Chumming Eft Quotes & Sayings

Siddhartha wants liberation, Dante wants Beatrice, Frodo wants to get to Mount Doom - we all want something. Quest is elemental to the human experience. All road narratives are to some extent built on quest. If you're a woman, though, this fundamental possibility of quest is denied. You can't go anywhere if you can't step out onto a road ...
... (T)here is no female counterpart in our culture to Ishmael or Huck Finn. There is no Dean Moriarty, Sal, or even a Fuckhead. It sounds like a doctoral crisis, but it's not. As a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker, my survival depended upon other people's ability to envision a possible future for me. Without a Melvillean or Kerouacian framework, or at least some kind of narrative to spell out a potential beyond death, none of my resourcefulness or curiosity was recognizable, and therefore I was unrecognizable. — Vanessa Veselka

(On stoicism) "As a matter of fact, the experiment has already started. Yesterday at lunch I had a smaller piece of pecan pie than usual, and I passed up the scoop of vanilla ice cream entirely. It's like I said in my essay. 'Just as nature abhors a vacuum, a Stoic abhors satiety.' What's more, as you may have noticed, I've stopped smoking."
"But not swearing."
"I'm working on it."
...
"The stoics believed that in bearing pain without complain, a mortal might transcend the mundane world and enter the eternal matrix of divine thought. — James K. Morrow

You will also allow me to thank the Academy for inviting me to lecture in Stockholm, for its hospitality, and for the opportunity afforded me for admiring the charm of your people and the beauty of your country. — Guglielmo Marconi

It's only money." "Yes, but it's only my money, not only your money," Nanny pointed out. "We witches have always held everything in common, you know that," said Granny. "Well, yes," said Nanny, and once again cut to the heart of the sociopolitical debate. "It's easy to hold everything in common when no one's got anything. — Terry Pratchett

Truth is one;
And, in all lands beneath the sun,
Whoso hath eyes to see may see
The tokens of its unity. — John Greenleaf Whittier

I want to see a new system. I believe that the credit scoring system is broken. That's my belief. — Suze Orman

Since I'm a novelist I'm the opposite of you - I believe that what's most important is what cannot be measured. I'm not denying your way of thinking, but the greater part of people's lives consist of things that are unmeasurable, and trying to change all these to something measurable is realistically impossible. — Haruki Murakami

I was distracted by the secrets of a new world. In the silence, broken only by the exaggerated oosh shoo of my own breath, I watched shoals of tiny iridescent fish, and larger black-and-white fish, that stared at me with blank, inquisitive faces, and gently swaying anemones filtering the gentle currents of their tiny, unseen haul. I saw distant landscapes twice as brightly colored and varied as they were above land. I saw caves and hollows where unknown creatures lurked, distant shapes that shimmered in the rays of the sun. — Jojo Moyes