30 quotes found
“Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.”
“[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.”
“You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.”
“Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.”
“It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.”
“Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.”
“[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automat...”
“[Y]ou were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase [angle of repose] as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest. As you said, it was too good for mere dirt; y...”
“There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance ... some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which t...”
“What do you mean, 'Angle of Repose?' she asked me when I dreamed we were talking about Grandmother's life, and I said it was the angle at which a man or woman finally lies down. I suppose it is; an...”
“I wouldn't live in a colony like that, myself, for a thousand dollars an hour. I wouldn't want it next door. I'm not too happy it's within ten miles. Why? Because their soft-headedness irritates me...”
“That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. "It's all right," he said. "But I'd take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That's about used ...”
“Civilizations grow by agreements and accomodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get s...”
“I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defe...”
“No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.”
“There is some history that I want not to have happened. I resist the consequences of being Nemesis.”
“Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.”
“I never learned to say shit before a lady. I don't believe in progress in quite the way you seem to. You believe in it more than Grandmother did. As for those purely cultural patterns of convention...”
“What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward, the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me...”
“It would be easy to call it quits. Occasionally I have these moments, not often. There is nothing to do but sit still until they pass. Tantrums and passions I don't need, endurance is what I need. ...”
