Agamben The Open Quotes & Sayings

Before The World Was Made
If I make the lashes dark
and the eyes more bright
and the lips more scarlet,
or ask if all be right
from mirror after mirror,
no vanity's displayed:
I'm looking for the face I had
before the world was made.
What if I look upon a man
as though on my beloved,
and my blood be cold the while
and my heart unmoved?
Why should he think me cruel
or that he is betrayed?
I'd have him love the thing that was
before the world was made. — W.B.Yeats

What is the purpose of wealth if it cannot serve an ideal that enhances humanity and betters the lives of the people, even if that means those we have never met before in our lives? — Janvier Chouteu-Chando

Steal Captain Black's car," said Yossarian. "That's what I always do." "We can't steal anybody's car. Since you began stealing the nearest car every time you wanted one, nobody leaves the ignition on. — Joseph Heller

Much of Hamlet is about the precise kind of slippage the mourner experiences: the difference between being and seeming, the uncertainty about how the inner translates into the outer, the sense that one is expected to perform grief palatably. (If you don't seem sad, people worry; but if you are grief-stricken, people flinch away from your pain.) — Meghan O'Rourke

The men in my family are strong because the women in my family kill and eat the weak ones. — Robert Jordan

I decided I ought to pick a project that would not be controversial, that would not really cost the government a lot of money. — Barbara Bush

I'm a real big country boy. — Tom Felton

You're trying to look for rock bottom, to that part of yourself that could no longer feel pain. But there is no such thing as rock bottom. As long as there is left to destroy in you, you'd do it. We always feel the need to sink ourselves because we keep being intolerable, because if we're suffering then maybe people would give us a break for all the shameful things we do. You think you could impose your own penance, but it never goes away, does it? That kind of deadening that's worse than actual dying. — V.J. Campilan

No, I went to the bar to ask for a mojito and that guy Johnny said he didn't make mojitos. Then he offered to make me a mint julep, in one of those silver cups and everything."
"Did you know say the true cause of the Civil War was some Northerner adding nutmeg to a mint julep?" Lucy asked. — Mary Jane Hathaway

That was the September I cut school six times in my first two weeks. I just couldn't do school anymore. Something inside wouldn't let me. — Junot Diaz

Why can't life always be lived under the stars,' she said, 'with great music and family and friends? — Jan Karon

Though at this moment she felt abused, abandoned, and ashamed of herself, Madeleine knew that she was still young, that she had her whole life ahead of her
a life in which, if she persevered, she might do something special
and that part of persevering meant getting past moments just like this one, when people made you feel small, unlovable, and took away your confidence. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Even if I have to do it alone, I will free all sentient beings from suffering and the causes of suffering, and set all sentient beings in happiness and its causes. — Dalai Lama XIV

That business does not prosper which you transact with the eyes of others. — Livy

No, sir. A sin. A suchmuch thing. — Salman Rushdie