people of all backgrounds working together in community. I will never forget seeing what hate can destroy. I will never forget seeing what love can heal."
19
"An inch to a man's heart is a mile to his wallet."
19
"Never can true reconcilement grow where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep..."
18
"The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse."
18
"Life has a peculiar feel when you look back on it that it doesn't have when you're actually living it. It's as though the whole thing were designed to be understood in hindsight, as though you'll never know the meaning of your experiences until you've had enough of them to provide reference."
18
"What you really value is what you miss not what you have."
18
"I can't destroy things so beautiful.""Time will destroy them if you don't. Time destroys everything. But if you destroy them, it will mean something."
18
"In solitude when we are least alone."
18
"More than half of my life is past, I have left only the time I need for turning the rest of it to account and for effacing my errors by my virtues."
18
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