Almost A Man Quotes & Sayings

Hey, Mom, I'm a married woman now. I want to have ten babies and live here forever and ever.
How weird is that? It's almost ROMANTIC.
And then I realized that my sister was trying to LIVE a romance novel.
Man, that takes courage and imagination. Well, it also took some degree of mental illness, too, but I was suddenly happy for her.
And a little scared. — Sherman Alexie

A tramp, therefore, is a celibate from the moment when he takes to the road. He is absolutely without hope of getting a wife, a mistress, or any kind of woman except - very rarely, when he can raise a few shillings - a prostitute.
It is obvious what the results of this must be: homosexuality, for instance, and occasional rape cases. But deeper than these there is the degradation worked in a man who knows that he is not even considered fit for marriage. The sexual impulse, not to put it any higher, is a fundamental impulse, and starvation of it can be almost as demoralizing as physical hunger. The evil of poverty is not so much that it makes a man suffer as that it rots him physically and spiritually. And there can be no doubt that sexual starvation contributes to this rotting process. Cut off from the whole race of women, a tramp feels himself degraded to the rank of a cripple or a lunatic. No humiliation could do more damage to a man's self-respect. — George Orwell

There's almost 70 billion in square feet under construction in high rises in commercial, residential and light manufacturing. And we estimate about 30 billion square feet, and that's with a 'B,' is commercial, that we would just consider office space. To put that in perspective, that's a 5x5-foot cubicle for every man, woman and child in China. — James Chanos

Next time we will look at this from a much more basic point of view and one antedating all zoology, which, glimpsed only a little after my twentieth year, made write in those days that what is most valuable in man is his eternal and almost divine discontent, a discontent which is a kind of love without a beloved, and like an ache which we feel in members of our body that we do not have. Man is the only being that misses he has never had. And the whole of what we miss, without ever having had it, is never what we call happiness. From this one could start a meditation on happiness, an analysis of that strange condition which makes man the only being who is unhappy for the very reason that he needs to be happy. That is, because he needs to be what he is not. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Normal people are not always boring. On the contrary. Volatility and passion, although often more romantic and enticing, are not intrinsically preferable to a steadiness of experience and feeling about another person (nor are they incompatible). These are beliefs, of course, that one has intuitively about friendships and family; they become less obvious when caught up in a romantic life that mirrors, magnifies, and perpetuates one's own mercurial emotional life and temperament. It has been with my pleasure, and not-inconsiderable pain, that I have learned about the possibilities of love - its steadiness and its growth - from my husband, the man with whom I had lived for almost a decade. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries
stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever. — Herman Melville

He was partly a young man of our time - that is, honest by nature, demanding the truth, seeking it and believing in it, and in that belief demanding immediate participation in it with all the strength of his soul; demanding an immediate deed, with an unfailing desire to sacrifice everything for this deed, even life. Although, unfortunately, these young men do not understand that the sacrifice of life is, perhaps, the easiest of all sacrifices in many cases, while to sacrifice, for example, five or six years of their ebulliently youthful life to hard, difficult studies, to learning, in order to increase tenfold their strength to serve the very truth and the very deed that they loved and set out to accomplish - such sacrifice is often almost beyond the strength of many of them. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Caspian felt sure that he would hate the new Tutor, but when the new Tutor arrived about a week later he turned out to be the sort of person it is almost impossible not to like. He was the smallest, and also the fattest, man Caspian had ever seen. He had a long, silvery, pointed beard which came down to his waist, and his face, which was brown and covered with wrinkles, looked very wise, very ugly, and very kind. His voice was grave and his eyes were merry so that, until you got to now him really well, it was hard to know when he was joking and when he was serious. His name was Doctor Cornelius. — C.S. Lewis

Man's principle trait is a readiness to believe anything. Otherwise, how could the Church have survived for almost two thousand years in the absense of universal gullibility? — Umberto Eco

All that weeping makes me want to slap her," he complained, "and I can scarce sleep for her sobbing." You would weep as well if you had a son and lost him, Sam almost said. He could not blame Gilly for her grief. Instead, he blamed Jon Snow and wondered when Jon's heart had turned to stone. Once he asked Maester Aemon that very question, when Gilly was down at the canal fetching water for them. "When you raised him up to be the lord commander," the old man answered. — George R R Martin

Nearly twenty years before, Hudson Taylor had written in an editorial: "All God's giants have been weak men, who did great things for God because they reckoned on His being with them." As he looked at himself, Hudson Taylor saw nothing but weakness; but as generations of Christians have studied Taylor's life, they have become acquainted with a man who dared to believe the Word of God and, by faith, carried the gospel to inland China - and saw God work wonders! "Want of trust is at the root of almost all our sins and all our weaknesses," he wrote in that same editorial, "and how shall we escape it but by looking to Him and observing His faithfulness. The man who holds God's faithfulness will not be foolhardy or reckless, but he will be ready for every emergency. — Warren W. Wiersbe

And that wreched creature without hands or feet, who had to be put to bed and fed like a child, that pitiable remnant of a man, whose almost vanished life was nothing more than one scream of pain, cried out in furious indignation: 'What a fool one must be to go and kill oneself!' - 'Joy of Life — Emile Zola

God pulled out almost to the tip and eased back in again. His body was pressed against his man from head to toe; only his hips moved his cock in and out of that heavenly cavern. God heard Day release the sexiest moan he'd ever heard in his life, and he thrust in with more power. "Yes! Fuck, right there! Right fucking there," Day urged while thrusting his hips up to meet him. God — A.E. Via

It never was anything very splendid at the best," said he. He lifted the lamp from the table with a sort of abstraction, not remarking even my offer to take it from him, and led the way. He was on the verge of seventy, and looked his age; but it was a vigorous age, with no symptom of giving way. The circle of light from the lamp lit up his white hair and keen blue eyes and clear complexion; his forehead was like old ivory, his cheek warmly colored; an old man, yet a man in full strength. He was taller than I was, and still almost as strong. As he stood for a moment with the lamp in his hand, he looked like a tower in his great height and bulk. I reflected as I looked at him that I knew him intimately, more intimately than any other creature in the world, - I was familiar with every detail of his outward life; could it be that in reality I did not know him at all? * — Mrs. Oliphant

Outside the station of Santa Maria Novella Isabella has to stand aside while a line of prisoners are marched into the terminus by armed Fascist guards. They pass within touching distance of her, carrying bags and bundles. There are old people and some children too. They all seem swamped by their clothes, disembodied by them somehow. Then she catches the eye of Ezra, a young Jewish man who once worked in the arts material shop where she buys most of her pigments and brushes. He is almost at the back of the line. The veins are high and urgent on his hand. His trousers are held up with a dirty piece of string. His cobalt blue eyes hold hers for the barest beat of a moment but some essence of his being conveys itself to her and her blood quickens in sympathy for him. She has the feeling of looking into the eyes of a ghost. — Glenn Haybittle

Words like "Society" and "State" are so concretized that they are almost personified. In the opinion of the man in the street, the "State," far more than any king in history, is the inexhaustible giver of all good; the "State" is invoked, made responsible, grumbled at, and so on and so forth. Society is elevated to the rank of a supreme ethical principle; indeed, it is even credited with positively creative capacities. — C. G. Jung

The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose; and the text of Scripture which he now most commonly quotes is, "The Kingdom of heaven is within you." That text has been the stay and support of more Pharisees and prigs and self-righteous spiritual bullies than all the dogmas in creation; it has served to identify self-satisfaction with the peace that passes all understanding. And the text to be quoted in answer to it is that which declares that no man can receive the kingdom except as a little child. What we are to have inside is a childlike spirit; but the childlike spirit is not entirely concerned about what is inside. It is the first mark of possessing it that one is interested in what is outside. The most childlike thing about a child is his curiosity and his appetite and his power of wonder at the world. We might almost say that the whole advantage of having the kingdom within is that we look for it somewhere else. — G.K. Chesterton

A lady is nothing very specific. One man's lady is another man's woman; sometimes, one man's lady is another man's wife. Definitions overlap but they almost never coincide. — Russell Lynes

Well then, I'm going to tell you a secret almost every newspaper man and woman who's been at it awhile knows: in real life, the number of actual stories - those with beginnings, middles, and ends - are slim and none. But if you can give your readers just one unknown thing (two at the very outside) and then kick in what Dave Bowie there calls a musta-been, your reader will tell himself a story. — Stephen King

The sounds of a man crying is a piteous noise, almost worse than an infant's cry. Babies are either hungry, sick or bored, or need changing. This man was none of those things. He was wrapped in grief as deep as the ocean, and no one could do anything to help him. — Samantha Hayes

There was no doubt in my mind that the man next to me was the same one who had been in my visions for the last six years. He was real, and he was at Luke's buying a whiskey? I almost felt cheated. For so long, I wondered what this vision was all about, feeling that it held some deeper meaning I would someday grasp. Yet, here I was at some seedy bar and the man in my dreams shows up and orders a whiskey. Now what? Save him from dying of inebriation? — L.J. Kentowski

Best ever was filming in Barcelona last year, and I had a couple of scenes with De Niro. He's a very shy man. Speaks so quietly that people tend to bend down and adopt the same tone, almost the same voice, whenever they talk to him - watching, you'd think someone's offering to carry out a hit for him when they're just offering him a cup of coffee. — Toby Jones

The size of a man's income has considerable effect on his access to the world beyond his neighborhood. With money he can overcome almost every tangible obstacle of communication, he can travel, buy books and periodicals, and bring within the range of his attention almost any known fact of the world. — Walter Lippmann

Here, in their midst, George feels a sort of vertigo. Oh God, what will become of them all? What chance have they? Ought I to yell out to them, right now, here, that it's hopeless? But George knows he can't do that. Because, absurdly, inadequately, in spite of himself, almost, he is a representative of the hope. And the hope is not false. No. It's just that George is like a man trying to sell a real diamond for a nickel, on the street. The diamond is protected from all but the tiniest few, because the great hurrying majority can never stop to dare to believe that it could conceivably be real. — Christopher Isherwood

The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. — C.S. Lewis

Lack of something to feel important about is almost the greatest tragedy a man may have. — Arthur E. Morgan

That old black coat he always wore to preach in was the one he put over her shoulders one evening when they were walking along the road together and he was throwing rocks at the fence posts the way a boy would do, still shy of her. But on a Sunday morning, with the sermon in front of him he'd spent the week on and knew so well he hardly need to look at it, he was a beautiful old man, and it pleased her more than almost anything that she knew the feel of that coat, the weight of it. — Marilynne Robinson

I do not see how it is possible for a man to die worth fifty million of dollars, or ten million of dollars, in a city full of want, when he meets almost every day the withered hand of beggary and the white lips of famine. How a man can withstand all that, and hold in the clutch of his greed twenty or thirty million of dollars, is past my comprehension. I do not see how he can do it. I should not think he could do it any more than he could keep a pile of lumber on the beach, where hundreds and thousands of men were drowning in the sea. — Robert G. Ingersoll

Knowledge and personality make doubt possible, but knowledge is also the cure of doubt; and when we get a full and adequate sense of personality we are lifted into a region where doubt is almost impossible, for no man can know himself as he is, and all fullness of his nature, without also knowing God. — Thornton T. Munger

The tall, thin serious man strode in, his dark cloak billowing so dramatically it threatened to extinguish the lamp flame with its draught. He advanced like a malevolent shadow consuming the dim orange light, filling the room with a presence almost more than human. — Gregory Figg

There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed. — Bertrand Russell

To Mahmoud, Harshaw looked like a museum exhibit of what he thought of as a "Yank" - vulgar, dressed too informally for the occasion, loud, probably ignorant and almost certainly provincial. A professional man, too, which made it worse, as in Dr. Mahmoud's experience most American professional men were under-educated and narrow, mere technicians. — Robert A. Heinlein

A man's religion is the chief fact with regard to him... By religion I do not mean here the church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign... We see men of all kinds of professed creeds attain to almost all degrees of worth or worthlessness under each or any of them... but the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion. — Thomas Carlyle

A treat indeed, to read Raymond Chandler for the first time. I almost envied the man, — Lawrence Block

There is magic in the feel of a paddle and the movement of a canoe, a magic compounded of distance, adventure, solitude, and peace. The way of a canoe is the way of the wilderness and of a freedom almost forgotten. It is an antidote to insecurity, the open door to waterways of ages past and a way of life with profound and abiding satisfactions. When a man is part of his canoe, he is part of all that canoes have ever known. — Sigurd F. Olson

I almost never draw a completely naked man. He has to have at least a pair of boots or something on. To me, a fully dressed man is more erotic than a naked one. A naked man is, of course beautiful, but dress him in black leather or a uniform - ah, then he is more than beautiful, then he is sexy! — Tom Of Finland

Miyata was fluent and intelligent. Nothing was beyond his curiosity. He seemed to be above the confusion of life, as if he had been commissioned to spend his own in undisturbed judgement of the world about him, protected always by a mandate from the gods. They spoke briefly of Korea and then of the past war with the United States. Miyata had been in Japan for its entire duration and must have been deeply affected, but when he talked about it, it was without bitterness. Wars were not of his doing. He considered them almost poetically, as if they were seasons, the cruel winters of man, even though almost all the work he had done in the 1930s and early 1940s had been lost when his house was burned in the great incendiary raid of 1944. He described the night vividly, the endless hours, the bombers thundering low over the storms of fire. — James Salter

In democratic countries, however opulent a man is supposed to be, he is almost always discontented with his fortune, because he finds that he is less rich than his father was, and he fears that his sons will be less rich than himself. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Saint-Just read for the next two hours his report on the plots of the Dantonist faction. He had imagined, when he wrote it, that he had the accused man before him; he had not amended it. If Danton were really before him, this reading would be punctuated by the roars of his supporters from the galleries, by his own self-justificatory roaring; but Saint-Just addressed the air, and there was a silence, which deepened and fed on itself. He read without passion, almost without inflection, his eyes on the papers that he held in his left hand. Occasionally he would raise his right arm, then let it fall limply by his side: this was his only gesture, a staid, mechanical one. Once, towards the end, he raised his young face to his audience and spoke directly to them: "After this," he promised, "there will be only patriots left. — Hilary Mantel

See that's where you're wrong baby. When you find your man, it's almost too easy. Gettin' married and havin' a mortgage, kids and a business to run and findin' a way to stay in love day in day out, that's the tougher part. But the beginning' ... that parts easy as pie. That's why they call it fallin' because it happens before you have time to stop yourself. — Rachel Hollis

About Nick:
Trudy thanked him, he gave a shy duck of his head and almost ran out of the room.
Trudy smiled after him, liking his blue-green eyes, the brown hair that waved to his shoulders and the slightly crooked, lightly freckled nose. In a few years with more confidence on him, that young man is going to be a lady killer. — Debra Holland

The growth of the mass media of communication and their use in politics have brought politics closer to the people than ever before and have made politics a form of entertainment in which the spectators feel themselves involved. Thus it has become, more than ever before, an arena into which private emotions and personal problems can be readily projected. Mass communications have made it possible to keep the mass man in an almost constant state of political mobilisation. — Richard Hofstadter

A 5'5", 182-pound, 43-year-old man wearing khaki shorts and a UCLA sweatshirt runs to Nicolas Cage in a manner he will spend the rest of the night describing to his slightly bored but equally boring date as "ambushing." No one else is on the street and Nicolas Cage is unable to avoid the man, who wants a picture with his "brand new Droid." As the man, who actually seems to be vibrating and hovering in an almost hummingbird-like way, adjusts his stance for the third attempt at a picture his crotch lightly brushes Nicolas Cage's upper thigh, causing his face to shift from "bemused resignation" to, strangely, "serene bliss," for what will become the man's inaugural Facebook profile picture. — Megan Boyle

At first the music almost repelled me, it was so intense, and this man made no attempt to sugarcoat what he was trying to say, or play. It was hard-core, more than anything I had ever heard. After a few listenings I realized that, on some level, I had found the master, and that following this man's example would be my life's work. — Eric Clapton

Most of the crimes which disturb the internal peace of society are produced by the restraints which the necessary, but unequal, laws of property have imposed on the appetites of mankind, by confining to a few the possession of those objects that are coveted by many. Of all our passions and appetites, the love of power is of the most imperious and unsociable nature, since the pride of one man requires the submission of the multitude. In the tumult of civil discord, the laws of society lose their force, and their place is seldom supplied by those of humanity. The ardor of contention, the pride of victory, the despair of success, the memory of past injuries, and the fear of future dangers, all contribute to inflame the mind, and to silence the voice of pity. From such motives almost every page of history has been stained with civil blood.... — Edward Gibbon

The dilemma is this. In the modern world knowledge has been growing so fast and so enormously, in almost every field, that the probabilities are immensely against anybody, no matter how innately clever, being able to make a contribution in any one field unless he devotes all his time to it for years. If he tries to be the Rounded Universal Man, like Leonardo da Vinci, or to take all knowledge for his province, like Francis Bacon, he is most likely to become a mere dilettante and dabbler. But if he becomes too specialized, he is apt to become narrow and lopsided, ignorant on every subject but his own, and perhaps dull and sterile even on that because he lacks perspective and vision and has missed the cross-fertilization of ideas that can come from knowing something of other subjects. — Henry Hazlitt

All errors are just ordinary, what extraordinary sin can you commit? All the sins have been committed already. You cannot find a new sin - it is very difficult, it is almost impossible to be original about sin. For millions of years people have committed everything that can be committed.
To be thrown in hell for your sins. Now this is too much! you can throw a man into hell for five years, ten years, twenty years, fifty years. If a man has lived for seventy years you can throw him there for seventy years.and that is if you only believe in one life. It is good that they believe in one life. — Osho

Holiness requires as great, or almost as great, an effort; but holiness works on lines that were natural once; it is an effort to recover the ecstasy that was before the Fall. But sin is an effort to gain the ecstasy and the knowledge that pertain alone to angels, and in making this effort man becomes a demon. — Arthur Machen

And then, after five minutes of silence, almost inaudibly, the old man sighed and said, more to himself than to Artyom: 'Lord, what a splendid world we ruined . . . — Dmitry Glukhovsky

We have become a sloppy bunch of people. We say things we don't mean. We make promises we don't keep. "I'll call you." "Let's get together." We know we won't. On the Human Interaction Stock Exchange, our words have lost almost all their value. And the spiral continues, as we now don't even expect people to keep their word; in fact we might even be embarrassed to point out to the dirty liar that they never did what they said they'd do. So if a guy you're dating doesn't call when he says he's doing to, why should that be such a big deal? Because you should be dating a man who's at least as good as his word. — Greg Behrendt

It was said that his decision to have his papers burnt was a defence against biographers. He had read a life of one of the archbishops of Dublin, Dr William Walsh, and thought it a travesty of the man he had known. No one would do that to him; no one would analyse the mind and heart of Daniel Mannix. It would be bad enough if they got it wrong. And for him, it might have been almost as bad if they got it right. — Brenda Niall

Ghost shook his head as he sat on the very edge of the bed, poised to take flight if need be. The spiral under his hair felt warm, almost painful, but he resisted the urge to rub it. It never helped when he did, and he was not sure what Gerry would do if the man saw it. The Witch had a symbol she called a triskele, the ink a vivid scarlet still, but no male that had ever come for healing bore a mark like hers, or like his. He had never found the words to ask the Witch about it, about why he was marked like a witch. — Morwen Navarre

It took me almost two thousand miles in the woods to see I had to do some hard work that wasn't simply walking - that I needed to begin respecting my own body's boundaries. I had to draw clear lines. Ones that were sound in my mind and therefore impermeable, and would always, no matter where I walked, protect me.

Moving forward, I wanted rules.

First - when I felt unsafe I'd leave, immediately. The first time, not the tenth time. Not after a hundred red flags smacked in wind violently, clear as trail signs pointing the way to SNAKES. Not after I'd been bitten - the violation. If I wasn't interested, I would reject the man blatantly. — Aspen Matis

As if to demonstrate, by a striking example, the impossibility of erecting any cerebral barrier between man and the apes, Nature has provided us, in the latter animals, with an almost complete series of gradations from brains little higher than that of a Rodent, to brains little lower than that of Man. — Thomas Huxley

Man is a clothed animal; almost. — Ahmed Mostafa

My dear woman, our greatest problem is
that almost everything is a goddamned code. We do not know what is real any more. Every gesture is symbolic. A man cannot shit short of some pundit finding hidden meaning in it. Even having children is a metaphor. Hence, we cannot trust ourselves; and, therefore, we do not trust anybody. No my dear, I do not believe in codes, and even if I did I certainly would not use one in my sleep! (from the play, Sixteen Words For Water) — Billy Marshall Stoneking

Ensor sees with his imagination, but his vision is perfectly accurate, of an almost geometric precision. He is one of the very few who can really see. Like you, he has an obsession with masks; he is a seer as you and I are. The common herd, of course thinks that he is mad.
*****************
You shall see what sort of man Ensor is, and what a marvellous insight he has into the invisible realm where our vices are created ... those vices for which our faces make masks. — Jean Lorrain

("Becoming cultured" and "being adjusted to the social group" are taken almost as synonymous.) Either way, it follows that you can teach people anything; you can adapt them to anything if you use the right techniques of "socializing" or "communicating." The essence of "human nature" is to be pretty indefinitely malleable. "Man," as C. Wright Mills suggests, is what suits a particular type of society in a particular historical stage. This — Paul Goodman

The extraordinary deference paid to physicians and their judgment preserved the idea that the woman's desire to end a pregnancy was not enough in itself, it had to be approved by a respectable authority figure, at the time almost always a man. — Katha Pollitt

On three great bonds of love do all cultures depend: the love between man and woman in marriage; the love between a mother and her child; and the camaraderie among men, a bond that used to be strong enough to move mountains. The first two have suffered greatly; the third has almost ceased to exist. — Anthony M. Esolen

While in any other great city the vagabond child is a lost man, while nearly everywhere the child left to itself is, in some sort, sacrificed and abandoned to a kind of fatal immersion in the public vices which devour in him honesty and conscience, the street boy of Paris, we insist on this point, however defaced and injured on the surface, is almost intact on the interior. It is a magnificent thing to put on record, and one which shines forth in the splendid probity of our popular revolutions, that a certain incorruptibility results from the idea which exists in the air of Paris, as salt exists in the water of the ocean. — Victor Hugo

Well, I am almost finished. Perhaps if you find something upon which to focus your attention, the pain will remain at bay a while longer." As she leaned forward, Rafe could see the tantalizing display of her breasts above the fabric of her apron. "I think I've found just the thing." Anthony chuckled beside them, but Cassandra was too occupied with her surgery to notice Rafe's gaze. He wanted her to notice. He wanted her to see him as more than the subject of her experiments. He wanted her to see him as a man. He wanted to see if her beautiful breasts felt and tasted as delicious as they looked. He stared, transfixed, until she finished. — Brooklyn Ann

Read Demosthenes or Cicero, read Plato, Aristotle, or any other of that class: you will, I admit, feel wonderfully allured, pleased, moved, enchanted; but turn from them to the reading of the Sacred Volume, and whether you will or not, it will so affect you, so pierce your heart, so work its way into your very marrow, that, in comparison of the impression so produced, that of orators and philosophers will almost disappear; making it manifest that in the Sacred Volume there is a truth divine, a something which makes it immeasurably superior to all the gifts and graces attainable by man. Section — John Calvin

I should think it might be difficult to possess a wife whom almost every other man in town has known so intimately, but no doubt True Love Conquers All. — Oakley Hall

This guy is pretty slick, Atticus. What else do you think he has in his pockets? Maybe a thick salami for me?> I almost dropped the goblets. Gods, Oberon, it's a good thing no one can hear you. It's not polite to ask if a man has a big salami in his pants, okay? Especially this guy. Laughter bubbled forth from Jesus as he poured two generous shots for us. "I like your hound, Siodhachan." He turned his head a bit to address him. "Hello, Oberon. I can hear what you say as well, and I tell you truly, I have nothing against salami itself. It is best to know when to keep your salami in your pants and when to pull it out, however, and even my priests have had some difficulty with that issue. Fortunately for us, there is little doubt regarding the right course of action in this situation." He pulled a long soppressata from the same pocket that had produced the goblets. — Kevin Hearne

Before water generates steam, it must register two hundred and twelve degrees of heat. Two hundred degrees will not do it; two hundred and ten will not do it. The water must boil before it will generate enough steam to move an engine, to run a train. Lukewarm water will not run anything.
A great many people are trying to move their life trains with lukewarm water - or water that is almost boiling - and they are wondering why they are stalled, why they cannot get ahead. They are trying to run a boiler with two hundred or two hundred and ten degrees of heat, and they cannot understand why they do not get anywhere.
Lukewarmness in his work stands in the same relation to man's achievement as lukewarm water does to the locomotive boiler. No man can hope to accomplish anything great in this world until he throws his whole soul, flings his force to his whole life, into it. — Orison Swett Marden

A few days earlier, during our time in Jerusalem, my friend George and I stumbled upon the Pool of Bethesda, which the Gospel of John names as the place where Jesus healed a paralyzed man.12 John describes it as a pool with "five porticoes." For centuries, some scholars doubted that the pool ever existed. But archaeological excavations in the nineteenth century uncovered almost the entire complex - including the five porticoes, just as John had described. Seeing not only the site at which Jesus had performed a miracle, but also one confirmation of the Gospels' accuracy was deeply moving. There were the five porticoes: one, two, three, four, five. There they were. And here he had been. — James Martin

In the almost film-like flitting-by of modern life, a man needs something to tell him, from time to time, that he is still himself, and nothing can give him this assurance in so comforting a manner as the "four feet trotting behind". — Konrad Lorenz

Man was entering under false pretenses the sphere of incredible facilities, acquired too cheaply, below cost price, almost for nothing, and the disproportion between outlay and gain, the obvious fraud on nature, the excessive payment for a trick of genius, had to be offset by self-parody. — Bruno Schulz

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary - the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trimtab.
It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trimtab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.
So I said, call me Trimtab. — R. Buckminster Fuller

You go on, I presume, with your latin Exercises: and I wish to hear of your beginning upon Sallust who is one of the most polished and perfect of the Roman Historians, every Period of whom, and I had almost said every Syllable and every Letter is worth Studying.
In Company with Sallust, Cicero, Tacitus and Livy, you will learn Wisdom and Virtue. You will see them represented, with all the Charms which Language and Imagination can exhibit, and Vice and Folly painted in all their Deformity and Horror.
You will ever remember that all the End of study is to make you a good Man and a useful Citizen. - This will ever be the Sum total of the Advice of your affectionate Father,
John Adams — John Adams

There are but three ways for a man to revenge himself of the censure of the world,
to despise it, to return the like, or to endeavor to live so as to avoid it; the first of these is usually pretended, the last is almost impossible, the universal practice is for the second. — Jonathan Swift

All Jesus' pictures are falsifications; they cannot be about the real Jesus. This real man must have been totally different, because we know he enjoyed drinking - it is impossible to think of a person who enjoys drinking and not laughing. He enjoyed women - it is difficult to think of a man who enjoys women and not laughing. He was friendly, almost in love, with a prostitute, Mary Magdalene. It is difficult to move with a prostitute - he was not moving with a Catholic monk, not with a priest, not with the Pope ... with a prostitute! These were the condemnations against him. — Rajneesh

McIntyre hesitated, and for a moment the tall, gray-haired man looked almost boyish. "After all this time ... don't you think you could call me William?"
Amy and Dan exchanged glances. As fond as they were of him, they couldn't imagine calling their lawyer by his first name.
He saw the hesitation on their faces. "Will?"
Amy cleared her throat. Dan fiddled with the new GPS.
"How about 'Mac'?"
"Mac," Dan said, trying out the name.
Mr. McIntyre looked wistful. "I always wanted to be a Mac. — Jude Watson

The need of one human being for the approval of his fellow humans, the need for a certain cult of fellowship - a psychological, almost physiological need for approval of one's thought and action. A force that kept men from going off at unsocial tangents, a force that made for social security and human solidarity, for the working together of the human family.
Men died for that approval, sacrificed for that approval, lived lives they loathed for that approval. For without it man was on his own, an outcast, an animal that had been driven from the pack.
It had led to terrible things, of course - to mob psychology, to racial persecution, to mass atrocities in the name of patriotism or religion. But likewise it had been the sizing that held the race together, the thing that from the very start had made human society possible.
And Joe didn't have it. Joe didn't give a damn. He didn't care what anyone thought of him. He didn't care whether anyone approved or not. — Clifford D. Simak

Here it is, the end of the world; and here I am, almost the very last man; and there it is, the highest mountain in sight. I know now what my karass has been up to, Newt. It's been working night and day for maybe half a million years to get me up that mountain." I wagged my head and nearly wept. "But what, for the love of God, is supposed to be in my hands?" I looked out of the car window blindly as — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man's intelligence and his comprehension ... would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

In modern society, fear of unemployment remains the darkest of the shadows thrown by the past. In an industrial order, a man out of work is almost a man out of life. — Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson Of Lodsworth

I believe that every man can multiply his own ability by almost constant wordless realization of his unity with his Source. I have, myself, made that feeling so much a part of me that I actually feel myself to be an extension of the Source; that my works are not my own, but interpretations of this Source. — Walter Russell

A wave of possessiveness came over him, almost frightening in its
intensity. Mine. The thought of another man looking at her was almost
enough to make him change his mind about leaving. — Monica McCarty

And such in fact is the behaviour of the specialist. In politics, in art, in social usages, in the other sciences, he will adopt the attitude of primitive, ignorant man; but he will adopt them forcefully and with self-sufficiency, and will not admit of- this is the paradox- specialists in those matters. By specialising him, civilisation has made him hermetic and self-satisfied within his limitations; but this very inner feeling of dominance and worth will induce him to wish to predominate outside his speciality. The result is that even in this case, representing a maximum of qualification in man- specialisation- and therefore the thing most opposed to the mass-man, the result is that he will behave in almost all spheres of life as does the unqualified, the mass-man. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

DOCTOR AIN WAS recognized on the Omaha-Chicago flight. A biologist colleague from Pasadena came out of the toilet and saw Ain in an aisle seat. Five years before, this man had been jealous of Ain's huge grants. Now he nodded coldly and was surprised at the intensity of Ain's response. He almost turned back to speak, but he felt too tired; like nearly everyone, he was fighting the flu.

The stewardess handing out coats after they landed remembered Ain too: A tall thin nondescript man with rusty hair. He held up the line staring at her; since he already had his raincoat with him she decided it was some kooky kind of pass and waved him on.

She saw Ain shamble off into the airport smog, apparently alone. Despite the big Civil Defense signs, O'Hare was late getting underground. No one noticed the woman.

- 'The Last Flight of Doctor Ain — James Tiptree Jr.

I was no fool; I was aware that when another man is too anxious to force money on one, it is time to examine the cards, for there is almost certainly something illegal, or dangerous, or both, involved in the matter. — Robert A. Heinlein

In civilized life, where the happiness and indeed almost the existence of man, depends on the opinion of his fellow men. He is constantly acting a studied part. — Jeremy Collier

A man will treat a woman almost exactly the way he treats his own interior feminine. In fact, he hasn't the ability to see a woman, objectively speaking, until he has made some kind of peace with his interior woman. — Robert Johnson

I didn't invent the rainy day, man. I just own the best umbrella. That's one of my favorite lines of all time. It's from a movie called Almost Famous. I think what it means is that life is going to throw all kinds of stuff at you, good and bad. But all you can do is get out there and try to stay dry. — Valerie Thomas

There is a hollow empty feeling that a man can have when he is waked too early in the morning that is almost like the feeling of disaster and he had this multiplied a thousand times. — Ernest Hemingway,

Giving him a grateful nod, Graydon turned away.
A heavy hand fell on his shoulder, causing him to stop in his tracks. Dragos' grip clenched, almost to the point of pain.
Normally, Dragos was not demonstrative with anyone other than Pia and Liam. Moved, Graydon angled his face away. After a moment, he reached up to grip the other man's hand in return. Only then did Dragos' hold ease and allow him to continue on his way. — Thea Harrison

The personality of man is not an apple that has to be polished, but a banana that has to be peeled. And the reason we remain so far from one another, the reason we neither communicate nor interact in any real way, is that most of us spend our lives in polishing rather than peeling... Almost everything in modern life is devoted to the polishing process, and little to the peeling process. It is the surface personality that we work on - the appearance, the clothes, the manners, the geniality. In short, the salesmanship: We are selling the package, not the product. — Sydney J. Harris

Jesus, you know I was walking back to the huddle and I looked over and, god damn, I almost flipped when I saw you and Davis standing together on the sideline. I thought, man, the world really is changing when you see a thing like that - Hunter Thompson and Al Davis - Christ, you know that's the first time I ever saw anybody with Davis during practice; the bastard's always alone out there, just pacing back and forth like a goddamn beast. ... — Hunter S. Thompson

A virtuous man may have a choleric or a sanguine constitution, be gay or grave, unreproved, be firm till he is almost over-bearing, or weakly subsmissive, have no will or opinion of his own; but all women are to be levelled, by meekness and docility, into one character of yielding softness and gentle compliance — Mary Wollstonecraft

I won't share you, Dylan. I mean that. If you think for one second now that we're married, you can try and pull some kind of shit over on me, you'd better think again. I can take whatever you can dish out when it comes to pain, embarrassment and humiliation, and whatever else you have going on in that wicked mind of yours, but I'll be damned if I'll share you with another woman. Or man."
What the fuck? I almost laugh at her, but she's so serious she would probably slap the shit out of me. "Calm the hell down. I'm not trying to pull anything over on you, okay? And seriously, a man?"
"Well, I don't know. Maybe one of your secrets is that you like getting pegged in the ass or something."
This time I laugh out loud at her and she narrows her eyes at me.
"Don't ask me to peg you either, because it's never going to happen."
I laugh even louder. Good God this woman is funny. "I promise you that I don't want to be pegged, Isa. — Ella Dominguez

A strong hand suddenly grasped my arm above the elbow. My eyes flew open in surprise. It was that hateful, arrogant man from earlier, standing a few steps below me. He looked at me with a strange expression on his face. It almost looked like ... concern. What did he want? I tried to ask him, but the walls were falling in on me again. I closed my eyes tightly. "I think you're about to faint," a low voice said. Whose voice was it? It was too nice to belong to that man. I shook my head and said weakly, "I don't faint." And then darkness rushed up while I swooped down. We met in the middle and it swallowed me whole. — Julianne Donaldson

As far as being a Republican is concerned, I come from a place, New York City, which is virtually, I mean, it is almost exclusively Democrat. And I have really started to see some of the negatives - as an example, and I have a lot of liking for this man, but the last number of months of his brother's administration were a catastrophe. And unfortunately, those few months gave us President Obama. And you can't be happy about that. — Donald Trump

I turned to Grey again. "The point is, killing someone is almost never the smart move, long term. Sometimes it's got to be done if you want to survive - but the more you do it, the more you risk creating more enemies and buying yourself even more trouble." Grey seemed to consider that for a moment, and then shrugged. "The argument is not entirely without merit. Tell me, wizard, does it give you some sort of satisfaction to protect this man? — Jim Butcher

I'm not saying Obama is right on everything. Of course not. He may be wrong on a number of things. But what I do know is that he behaves like a very, very sane man almost all the time. — John Cleese

Your mother is a better man than me. Mothers are almost always better men than men are. — Sherman Alexie

I do not approve the maxim which desires a man to know a little of everything. Superficial knowledge, knowledge without principles, is almost always useless and sometimes harmful knowledge. — Luc De Clapiers

I still get excited performing live. when you see the immediate reaction from a crowd, its like being a theater performer, its something you can't get from being a writer or being an ad man ... its almost ritualistic. — Marilyn Manson

I like my fellow man, but I also realize he carried a good measure of the Old Nick in him and he can find a good excuse for almost any kind of wrongdoing or mischief. — Louis L'Amour