Famous Quotes & Sayings

Josiah Bancroft Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 23 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Josiah Bancroft.

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Famous Quotes By Josiah Bancroft

Josiah Bancroft Quotes 296078

It is not cynical to admit the past has been turned into a fiction. It is a story, not a fact. The real has been erased. Whole eras have been added or removed. Wars have been aggrandized, and human struggle relegated to the margins. Villains are redressed as heroes. Generous, striving, imperfect men and women have been stripped of their flaws or plucked of their virtues and turned into figurines of morality or depravity. Whole societies have been fixed with motive and visions and equanimity where there was none. Suffering has been recast as noble sacrifice! Do you know why the history of the Tower is in such turmoil? Because too many powerful men are fighting for the pen, fighting to write their story over our dead bodies. They know what is at stake: immortality, the character of civilization, and influence beyond the ages. They are fighting to see who gets to mislead our grandchildren. — Josiah Bancroft

Josiah Bancroft Quotes 2003485

The gaps are part of the set, too," she'd said. "You can't replace them. I know how each piece was broken or lost. I broke a plate myself when I was nine. Now I'm an immortal part of the pattern. I'll take my gaps, thank you. — Josiah Bancroft

Josiah Bancroft Quotes 982314

If the law is malleable, Mr. Senlin, if it bends and conforms to man, then man will become resolute in his flaws. The law exists to give shape to man's ideals. When you think about it, doesn't mercy serve the wicked at the expense of the law? — Josiah Bancroft

Josiah Bancroft Quotes 708414

The handkerchief is the universal utensil of the seasoned traveler. It can be a sanitizing device, a seat cover, a dust mask, a garrote, a bandage, a gag, or a white flag. One may feel well-prepared with nothing but a pocket square. — Josiah Bancroft

Josiah Bancroft Quotes 1611265

Senlin did not believe in that sort of love: sudden and selfish and insatiable. Love, as the poets so often painted it, was just bald lust wearing a pompous wig. He believed true love was more like an education: it was deep and subtle and never complete. — Josiah Bancroft

Josiah Bancroft Quotes 1780407

Iren broke the moment of quiet reflection. "He was a bad captian"

"But a worse bird" said Voleta.

Man, what a thing to say after a dude falls to his death. — Josiah Bancroft

Josiah Bancroft Quotes 2253455

Whatever Marya's state, whatever mine, I will find her, and I will carry her home. — Josiah Bancroft

Josiah Bancroft Quotes 1460447

The essential lesson of the zoetrope is this: movement, indeed all progress, even the passage of time, is an illusion. Life is the repetition of stillness. — Josiah Bancroft

Josiah Bancroft Quotes 1064321

We shouldn't have to go around congratulating each other for behaving with basic human dignity. — Josiah Bancroft

Josiah Bancroft Quotes 1121022

Learning starts with failure. — Josiah Bancroft

Josiah Bancroft Quotes 1425821

Suits me. I'd rather be a nothing at the center of everything than a puffed-up somebody at the edge of it all." She said this in her usual unguarded way. And without meaning to, she had described him exactly: a puffed-up somebody at the edge of it all. — Josiah Bancroft

Josiah Bancroft Quotes 1436465

It is not cynical to admit that the past has been turned into a fiction. It is a story, not a fact. The real has been erased. Whole eras have been added and removed. Wars have been aggrandized, and human struggle relegated to the margins. Villains are redressed as heroes. Generous, striving, imperfect men and women have been stripped of their flaws or plucked of their virtues and turned into figurines of morality or depravity. Whole societies have been fixed with motive and vision and equanimity where there was none. Suffering has been recast as noble sacrifice! — Josiah Bancroft

Josiah Bancroft Quotes 1559352

You intellectuals are always so surprised to discover how fragile your body is. The mind is so robust, so remote. But muscles and bones are as simple as tied-up straw. They unravel and snap. And the more they break, the more the mind shrinks. In the moments before the cascade into death, the great intellect is reduced to a silent kernel. The mind is nothing more than a door into the dark. — Josiah Bancroft

Josiah Bancroft Quotes 909033

But what was excruciating at first turned cathartic the more he talked. In telling his story, he discovered that he had developed definite ideas about his own motives and decisions. These ideas seemed to have formed in the ether of emotions and dreams, that wooly fog that lay outside the footlights of the conscious mind. They were not large revelations, but were rather like the little epiphanies one suffers and enjoys over a morning cup of tea. — Josiah Bancroft

Josiah Bancroft Quotes 1630965

She would not tell him the truth for some weeks, but she would eventually confess that she had left with him because the fear had gone out of her daily leaps. Her hours were filled with confident, minor feats and toothless dangers. She would not call it such, but Adam would later name it for her: it was boredom that had driven her from her mother's side and a secure home. — Josiah Bancroft

Josiah Bancroft Quotes 1710403

Even beauty diminishes with study. It is better to glance than gawk. — Josiah Bancroft

Josiah Bancroft Quotes 1728816

Every important journey I have undertaken has begun the same: with crushed sheets, a balled pillow, flung open books, and not a wink of sleep. — Josiah Bancroft

Josiah Bancroft Quotes 1754159

We are, each of us, a multitude. I am not the man I was this morning, nor the man of yesterday. I am a throng of myself queued through time. We are, gentle reader, each a crowd within a crowd. — Josiah Bancroft

Josiah Bancroft Quotes 791232

He believed true love was more like an education: it was deep and subtle and never complete. The — Josiah Bancroft

Josiah Bancroft Quotes 1833930

Spring is gray and miserable and rainy for three or four weeks while the snow melts. The ditches turn into creeks and everything you own is clammy as a frog belly. Then one morning, you walk outside and the sun is out and the clover has grown over the ditches and the trees are pointed with leaves, like ten thousand green arrowheads, and the air smells like..." and here he had to fumble for a phrase, "like a roomful of stately ladies and one wet dog. — Josiah Bancroft

Josiah Bancroft Quotes 1966546

She had to rediscover fear and, tucked somewhere inside that fear, life. — Josiah Bancroft

Josiah Bancroft Quotes 765480

Yes, I hear that people who suffer from brain damage are quite happy. That's what I always wanted for you, Edith: for you to be happy, no matter how many blows to the head it takes. — Josiah Bancroft

Josiah Bancroft Quotes 244930

I'm glad your self-righteousness has given you some exercise, but you forget: we are not such a tidy, reasonable, and humane race. Our thoughts don't stand in grammatical rows, our hearts don't draw equations, our consciences don't have the benefit of historians whispering the answers to us. — Josiah Bancroft