Alejandra M > Alejandra's Quotes

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  • #1
    Tim O'Brien
    “That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.”
    Tim O'Brien

  • #2
    Tim O'Brien
    “They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.”
    Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

  • #3
    Tim O'Brien
    “A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.”
    Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

  • #4
    Tim O'Brien
    “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”
    Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
    tags: war

  • #5
    Robert Frost
    “In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
    Robert Frost

  • #6
    Robert Frost
    “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
    Robert Frost

  • #7
    Robert Frost
    “Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself.”
    Robert Frost

  • #8
    Robert Frost
    “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”
    Robert Frost

  • #9
    Robert Frost
    “Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.”
    Robert Frost

  • #10
    Frederick Douglass
    “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”
    Frederick Douglass

  • #11
    Frederick Douglass
    “In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky — her grand old woods — her fertile fields — her beautiful rivers — her mighty lakes, and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked, my joy is soon turned to mourning. When I remember that all is cursed with the infernal actions of slaveholding, robbery and wrong, — when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, and that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing.”
    Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings

  • #12
    Frederick Douglass
    “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?

    I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”
    Frederick Douglass

  • #13
    John C. Holt
    “Leaders are not, as we are often led to think, people who go along with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see, whether anyone is following them. "Leadership qualities" are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. They include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, stubbornness, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head, even when things are going badly. True leaders, in short, do not make people into followers, but into other leaders.”
    John Holt , Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book Of Homeschooling

  • #14
    John C. Holt
    “The true test of character is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do.”
    John Holt

  • #15
    Tim O'Brien
    “And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”
    Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

  • #16
    Tim O'Brien
    “A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries.”
    Tim O'Brien

  • #17
    David     Platt
    “The road that leads to heaven is risky, lonely, and costly in this world, and few are willing to pay the price.”
    David Platt, Follow Me: A Call to Die. A Call to Live.

  • #18
    David     Platt
    “far more important than looking and searching for God’s will is simply knowing and trusting God.”
    David Platt, Follow Me: A Call to Die. A Call to Live.

  • #19
    Walt Whitman
    “We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. So medicine, law, business, engineering... these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love... these are what we stay alive for.”
    Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

  • #20
    Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
    “How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.”
    Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

  • #21
    Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
    “There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.”
    Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

  • #22
    Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
    “Even broken in spirit as he is, no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions, seems still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth. Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery, and be overwhelmed by disappointments; yet, when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit that has a halo around him, within whose circle no grief or folly ventures.”
    Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

  • #23
    Charlotte Brontë
    “I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
    Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

  • #24
    Charles Dickens
    “Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.”
    Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

  • #25
    Charles Dickens
    “Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before--more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.”
    Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

  • #26
    Joseph Conrad
    “Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets.”
    Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

  • #27
    Antonio Machado
    “Last night as I was sleeping,
    I dreamt—marvelous error!—
    that a spring was breaking
    out in my heart.
    I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
    Oh water, are you coming to me,
    water of a new life
    that I have never drunk?

    Last night as I was sleeping,
    I dreamt—marvelous error!—
    that I had a beehive
    here inside my heart.
    And the golden bees
    were making white combs
    and sweet honey
    from my old failures.

    Last night as I was sleeping,
    I dreamt—marvelous error!—
    that a fiery sun was giving
    light inside my heart.
    It was fiery because I felt
    warmth as from a hearth,
    and sun because it gave light
    and brought tears to my eyes.

    Last night as I slept,
    I dreamt—marvelous error!—
    that it was God I had
    here inside my heart. ”
    Antonio Machado

  • #28
    Antonio Machado
    “I Have Walked Down Many Roads
    by Antonio Machado
    translated from the Spanish by Don Share


    I have walked down many roads
    and cleared many paths;
    I have navigated a hundred oceans
    and anchored off a hundred shores.

    All over, I have seen
    caravans of sadness,
    pompous and melancholy men
    drunk with black shadows,

    and defrocked pedants
    who stare, keep quiet, and think
    they know, because they don’t
    drink wine in the neighborhood bars.

    Bad people who go around
    polluting the earth . . .

    And all over, I have seen
    people who dance or play,
    when they can, and work
    their four handfuls of land.

    If they turn up someplace,
    they never ask where they are.

    When they travel, they ride
    on the backs of old mules,

    and don’t know how to hurry,
    not even on holidays.

    When there’s wine, they drink wine;
    when there’s no wine, they drink cool water.

    These are good people, who live,
    work, get by, and dream;
    and on a day like all the others
    they lie down under the earth.”
    Antonio Machado, Times Alone: Selected Poems

  • #29
    Louise Erdrich
    “Society is like this card game here, cousin. We got dealt our hand before we were even born, and as we grow we have to play as best as we can.”
    Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine



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