Be One Of A Kind Quotes & Sayings

They glanced at one another like tigers taking measure of a menacing new rival. But in this kind of jungle you could never be sure where the real danger lurked. — Erich Segal

I view my job as being someone who is supposed to piss people off. I don't want to be just one-of-the-guys. I don't want to be just a smiling face you see on television presenting some vapid kind of easily-digestible garbage. — Marilyn Manson

You may have noticed that people in bus stations, if they know you also are alone, will glance at you sidelong, with a look that is both piercing and intimate, and if you let them sit beside you, they will tell you long lies about numerous children who are all gone now, and mothers who were beautiful and cruel, and in every case they will tell you that they were abandoned, disappointed, or betrayed--that they should not be alone, that only remarkable events, of the kind one reads in a book, could have made their condition so extreme. And that is why, even if the things they say are true, they have the quick eyes and active hands and the passion for meticulous elaboration of people who know they are lying. Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever been otherwise. Loneliness is absolute discovery. — Marilynne Robinson

About twenty pages into Luke B. Goebel's Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, I realized I was reading with one hand holding my forehead and one balled at my waist, kind of clenched, and gazing down into the paper like a man soon to be converged upon. Goebel's testimony comes on like that: engrossing, fanatical, full of private grief, and yet, at the same time, charismatic, tender, and intrepid, aglow with more spirit than most Americans have the right to wield. — Blake Butler

I guess the one-liner kind of comic sounds like a guy who can talk and talk and whatever the subject is, he can pull out a one-liner, but I couldn't do that. I didn't like the association. I mean, I love Steven Wright, but so many people started saying "Steven Wright" to me, and I would get mad, because I never wanted to be thought of as copying anybody. — Mitch Hedberg

This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me. — Roger Angell

I mentioned early in this book the kind of rereading distinctive of a fan
the Tolkien addict, say, or the devotee of Jane Austen or Trollope or the Harry Potter books. The return to such books is often motivated by a desire to dwell for a time in a self-contained fictional universe, with its own boundaries and its own rules. (It is a moot question whether Austen and Trollope's first readers were drawn to their novels for these reasons, but their readers today often are.) Such rereading is not purely a matter of escapism, even though that is one reason for its attraction: we should note that it's not what readers are escaping from but that they are escaping into that counts most. Most of us do not find fictional worlds appealing because we find our own lives despicable, though censorious people often make that assumption. Auden once wrote that "there must always be ... escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep." The sleeper does not disdain consciousness. — Alan Jacobs

One Sunday evening when it was very hot and breathlessly still we sere sitting here in this room in the dusk. He switched on the record player. Liszt. We sat. As I say, here. In this very room. We listened to the piece. Neither of us said a word. That's when he took my hand and we went out into the garden. In a quiet voice he said that I wasn't like any other person in the world and that some people wouldn't understand that. They wouldn't want me to be the way I was. They'd want to change me. They'd try to order me about and make me into the kind of person they wanted me to be. Since I was still a child there would be little I could do except stay alone, stay out of trouble, and make myself very small in the world. — Laird Koenig

When you are in love, it means that the person you love is of great personal, selfish importance to you and to your life. If you were selfless, it would have to mean that you derive no personal pleasure or happiness from the company and the existence of the person you love, and that you are motivated only by self-sacrificial pity for that person's need of you. I don't have to point out to you that no one would be flattered by, nor would accept, a concept of that kind. Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound assertion of your own needs and values. It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person. — Ayn Rand

You have to be the prude or the slut, and if you pick one, other people hate you for it, and you can't trust anyone anymore, because they're all after the same thing, and you see that you can never go back to how was before ... — Ned Vizzini

Little bits of Norwegian came to me by a kind of aural osmosis. The most surprising linguistic fact I learned was the impoverishment of that language in swear words. In fact, there is only one- 'farn'- which merely means something like 'devil take it!', but is considered very rude by a well brought-up Viking. It has to pass muster for most of the everyday tragedies that beset an expedition. If a finger is hammered, you jump up and down and cry 'farn'; if you drop an outstanding fossil irretrievably into the sea, you splutter for a while and then mutter 'farn' under your breath. If all your provisions were carried away by a hurricane and death were guaranteed, all the poor Norwegian could do would be to stand on the shingle and cry 'farn' into the wind. Somehow this does not seem adequate for the occasion. — Richard Fortey

People were kind and friendly and amusing, but they thought that companionship and conversation were synonymous, and some of them had voices that jarred in your head. There was a lot to be said for dogs. They understood without telling you so, and they were always pleasing to look at, awake or asleep, like Bingo. He slept now, with little whistling snores, in his basket at the side of the fire, his stubby legs and one whiskery eyebrow twitching to the fitful tempo of his dreams. — Monica Dickens

I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities that author has to offer; and that for a host of reasons the bound book is the ideal vehicle for the written word. — Sven Birkerts

In an age when the difference between prince and peasant was thought to be in the stars, Mr Tzara, art was naturally an affirmation for the one and a consolation to the other; but we live in an age when the social order is seen to be the work of material forces and we have been given an entirely new kind of responsibility, the responsibility of changing society. — Tom Stoppard

Six months ago when she first came up with the idea to kill Wilson, back when she was living in Memphis, she'd started going to church again. Since she was spending so much time thinking about sinister things, the least she could do, she reasoned, was to think about God and his love twice a week at church so that she wouldn't become a total sociopath. And rather than kill other people who were stand-ins for the person she really wanted to kill, like serial killers did, she'd be kind and generous to others and hone in on the one who deserved to die. And her plan had worked extremely well. Since she'd started planning to kill Wilson, and then decided to destroy his family instead, she felt no animosity toward anyone but him. Almost none at all! — Elizabeth Stuckey-French

People really understand very little of one another. Sometimes when I speak to him, my Cid looks very hard and straight into my face as if in search of something (a city on a map?) like someone who has tumbled off a star. But he's not the one who feels alien - ever, I think. He lives in a small country of hope, which is his heart. Like Sokrates he fails to understand why travel should be such a challenge to the muscles of the heart, for other people. Around every bend of the road is a city of gold, isn't it?
I am the kind of person who thinks no, probably not. And we walk, side by side, in different countries. — Anne Carson

Maybe there is a single spot, just one, where living organisms are holed up. Maybe so, but if so this would be the strangest thing of all, absolutely incomprehensible. For we are not familiar with this kind of living. We do not have solitary, isolated creatures. It is beyond our imagination to conceive of a single form of life that exists alone and independent, unattached to other forms — Lewis Thomas

What I could tell the boy was, the moment we are born appears to be the very same moment we forget we are loved. Now isn't this awkward? Shouldn't the two things dovetail, love and memory? Shouldn't a feeling that powerful be carved on a tree so no one can ignore its message? To come so far to be in this world only to forget something all-important - what kind of a journey is that? I'll bet that 90 percent of the love that surrounds us is dismissed or discounted - the cup of tea a friend makes, the letter from a faraway auntie. The fact that no one feels loved enough merely proves my point. — Laurie Fox

Relationships help you learn more about what you want. If one doesn't work out, you just kind of look at it and go, Okay, well, this is what I did like and this is what I didn't like, and this is what I did wrong, and maybe I need to be more like this. And so you learn things, and that's why you grow. And you bring all the stuff that you've changed about yourself to a new relationship until you finally find that person you really, really want. — Ashley Tisdale

August 1
The harvest season has finally arrived. Today marks its opening. Our next stop on the wheel of the year will be the autumn equinox. I've always seen the opening of the harvest as a kind of stairway we walk down to reach the dark and magickal part of the year where all the good things await. The cool, comforting energy that feels more like home than any place can. Today is the landing at the top of the stairs. All we have to do is put one foot before the other, and before you know it, we'll be watching The Great Pumpkin again. — Damien Echols

We always make the mistake, the fatal mistake in the case of military people, of imagining that each war will be a kind of version of the one that happened previously. — Stephen Fry

It seemed like so much of romantic relationships today have to do when the people are not in the same room. Whether it's texting or emailing or Facebooking, there's a kind of distance between the participants. I think it's sort of shifted the energy of that first romantic meeting, where it's quicker, perhaps more desperate, more energetic, in a whole different way, and it's resulted in a situation where people seem to be sometimes more comfortable having a sexual relationship than an emotional one. — Ivan Reitman

I know whom I shall marry. He must be handsome, young, clever enough, and very rich-ever so much richer than the Lawrences. His family musn't object, and I shall be very happy, for they shall be kind, sell-bred, genrous people, and they shall like me. He shall be the oldest and have the estate, and should be a city house in a fashionable street, and twice as comfortable as anything and full of solid luxury. One of us must marry well; Meg didn't, Jo didn't, Beth can't yet, so I shall, and make everything cozy all around. — Louisa May Alcott

Sinner, I would be loth to have thy soul destroyed by wilful self-delusion ... So consequently, there is a despair which is a grievous sin; and there is a despair which is absolutely necessary to thy salvation. I would not have thee despair of the sufficiency of the blood of Christ to save thee, if thou believe, and heartily obey him; nor of the willingness of God to pardon and save thee, if thou be such a one; nor yet absolutely of thy own salvation; because, while there is life and time, there is some hope of thy conversion, and so of thy salvation ... Never stick at the sadness of the conclusion, man, but acknowledge plainly, If I die before I get out of this estate, I am lost forever. It is as good deal truly with thyself as not; God will not flatter thee, he will deal plainly whether thou do or not. The very truth is, this kind of despair is one of the first steps to heaven(233). — Richard Baxter

Solitude is one thing and being alone is another. Solitude can be isolation, an escape, an unwanted thing; but to be alone without the burden of life, with that utter freedom in which time/thought has never been, is to be with the universe. In solitude there is despairing loneliness, a sense of being abandoned, lost, craving for some kind of relationship, like a ship lost at sea. All our daily activity leads to this isolation, with its endless conflicts and miseries, and rare joys thrown in. This isolation is corruption, manifested in politics, in business and of course in organized religions. Corruption exists in the very high places and on the very doorstep. To be tied is corruption; any form of attachment leads to it, whether it be to a belief, faith, ideal, experience, or any conclusion. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

He had never seen a gunshot wound. He kept asking what it felt like? dull or sharp? an ache or burn? My head was spinning and naturally I could give him no kind of coherent answer but I remember thinking dimly that it was sort of like the first time I got drunk, or slept with a girl; not quite what one expected, really, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way. Neon lights: Motel 6, Dairy Queen. Colors so bright, they nearly broke my heart. — Donna Tartt

One of the most commonly overlooked spiritual practices is daring to be completely honest with everyone you encounter. Some may say others cannot handle their honesty, but true honesty is not a strategy or a weapon of any kind. It is the willingness to be open and absolutely transparent in sharing how any moment feels in your heart. It has nothing to do with confrontation, accusation, or any form of blame. True honesty is the willingness to stand completely exposed, allowing the world to do what it may, and say what it will, only so you may know who you are - beyond all ideas. — Matthew Kahn

I have a very specific memory of watching 'Singing in the Rain,' and looking at myself in the mirror after watching it and perceiving myself as one of those people that I was just watching on T.V. It was just kind of a knowing that this would be the world that I would enter into. And that's what I did. — Kat Edmonson

For me life is an inn where I must stay until the carriage from the abyss calls to collect me [ ... ] I could consider this inn to be a prison, since I'm compelled to stay here; I could consider it a kind of club, because I meet other people here. However, unlike others, I am neither impatient nor sociable. I leave those who chatter in the living room, from where the cosy sound of music and voices reaches me. I sit at the door and fill my eyes and ears with the colours and sounds of the landscape and slowly, just for myself, I sing vague songs that I compose while I wait.
Night will fall on all of us and the carriage will arrive. I enjoy the breeze given to me and the soul given to me to enjoy it and I ask no more questions, look no further. If what I leave written in the visitors' book is one day read by others and entertains them on their journey, that's fine. If no one reads it or is entertained by it, that's fine too. — Fernando Pessoa

Don't go through life with a closed mind. Allow innovations and creativity to flow. We should always challenge ourselves to excel in more ways than one. Be open to ideas or suggestions on how to improve. And, the chances of reaching your goals will increase enormously. — Amaka Imani Nkosazana

I am a team player - and that is what you need to be an effective point guard. You gotta see the court, you gotta set up the play, and you gotta let others execute for the most part. I don't throw elbows for the sake of throwing elbows, but if somebody throws one at me and it's necessary to respond in kind, I suppose I can if I have to. — Susan Rice

Remember one thing as South Africa prepares to go to the polls this week and the world grapples with the ascendancy of the African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma: South Africa is not Zimbabwe.
In South Africa, no one doubts that Wednesday's elections will be free and fair. While there is an unacceptable degree of government corruption, there is no evidence of the wholesale kleptocracy of Robert Mugabe's elite. While there has been the abuse of the organs of state by the ruling ANC, there is not the state terror of Mugabe's Zanu-PF. And while there is a clear left bias to Zuma's ANC, there is no suggestion of the kind of voluntarist experimentation that has brought Zimbabwe to its knees. — Mark Gevisser

It'll probably be brutal, too. They might even feed you to the dog.
He doesn't have a dog.
Yeah, well, he might get one just to feed you to it.
She'd never been the kind of person to let something as ridiculous as rational logic interfere with her fear.' (Alix) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

I don't have any interest in helping you keep your job," I say, shifting my weight onto my heels, suddenly tired and
resigned. "But I promise to do what I can to keep you from being fired over false pretenses. If you get thrown out of here,
it'll be your fault, not mine, and not Mr. Dade's."
"You say that now - "
" - and I'll say it tomorrow." I turn and pull open the door. "Good night, Asha. Go home and get some sleep."
"I'm not tired."
"Then go to the park and pull the wings off butterflies," I say with a sardonic smile. "That seems like the kind of
thing you would enjoy."
She smiles back, shakes her head. "Butterflies are too weak."
"Then shoot a coyote, whatever," I suggest. "But your work day's over. We all need our rest and if I'm going to be a
dictator, I'm going to try to be a benevolent one. — Kyra Davis

Few understand that horses are never truly domesticated. Their instincts are always there and readily take over once they are free. They stay or return to us by their choice, not the compulsion forced upon them.
Once realized you must also recognize only kindness will prevail to make a partner of an animal who'd prefer only the company of his kind and the freedom of wide open spaces. Any other relationship is based on the inadequacies of the tormentor on the tormented. One will lose. It's always the horse, for even if he wins his defensive battle the mark of rogue will remain.
It's been witnessed how a mustang will give up his life if his freedom can't be regained when in the grip of adversity. There's so much for us to learn from this, if we'd only learn to listen to their message. — Judith-Victoria Douglas

I thought The Limits of Control could be interpreted in two ways: as the limits of one's self-control; and as the limits of allowing other people's control over one's -consciousness - which I kind of thought was a double meaning that was appropriate. — Jim Jarmusch

Working with the Kinks, there always seemed to be some kind of automatic process at work. Ray and I had this telepathy happening for a long time, where one of us always knew what the other could do with something. — Dave Davies

There is a special blessing in old clothes, and that aside from their comfort, for which especially they are to be cherished. They confer a kind of anonymity on one who wears them gladly; all their bright places rubbed to a uniform dullness, they achieve an appearance so nearly nondescript that only a close scrutiny could learn that ever they held shape at all. — Maude Meagher

This overall picture is quite damning for the Strict Father model. That model seems to be a myth. If this research is right, a Strict Father upbringing does not produce the kind of child it claims to produce. Incidentally, this picture is not from one study or from studies by one researcher. This is the overall picture gathered from many studies by many different researchers (see References, — George Lakoff

As laser-bright moments; diamond-hard memories; crisp and clear. A future lived, a future savored, a future of moments so sharp and pointed that they would sometimes cut and sometimes glint so brightly it would hurt to contemplate them, but sometimes, too,
would be joyous, an absolute, pure, unalloyed joy, the kind of joy he hadn't felt much if at all lo these twenty-one years. — Robert J. Sawyer

Long before reaching this kind of stability in meditation, however, one can discover that the sense of self - the sense that there is a thinker behind one's thoughts, an experiencer amid the flow of experience - is an illusion. The feeling that we call "I" is itself the product of thought. Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking. Consider — Sam Harris

I was working with a Crookes tube covered by a shield of black cardboard. A piece of barium platino-cyanide paper lay on the bench there. I had been passing a current through the tube, and I noticed a peculiar black line across the paper ...
The effect was one which could only be produced in ordinary parlance by the passage of light. No light could come from the tube because the shield which covered it was impervious to any light known even that of the electric arc ...
I did not think I investigated ...
I assumed that the effect must have come from the tube since its character indicated that it could come from nowhere else ... It seemed at first a new kind of invisible light. It was clearly something new something unrecorded ...
There is much to do, and I am busy, very busy.
[Describing to a journalist the discovery of X-rays that he had made on 8 Nov 1895.] — Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen

Utopias seem to be much more attainable than one would have believed in other times. And we currently find ourselves faced with a different kind of agonizing question: How can one avoid their definitive attainment? ... Utopias are attainable. Life leads us toward utopias. Perhaps a new century will begin, a century in which the intellectuals and the cultivated classes will dream again of ways to avoid utopias and to return to a non-utopian society, one less "perfect" and more free. — Aldous Huxley

It" is the idea of him or her that resides in us--inspired by the "Something" in them, as Pope has it, "That gives us back the Image of our Mind." Although the perception of It must be excited by some extraordinary perturbation in the looks and personality of the adored, the aura that It broadcasts arises not merely from the singularity of an original, as Walter Benjamin supposed, but also from the fabulous success of its reproducibility in the imaginations of many others, charmed exponentially by the number of its copies. The one-of-kind item must become a type, a replicable role-icon of itself--from "a Charles Hart" or "a Nell Gwyn" to "a Mary Pickford" or "a Douglas Fairbanks"--in order to unleash the Pygmalion effect in the hearts and minds of the fans, making the idea of him or her theirs--as much or more than anything else they might call their own. — Joseph Roach

It's not that I'm being shy. It's just that
well, for one, I don't even remember the event. It's a blank: a white slate, a black hole. I have vague images, half-impressions: of being, or having been
or, more precisely, being about to be
hit; blue light; railings; lights of other colours; being held above some kind of tray or bed. But who's to say that these are genuine memories? Who's to say my traumatized mind didn't just make them up, or pull them out from somewhere else, some other slot, and stick them there to plug the gap
the crater
that the accident had blown? Minds are versatile and wily things. Real chancers. — Tom McCarthy

One day I saw a picture of the Buddha on a Buddhist magazine and he was sitting on the grass, and he was sitting on the grass, very peaceful, smiling, and I was impressed. Around me people were not like that, so I had the desire to be someone like him. I nourished that kind of desire until the age of sixteen, when I had the permission from my parents to go and ordain as a Buddhist monk. — Nhat Hanh

The sorrow of war inside a soldier's heart was in a strange way similar to the sorrow of love. It was a kind of nostalgia, like the immense sadness of a world at dusk. It was a daness, a missing, a pain which could send one soaring back into the past. The sorrow of the battlefield could not normally be pinpointed to one particular event, or even one person. If you focused on any one event it would soon become a tearing pain. — Bao Ninh

Well I've been doing it for about twenty years, I did films when I was a little kid, when I was about six or seven, I was in films and I had this really high voice, I did a series called Dinobabies, that was my first one. And then after that I did Madeline, yeah so it just kind of happened and then never went away. Then everyone said your voice is going to change and you'll be out ... No, no, still on helium. — Andrea Libman

There is another difference between my grandfather and James B. Duke that may finally be more important than any other, and this was a difference of kinds of pleasure. We may assume that, as a boomer, moving from one chance of wealth to another, James B. Duke wanted only what he did not yet have. If it is true that he was in this way typical of his kind, then his great pleasure was only in prospect, which excludes affection as a motive. My grandfather, on the contrary, and despite his life's persistent theme of hardship, took a great and present delight in the modest good that was at hand: in his place and his affection for it, in its pastures, animals, and crops. — Wendell Berry

But where was he going to go, exactly? It was not considered the thing to look panicked or even especially concerned about graduation, but everything about the world after Brakebills felt dangerously vague and under-thought to Quentin. What was he going to do? What exactly? Every ambition he'd ever had in his life had been realized the day he was admitted to Brakebills, and he was struggling to formulate a new one with any kind of practical specificity. This wasn't Fillory, where there was some magical war to be fought. There was no Watcherwoman to be rooted out, no great evil to be vanquished, and without that everything else seemed so mundane and penny-ante. No one would come right out and say it, but the worldwide magical ecology was suffering from a serious imbalance: too many magicians, not enough monsters. — Lev Grossman

This plea comes from the bottom of my heart. Every friend of freedom, and I know you are one, must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence. A country in which shooting down unidentified planes "on suspicion" can be seriously considered as a drug-war tactic is not the kind of United States that either you or I want to hand on to future generations. — Milton Friedman

Dare I hint at that worse time when, strung together somewhere in great black space, there was a flaming necklace, or ring, or starry circle of some kind, of which I was one of the beads! And when my only prayer was to be taken off from the rest, and when it was such inexplicable agony and misery to be a part of the dreadful thing? — Charles Dickens

Jesus brings a kingdom ruled by the crucified one and populated by the unclean and always found in the unexpected. I'd expected to look at the past and see only mistakes that I'd moved on from, to see only damage and addiction and tragic self-delusion. But by thinking that way, I'd assumed that God was nowhere to be found back then. But that's kind of an insult to God. It's like saying, 'You only exist when I recognize you.' The kingdom of heaven, which Jesus talked about all the time, is, as he said, here. At hand. It's now. Wherever you are. In ways you'd never expect. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

One of my guiding principles is don't do anything that other people are doing. Always do something a little different if you can. The concept is that if you do it a little differently there is a greater potential for reward than if you the same thing that other people are doing. I think that this kind of goal for one's work, having obviously the maximum risk, would have the maximum reward no matter what the field may be. — Seymour Cray

Simons, as restrained as Bradlee could be hard-charging and obstreperous, liked to tell of watching Bradlee grind his cigarrettes out in a demitasse cup during a formal dinner party. Bradlee was one of the few persons who could pull that kind of thing off and leave the hostess saying how charming he was.
Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward — Carl Bernstein

Each of us can be a leader. We need to remember that the mantle of leadership is not the cloak of comfort, but the robe of responsibility. Perhaps our service is to youth. If so, I caution: 'Youth needs fewer critics and more models.' One hundred years from now it will not matter what kind of a car we drove, what kind of a house we lived in, how much we had in the bank account, nor what our clothes looked like. But the world may be a little better because we were important in the life of a boy or a girl. — Thomas S. Monson

Her face ... was a one-of-a-kind, a surprising variation on a familiar theme - a variation that made observers think, Yes - that would be another very nice way for people to look. What Beatrice had done with her face, actually, was what any plain girl could do. She overlaid it with dignity, suffering, intelligence, and a piquant dash of bitchiness. — Kurt Vonnegut

I was lucky to be in a household where whatever I wanted to do was supported and my music was always such a natural part of me, and I was never told that I couldn't do it. So I've always been able to follow my heart and my instincts and what I love, that being my art. And I know that not everybody really has that chance or that environment, the same one that I did, so I kind of want to help in any way that I can. — Zella Day

If you want something new in your life, you have to make space for it. I mean that psychologically as well as physically. Take a look at your closet. If you have the kind of closet where you can't fit another thing in there, that might be the reason you don't have more new clothes. If you want a new man in your life, you've got to let go of the one who stopped dating you five years ago. In other words, you need to complete the past in order for the present to show up more fully. — Jack Canfield

The brick is neither here nor there,' interrupted the stranger in an imposing fashion, 'it never merely falls on someone's head from out of nowhere. In your case, I can assure you that a brick poses no threat whatsoever. You will die another kind of death.
'And you know just what that will be?' queried Berlioz with perfectly understandable irony, letting himself be drawn into a truly absurd conversation. 'And can you tell me what that is?'
'Gladly,' replied the stranger. He took Berlioz's measure as if intending to make him a suit and muttered something through his teeth that sounded like 'One, two.. Mercury in the Second House ... the moon has set ... six-misfortune ... evening-seven ... ' Then he announced loudly and joyously, 'Your head will be cut off! — Mikhail Bulgakov

The key to entering into the Divine Exchange is never our worthiness but always God's graciousness. Any attempt to measure or increase our worthiness will always fall short, or it will force us into the position of denial and pretend, which produces the constant perception of hypocrisy in religious people.
To switch to an "economy of grace" is a switch that is very hard for humans to make. We base almost everything in human culture on achievement, performance, accomplishment, an equal exchange value, or some kind of worthiness gauge. I call it meritocracy. Unless one personally experiences a dramatic and personal breaking of the rules of merit (forgiveness or undeserved goodness), it is almost impossible to disbelieve or operate outside of its rigid logic. This cannot happen theoretically or abstractly. It cannot happen "out there" but must be known personally "in here. — Richard Rohr

I'll have to think about it, but I can do that," Taryn said. "Of course you can," Dannon said. "But don't think about ways to trick them or outsmart them. Just focus on your ignorance. You don't know anything, but you're willing to speculate, and you'd like some information from them - to hear what they think." "What about you and Carver?" "We can handle it," Dannon said. "We've spent half our lives lying to cops, of one kind or another. Nobody else on the staff knows. Might not be a bad idea for us to stay away completely . . . unless they ask for us." "Let's do that," Taryn said. "Maybe you two could start doing some advance security work." "I'll talk to Ron," Dannon said. He heard high heels, and said, "Here comes Alice. — John Sandford

The self that does not survive scrutiny is the subject of experience in each present moment - the feeling of being a thinker of thoughts inside one's head, the sense of being an owner or inhabitant of a physical body, which this false self seems to appropriate as a kind of vehicle. Even if you don't believe such a homunculus exists - perhaps because you believe, on the basis of science, that you are identical to your body and brain rather than a ghostly resident therein - you almost certainly feel like an internal self in almost every waking moment. And yet, however one looks for it, this self is nowhere to be found. It cannot be seen amid the particulars of experience, and it cannot be seen when experience itself is viewed as a totality. However, its absence can be found - and when it is, the feeling of being a self disappears. — Sam Harris

Well, here we are. Let's change. Let's change the world. Together." "You sound like my father." "Your father wants the gods back on their pedestals. I want us working as one: humans with Craft, gods with divine power, priests with Applied Theology. But we need space to build that society. We need the time and the power to change, and we'll never have that time or power with Craftsmen crushing us. We need freedom, and I can win that freedom. Not in a decade or three. Today. In one stroke." "You want a moderate revolution. You just need to kill a few people first." "A few people. Yes. To free a city. To save a planet. Dresediel Lex will be a model for the world." "I kind of like it the way it is. — Max Gladstone

Jay Wexler is my kind of writer
a weird one, and a wry one, and one who isnt afraid to act silly in a sort of bait-and-switch that, to the readers surprise, moves him as much as it makes him laugh. Like all the best comedians, Wexler is clearly nursing a heart that the world broke a long time ago. Ed Tuttle is a book that cant decide what it wants to be when it grows up, but as with most cases of arrested development, theres something very serious going on behind all the antics. Plus, there are pictures. — Ron Currie Jr.

Actors need a kind of aggression, a kind of inner force. Don't be only one-sided, sweet, nice, good. Get rid of being average. Find the killer in you. — Stella Adler

One of the telltale signs of one who has completely embraced their authentic self is that they are, with great consistency, the same person in public as they are behind closed doors. Until you learn how to access your authentic voice, the uniqueness of who you truly are will never be fully realized. What makes you special (just like everyone else) is that you were placed here on this planet to express the one-of-a-kind being only you can be. — Dennis Merritt Jones

To reflect the entire spectrum, the dynamics of the adventure novel must be invested with a philosophic synthesis of one kind or another. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Jazz music is a style, not compositions; any kind of music may be played in Jazz if one has the knowledge. — Jelly Roll Morton

You happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless hair trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness
a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest self which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib comic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that with each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty of a solitary future in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting the Heimlich maneuver on yourself over the back of the kitchen chair — David Rakoff

WHO'S GOT A TAMPON? I JUST GOT MY PERIOD, I will announce loudly to nobody in particular in a women's bathroom in a San Francisco restaurant, or to a co-ed dressing room of a music festival in Prague, or to the unsuspecting gatherers in a kitchen at a party in Sydney, Munich, or Cincinnati. Invariably, across the world, I have seen and heard the rustling of female hands through backpacks and purses, until the triumphant moment when a stranger fishes one out with a kind smile. No money is ever exchanged. The unspoken universal understanding is: Today, it is my turn to take the tampon. Tomorrow, it shall be yours. There is a constant, karmic tampon circle. It also exists, I've found, with Kleenex, cigarettes, and ballpoint pens. — Amanda Palmer

There is something stunningly narrow about how the Anthropic Principle is phrased. Yes, only certain laws and constants of nature are consistent with our kind of life. But essentially the same laws and constants are required to make a rock. So why not talk about a Universe designed so rocks could one day come to be, and strong and weak Lithic Principles? If stones could philosophize, I imagine Lithic Principles would be at the intellectual frontiers. — Carl Sagan

WALLY: . . . That may be why I never understand what's going on at a party, and I'm always completely confused. I mean, we'll come home, and Debby will describe some incredible incident, and I won't have even noticed it. Everything passes in a kind of trance. You know, Debby once said after one of these New York evenings that she thought she'd traveled a greater distance just by journeying from her origins in the suburbs of Chicago to that New York evening than her grandmother had traveled in making her way from the steppes of Russia to the suburbs of Chicago. — Wallace Shawn

Whenever you do any one thing intensely over a period of time you have to give up other lives you could be living. You have to have a real single-minded kind of tunnel vision if you want to get anything significant accomplished. Especially if the desire is not to be a businessman, but to be a creative person. — Steve Jobs

But although the rules are vague
And widely disregarded now
Some precepts remain: live with love -
That is a rule we all can understand;
Forgive those who need forgiveness,
Which I think is everybody, more or less;
Be kind - that, perhaps, is first and foremost
In any postmodern, new-fangled
Code we devise for ourselves;
Yes, be kind: love one another,
And most of all tend with gentleness
The small patch of terra firma
That is allocated to each of us ... — Alexander McCall Smith

American foreign policy was a mirror image of Russian foreign policy: whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse. American domestic policies were conducted under a kind of upside-down Russian veto: no man could be elected to public office unless he was on record as detesting the Russians, and no proposal could be enacted, from a peace plan at one end to a military budget at the other, unless it could be demonstrated that the Russians wouldn't like it. — Archibald MacLeish

The inspired moment may sometimes be described as a kind of hallucinatory state of mind: one half of the personality emotes and dictates while the other half listens and notates. The half that listens has better look the other way, had better simulate a half attention only, for the half that dictates is easily disgruntled and avenges itself for too close inspection by fading entirely away. — Aaron Copland

And I mouth into the phone, I love you, in case some of her cells pick up on the vibrations and it serves me well in the next life. If there is one. If there is a next life, I hope it's in the past; I don't think the future will be any more handleable. — Ned Vizzini

Anthropologists have invented the ingenious, convenient, fictional notion of the "true Negro," which allows them to consider, if need be, all the real Negroes on earth as fake Negroes, more or less approaching a kind of Platonic archetype, without ever attaining it. Thus, African history is full of "Negroids," Hamites, semi-Hamites, Nilo-Hamitics, Ethiopoids, Sabaeans, even Caucasoids! Yet, if one stuck strictly to scientific data and archeological facts, the prototype of the White race would be sought in vain throughout the earliest years of present-day humanity. — Cheikh Anta Diop

So what's the point, then, if we can't be happy? Why are we doing any of this?"
"Oh, there's definitely happiness," Jack said, turning his back on the ocean and looking at her. "But it's just about moments, not ever-afters." He grinned. "Like when you're right in the middle of the ocean with your friends, with no one trying to kill you in any kind of horrifying way. You have to appreciate these moments when they happen, 'cause obviously we don't get many of them. — James Riley

Before entering into any kind of intimate relationships, whether friendship, familial re-connection, or romance, the idea of "needing" or "being needed" must be eliminated. It's harmful to me and others. Need is no kind of foundation for anything. Rather, I choose to be wanted. "Want" is a deliberate choice. Wanting is not based in fear or ego (which are one in the same, I believe). Want comes from recognition of someone else's goodness and loving them for it. Being wanted is unconditional. It does not require emotional games be played, it does not require reparations be made or obligations be met. Being wanted is good, in and of itself. — Jennifer DeLucy

It's very hard to be a screenwriter. I remember getting a couple of awards. I got a PEN West award a million years ago when I did Running on Empty, and I sat in the room with all these writers. They wrote everything from novels to non-fiction to children's books to journalism - any kind of writing - and I realized that there was no one in the room who would ever read anything I'd written. — Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal

It's not impressive to get in a fight, but if one does happen, you've gotta be ready to handle it. Every girl, not just biker chicks, knows what kind of guy can. — Theo Rossi

It remains to mention some of the ways in which people have spoken misleadingly of logical form. One of the commonest of these is to talk of 'the logical form' of a statement; as if a statement could never have more than one kind of formal power; as if statements could, in respect of their formal powers, be grouped in mutually exclusive classes, like animals at a zoo in respect of their species. But to say that a statement is of some one logical form is simply to point to a certain general class of, e.g., valid inferences, in which the statement can play a certain role. It is not to exclude the possibility of there being other general classes of valid inferences in which the statement can play a certain role — Peter Frederick Strawson

It would be kind of ill to see Rachel McAdams win an Oscar [for Spotlight] - I don't think people give her credit for her range, she started in a kind of character with younger demographic-aged films and really made a push to be taken more seriously and got a lot of opportunities and knocked it out the park. But I feel like Jennifer Jason Leigh deserves one, maybe not just for Hateful Eight but for [Anomalisa] and everything. Like, I tried to watch Adaption again, that's rough! — Bun B.

Well ... " He leans across the basket to place the necklace over my head. It falls in line atop my key. He drags my hair free, smoothing the strands to cover both chains. "I thought this could be symbolic. It's made of the same kind of metal, looks vintage like the key. Together, they prove what I've always known. Even when we used to come here as kids." "And what's that?" I watch him, intrigued by how the tunnel's opening tints one side of his smooth complexion with bluish light. "That only you have the key to open my heart. — A.G. Howard

And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind her, and to whom she is grateful. — George Eliot

Actresses talking about characters they've played often use the phrase "strong woman", which kind of irks me. Firstly, the description appears to be reserved for two kinds of female: the gun-toting chick in tiny-vest-and-shorts combo, or the tough-talking businesswoman who secretly longs for a man to bring out her softer side. So obviously, our idea of strength is pretty narrow and one-dimensional. Secondly, why isn't Brad Pitt ever asked about how much he enjoys playing a "strong man"? Is it automatically assumed that men's roles will be complex and interesting? — Rosie Blythe

I'm learning a lot about how to be one of the 'good' actors. You'd hope that it's natural to be a good person, and kind, but I'm learning how to deal with long, sometimes boring days. — Lily James

There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D.H. had known something. His buddy Huxley was just an intellectual fidget, but what a marvelous one. Better than G.B. Shaw with that hard keel of a mind always scraping bottom, his labored wit finally only a task, a burden on himself, preventing him from really feeling anything, his brilliant speech finally a bore, scraping the mind and the sensibilities. It was good to read them all though. It made you realize that thoughts and words could be fascinating, if finally useless. — Charles Bukowski

This is certainly that kind of masterpiece, and a new name should be created for such an all-frequencies assault on the sensibilities. I propose the name blivit. This is a word which during my adolescence was defined by peers as two pounds of shit in a one-pound bag. — Kurt Vonnegut

Havel had said that people struggling for independence wanted money and recognition from other countries; they wanted more criticism of the Soviet empire from the West and more diplomatic pressure. But Havel had said that these were things they wanted; the only thing they needed was hope. Not that pie in the sky stuff, not a preference for optimism over pessimism, but rather "an orientation of the spirit." The kind of hope that creates a willingness to position oneself in a hopeless place and be a witness, that allows one to believe in a better future, even in the face of abusive power. That kind of hope makes one strong. — Bryan Stevenson

A man abandoned by himself on a desert island would adorn neither his hut nor his person; nor would he seek for flowers, still less would he plant them, in order to adorn himself therewith. It is only in society that it occurs to him to be not merely a man, but a refined man after his kind (the beginning of civilization). For such do we judge him to be who is both inclined and apt to communicate his pleasure to others, and who is not contented with an object if he cannot feel satisfaction in it in common with others. Again, every one expects and requires from every one else this reference to universal communication of pleasure, as it were from an original compact dictated by humanity itself. — Immanuel Kant

The fact is that I have lived with the belief that power, any kind of power, was the one thing forbidden to poets ... Power requires that the inner person never be unmasked. No, we poets have to go naked. And since this is so, it is better that we stay private people; a naked public person would be rather ridiculous, what? — May Sarton

She wasn't too big, heroic, what they call Junoesque. It was that there was just too much of what she was for any one human female package to contain, and hold: too much of white, too much of female, too much of maybe just glory, I don't know: so that at first sight of her you felt a kind of shock of gratitude just for being alive and being male at the same instance with her in space and time, and then in the next second and forever after a kind of despair because you knew there would never be enough of any one male to match and hold and deserve her; grief forever after because forever after nothing less would ever do. — William Faulkner

From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. — George Orwell

The what?"
"Lone Wolves." He turned to show me the back of his raggedy jacket. Sure enough, a snarling wolf face stared back at me from the leather.
"Wait a second," I said. "Isn't it supposed to be 'Lone Wolf' as in, you know, one? If there's more than one, then it kind of defeats the purpose of being 'lone', doesn't it?"
The leader squinted hard, as if trying to follow my logic and getting lost. — Jaye Wells

I'm not any kind of hero, honey. I'm just a guy." "A swaggering, alpha male who likes to be in charge kind of guy." He quirked an eyebrow. "I'm the first one of those you met? Welcome to Montana. — Olivia Jaymes

I was the dhampir daughter of the family patriarch, the little known stain on an otherwise immaculate record. Louis-Cesare, on the other hand, was vamp royalty. The only Child of Mircea's younger, and far stranger, brother Radu, he was a first-level master
the highest and rarest vampire rank.
A month ago, the prince and the pariah had crossed paths because we had one thing in common: we were very good at killing things. And Mircea's bug-eyed crazy brother Vlad had needed killing if anyone ever had. The collaboration hadn't exactly been stress free, but to my surprise, we eventually sorted things out and got the job done. By the end, I'd even started to think that it was kind of nice, having someone to watch my back for a change.
Sometimes, I could be really stupid. — Karen Chance

You are too kind." Her voice dripped with sarcasm. "But what has marriage to offer me that I don't already have?"
There were many ways to answer that question, but having care for her innocence, Lachlan refrained from the blunt one. One glance at that beautiful face and lush body, and he need look no further for a reason why the lass should be wed: swiving. And lots of it. — Monica McCarty