Page 4 Quotes

“[Thoreau's] famous night in jail took place about halfway through his stay in the cabin on Emerson's woodlot at Walden Pond. His two-year stint in the small cabin he built himself is often portrayed as a monastic retreat from the world of human affairs into the world of nautre, though he went back to town to eat with and talk to friends and family and to pick up money doing odd jobs that didn't fit into Walden's narrative. He went to jail both because the town jailer ran into him while he was getting his shoe mended and because he felt passionately enough about national affairs to refuse to pay his tax. To be in the woods was not to be out of society or politics.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics

“Third, there was little or no opportunity for professional meetings and contact within the system since the local, state, and regional associations were not open to them for visitation or membership. Fourth, before the opening of the Hampton Institute School of Library Service in 1925, professional library school training for blacks had to be obtained outside the region.”
― Annie L. McPheeters, Library Service in Black and White: Some Personal Recollections, 1921-1980

“Arrakis - Dune - Desert Planet”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Some things can only be seen in the shadows,” my father said, flashing a mysterious smile probably borrowed from the pages of one of his worn Alexandre Dumas romances.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Mirek says: The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“With this he is trying to justify what his friends call carelessness: meticulously keeping a diary, preserving his correspondence, compiling the minutes of all the meetings where they discuss the situation and ponder what to do. He says to them: We’re not doing anything that violates the constitution. To hide and feel guilty would be the beginning of defeat.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“He ended up agreeing with his more prudent dom of speech, but the laws punished anything that could be considered an attack on state security. One never knew when the state would start screaming that this word or that was an attempt on its security. So he decided to put his compromising papers in a safe place.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Eight years before, after a tumultuous election campaign, Mallory had defeated an inept and unpopular but liberal President by tactics that people like the dean regarded as kicking a man when he was down: he had pointedly ignored an appalling personal scandal that swirled round the incumbent and dwelled caustically on the man’s virtually unbroken string of disastrous policy mistakes. After one term, Mallory himself was defeated by Lockwood, and when he ran against Lockwood a second time, two months ago, he lost by the smallest margin of popular votes in history. After that, though he continued to loiter in the nightmares of those who deplored him, his image had vanished from the news media, reducing him overnight from the enormous dimensions of world repute to his original puny size and being, as if fame itself were a floppy disk that could be inserted into the collective consciousness or removed from it according to the whim of some Olympian computer operators.”
― Charles McCarry, Shelley's Heart

“He knew that there is no better place to have a private word with a President, who is never alone otherwise, than at a public event.”
― Charles McCarry, Shelley's Heart

“You gotta let life be life.”
― Timothy Janovsky

“There was an Episode of Skyscrapers—New York seen upside down as from a circling aeroplane in the early dawn of morning. And the strange inharmonious rhythm beat ever more insistently—with increasing menacing monotony.”
― Mary Westmacott, Giant's Bread

“And on the top immense pinnacle a little figure—facing away from the audience towards the insufferable glare that represented the rising of the sun”
― Mary Westmacott, Giant's Bread

“The glare increased—to the whiteness of magnesium.”
― Mary Westmacott, Giant's Bread