Bo2 Origins Nikolai Quotes & Sayings

When I look in the mirror I see an old woman; or not old, because nobody is allowed to be old any more. Older, then. Sometimes I see an older woman who might look like the grandmother I never knew, or like my own mother, if she'd managed to reach this age. But sometimes I see instead the young girl's face I once spent so much time rearranging and deploring, drowned and floating just beneath my present face, which seems -- especially in the afternoons, with the light on a slant -- so loose and transparent I could peel it off like a stocking. — Margaret Atwood

Three sorts of goods, Aristotle specified, contribute to happiness: goods of the soul, including moral and intellectual virtues and education; bodily goods, such as strength, good health, beauty, and sound senses; and external goods, such as wealth, friends, good birth, good children, good heredity, good reputation and the like. — Sissela Bok

To call for close reading, in fact, is to do more than insist on due attentiveness to the text. It inescapably suggests an attention to this rather than to something else: to the 'words on the page' rather than to the contexts which produced and surround them. It implies a limiting as well as a focusing of concern - a limiting badly needed by literary talk which would ramble comfortably from the texture of Tennyson's language to the length of his beard. But in dispelling such anecdotal irrelevancies, 'close reading' also held at bay a good deal else: it encouraged the illusion that any piece of language, 'literary' or not, can be adequately studied or even understood in isolation. It was the beginnings of a 'reification' of the literary work, the treatment of it as an object in itself, which was to be triumphantly consummated in the American New Criticism. — Terry Eagleton

Taxes are the killing fields of Democrats. — Grover Norquist

Our enemies provide us with a precious opportunity to practice patience and love. We should have gratitude toward them. — Dalai Lama

Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell. — Elena Ferrante

I loved writing for the school newspaper. I liked to report and interview people, but I really liked to write columns, funny columns. — Bonnie Jo Campbell

It's almost a standard tactic, really, to try to minimize any effort that people in the entertainment business or in any public occupation make to express themselves. — Viggo Mortensen