Copied Quotes & Sayings

I carry in my datebook a piece of paper that my mother copied out for me, from the 1840 Census. Hardy Callaway Culver of Hancock County, Georgia, had 42 slaves, 31 "employed in agriculture." Culver was my great-great-great grandfather. I carry this piece of paper with me every day because I don't want to forget. I don't know what to do with the information, but I don't want to forget it. — Laura Lippman

We have no patent on anything we do and anything we do can be copied by anyone else. But you can't copy the heart and the soul and the conscience of the company. — Howard Schultz

So they, who climb to wealth, forget
The friends in darker fortunes tried.
I copied them
but I regret
That I should ape the ways of pride. — William C. Bryant

Be who you are,nobody likes to be copied! — Morgan Musseau

I originated a remark many years ago that I think has been copied more than any little thing that Ive every said, and I used it in the FOLLIES of 1922. I said America has a unique record. We never lost a war and we never won a conference in our lives. I believe that we could without any degree of egotism, single-handed lick any nation in the world. But we cant confer with Costa Rica and come home with our shirts on. — Will Rogers

I wrote it the right way, so it was copied the wrong way right. I mean the right way wrong. — Eugene Ormandy

Bits have unique properties, then, that we can use to our advantage: they're super-small, super-fast, easily acquired and created and copied and shared in near-infinite quantity, protected from the ravages of time, and free from the limitations of distance and space. In practice, though, bits reveal several paradoxes: they're weightless, but they weigh us down; they don't take up any space, but they always seem to pile up; they're created in an instant, but they can last forever; they move quickly, but they can waste our time. — Mark Hurst

The guide showed us a coffee-colored piece of sculpture which he said was considered to have come from the hand of Phidias, since it was not possible that any other artist, of any epoch, could have copied nature with such faultless accuracy. The figure was that of a man without a skin; with every vein, artery, muscle, every fibre and tendon and tissue of the human frame, represented in detail. It looked natural, because somehow it looked as if it were in pain. A skinned man would be likely to look that way, unless his attention were occupied with some other matter. It was a hideous thing, and yet there was a fascination about it some where. I am sorry I saw it, because I shall always see it, now. I shall dream of it, sometimes. I shall dream that it is resting its corded arms on the bed's head and looking down on me with its dead eyes; I shall dream that it is stretched between the sheets with me and touching me with its exposed muscles and its stringy cold legs. — Mark Twain

When did the world begin and how?"
I asked a lamb, a goat, a cow:

"What's it all about and why?"
I asked a hog as he went by:

"Where will the whole thing end, and when?"
I asked a duck, a goose, a hen:

And I copied all the answers too,
A quack, a honk, an oink, a moo. — Robert Clairmont

What is the advantage of a nonverbal spell?" Hermione's hand shot into the air. Snape took his time looking around at everybody else, making sure he had no choice, before saying curtly, "Very well - Miss Granger?" "Your adversary has no warning about what kind of magic you're about to perform," said Hermione, "which gives you a split-second advantage." "An answer copied almost word for word from The Standard Book of Spells, Grade Six," said Snape dismissively (over in the corner, Malfoy sniggered), "but correct in essentials. Yes, — J.K. Rowling

I'll be honest. We copied everyone ... the Beatles, the Bachelors. It was the only way people would even listen to you. — Maurice Gibb

There are any number of models artists can use to profit off of their talent and artistry. It is not up to the state to protect them from competition. Musicians can obviously get paid for performing and having their music copied and "pirated" helps them in this respect by making them more well known, more popular. — Stephan Kinsella

Had the followers of Jesus remained an obscure Jewish sect, most of you would not have learned to read, and the rest of you would be reading from hand-copied scrolls. — Rodney Stark

I copied everything I did in Galaxy Quest from Bill Paxton in Aliens, I owe him some credit. — Sam Rockwell

In an economy where more and more value is in information - is in the bits, not the atoms, where bits can be copied essentially for free - any time you have that situation, economic schemes that rely on existing models of intellectual property laws for protection are going to do less and less well. — Mitch Kapor

Gringos! They have copied us again — Luis Alberto Urrea

Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I've been bragging for over 25 years that my first New York Times bestseller was a book I copied from the U.S. Government Printing Office! — Matthew Lesko

I can generate suctional forces, which act indirectly and are entirely undetectable. No current of air can be noticed; only an almost imperceptible cooling, as occurs when air is sucked in strongly with the back of the hand held in front of the mouth. It is therefore incorrect to say that I have copied the cyclones and typhoons of the tropics. — Viktor Schauberger

If we compare the present state of the New Testament text with that of any other ancient writing, we must ... declare it to be marvelously correct. Such has been the care with which the New Testament has been copied - a care which has doubtless grown out of true reverence for its holy words ... The New Testament is unrivaled among ancient writings in the purity of its test as actually transmitted and kept in use. — B. B. Warfield

I do not see the value of separating humans into a body, soul and spirit. We don't do this with any other mammals, so why do we do it with ourselves? Thinking and fresh ideas arise naturally from the rhythm of one's internal felt-sense. It is the process artists demonstrate to humanity - to express our individuality in real-time, as a living process, rather than a "copied" idea. — Christopher Zzenn Loren

We are asking if thought can be aware of itself. That is rather a complex question, and requires very careful observation. Thought has created wars through nationalism, through sectarian religions. Thought has created all this; God has not created the hierarchy of the church
the pope, all the robes, all the rituals, the swinging of the incense, the candles. All that paraphernalia that goes on in a cathedral or in a church is put together by thought, copied, some of it, from the ancient Egyptians, from the ancient Hindus, and Hebrews. It is all thought. So "God" is created by thought. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

I don't accept what people say. I took something to be copied recently, to be enlarged and blown up, and they said it couldn't be done, and I went somewhere five minutes away, and they did it. — Charles Grodin

I've always said that the 1986 [Immigration Reform and Control] Act had a fourth leg [in addition to law enforcement, increased immigration and amnesty] to its stool which was wishful thinking. And that pattern of a four-legged stool was copied in the failed attempts to enact a second and bigger general amnesty for illegal aliens in 2006, 2007, and in the current year 2013. — Jan C. Ting

With the threat of failure looming, students with the growth mindset set instead mobilized their resources for learning. They told us that they, too, sometimes felt overwhelmed, but their response was to dig in and do what it takes. They were like George Danzig. Who? George Danzig was a graduate student in math at Berkeley. One day, as usual, he rushed in late to his math class and quickly copied the two homework problems from the blackboard. When he later went to do them, he found them very difficult, and it took him several days of hard work to crack them open and solve them. They turned out not to be homework problems at all. They were two famous math problems that had never been solved. — Carol S. Dweck

People in the outside world said something stupid with their every breath, and when they didn't talk their radios filled the gap with the copied voices of people singing the same songs over and over. — Chuck Palahniuk

I feel very, very proud that so many people have copied me. — Alec Issigonis

It was only after I had been out of the art school that I actually copied a small Seurat, and I copied it in order to follow his thought, because if you do copy an artist, and you have a close feeling for him, in fact that you need to know more about his work, there is no better way than actually to copy, because you get very close indeed to how somebody thinks. — Bridget Riley

It's not like what I do or what I wear is my copyright. What I'm wearing now also is an inspiration. It is how I saw it on the mannequin, and I just wore it, so it's in a way copied. But obviously, I wouldn't want to spend my life thinking about dresses. It is such a waste of life. — Kangana Ranaut

The books I liked became a Bible from which I drew advice and support; I copied out long passages from them; I memorized new canticles and new litanies, psalms, proverbs, and prophecies, and I sanctified every incident in my life by the recital of these sacred texts. My emotions, my tears, and my hopes were no less sincere on account of that; the words and the cadences, the lines and the verses were not aids to make believe: but they rescued from silent oblivion all those intimate adventures of the spirit that I couldn't speak to anyone about; they created a kind of communion between myself and those twin souls which existed somewhere out of reach; instead of living out my small private existence, I was participating in a great spiritual epic. — Simone De Beauvoir

Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness. — Virginia Woolf

Let us cease treating the Evangelists as men on trial whose every word is suspect. When one of them is alone in stating something, certain modern critics who pride themselves on their independence reject his testimony as isolated; when several say the same thing, it seems, we are told, that they must have copied from one another, and their testimony is equally worthless. Were such radical norms applied to profane writers, history could not be written". — Ferdinand Prat

I read (and copied into my Interesting Things I Have Heard notebook) — Matthew Quick

She'd come across a few Highlanders while in Edinburgh, but none compared to Darius. She didn't even have to ask if he was a Highlander.
It was in the way he held himself, the way he spoke. It was a look that couldn't be faked or copied. Whatever made a man a Highlander was in his blood, in his very soul. — Donna Grant

Realize this, though. Half my genes run through your body, and my selfish genome is heavily evolutionarily pre-programmed to look out for its copies. The other half is copied from the man I admire most in all the worlds and time, so my interest is doubly riveted. The artistic combination of the two, shall we say, arrests my attention. — Lois McMaster Bujold

The police, he knew, had already copied the — David Baldacci

Economists copied their mathematics from the work of 19th-century physicists: they see individuals and businesses as interchangeable atoms, not as unique creators. — Peter Thiel

Hank Nearly was an avid reader. He arrived early in his brown corduroy coat, with a book taken from the library, copied all the pages on the Xerox machine, and sat at his desk reading what looked passebly like the honest pages of business. He's make it through a three-hundred-page novel every two or three days. — Joshua Ferris

How might letters be most efficiently copied so that the blind might read them with their fingers? — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Pictures artists staged their own images or copied or cut out others already in existence. The viewer took them in separately, in sometimes paradoxical waves: an original image, then the manipulations of it, then the places where image and idea intersected. This created a crucial perceptual glitch that irony and understanding filled. — Jerry Saltz

After soft kisses, they pressed their hands together palm to palm. The tingling scattered all over Livia's body, warming her.
"Do you feel that?" she whispered with a smile.
His lips moved in his silent count. Blake wrapped his fingers around her hand. She copied the movement. Their hands together now resembled a heart-not a cartoon rendering of the shape, but a real human heart.
He touched her lips with his and murmured, "I've been feeling it since you first smiled at me. — Debra Anastasia

It has been observed before that images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet's spirit. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Cat my dogs ef it ain't de powerfulest dream I ever seen," as Joyce, quoting Twain, copied in his notebook on Huckleberry Finn. — John "Book Of The Dark" Bishop

How was New York?' Ashley asks politely.
I'm not sure how to respond. Something like: Well, the mustachioed master of the secret library is going to be pissed that I copied the entirety of his ancient codebook and delivered it to Google, but at least I got to stay at a nice hotel?
Instead I say, New York was good. — Robin Sloan

Rumi himself once said that counterfeit gold is only to be found because there is such a thing as real gold to be copied. — Idries Shah

I did go bankrupt because everybody copied me - every single industry. But genuinely, it doesn't matter. I swear I don't care. — Maripol

A man you like, you mean, Tabitha?" my grandmother asked. "I wouldn't mention him if I didn't like him," my mother said. "I want you to meet him," she said to us all. "You've dated him?" my grandmother asked. "No! I just met him - just today, on today's train!" my mother said. "And already you like him?" Lydia asked, in a tone of voice so perfectly copied from my grandmother that I had to look to see which one of them was speaking. "Well, yes," my mother said seriously. "You know such things. You don't need that much time. — John Irving

There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service ofmankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hatingoneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love. — Alan Watts

When I am no longer being copied, I shall know that I am a back number ... the fear of being copied is often the characteristic of the meager imagination. — Elsie De Wolfe

There must be nothing in my daily conduct that, copied by another, could lead that one into unholiness. — Helen Roseveare

O all you host of heaven!O Earth! waht else?
And shall i couple hell? O Fie! Hold, hold, my heart
And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memmory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter; yes, by heaven! — William Shakespeare

Couture has copied my things for years, in addition to countless other costume designers, claiming theirs were the original ideas. It's all part of the business, unfortunately. — Edith Head

It was murder - strangulation - but one need not say that the claw-mark on Mrs. Suydam's throat could not have come from her husband's or any other human hand, or that upon the white wall there flickered for an instant in hateful red a legend which, later copied from memory, seems to have been nothing less than the fearsome Chaldee letters of the word 'LILITH'. One need not mention these things because they vanished so quickly - as for Suydam, one could at least bar others from the room until one knew what to think oneself. The doctor has distinctly assured Malone that he did not see IT. The open porthole, just before he turned on the lights, was clouded for a second with a certain phosphorescence, and for a moment there seemed to echo in the night outside the suggestion of a faint and hellish tittering; — H.P. Lovecraft

If you go back and watch 'The French Connection,' it's been cannibalized so many times. There are certain movies like that, where you see the original and think, 'This isn't so great.' And the reason it isn't so great is because everyone has copied it. — Adam McKay

In the old days, we painstakingly copied our emails onto paper, put a stamp on them and mailed them to arrive 4 to 5 days later. We also churned our own butter and used our phones for talking. — Peter Sagal

I rise early that morning and dress in green and brown, my skirst the same colour as the forest floor. I include a cap copied from one of the duchess's, but set farther back from my face. She may be a bitch, but she does have style. — Katherine Longshore

in fact, vast passages from the King James Version of The Bible had been copied virtually verbatim and spread throughout, comprising almost one eighteenth of The Book of Mormon. Koplanski then went on to further question the veracity of Smith's claim that The Book of Mormon had been originally written in the 1st Century. He did this by pointing out that the near identical King James Version passages included within The Book of Mormon also contained the same italicized words that the KJV translators had inserted into the King James Version when it was completed in 1611, some 200 years before Smith discovered and translated the Gold Plates. — Jack L. Brody

The very rationalists who jeer at the trial by combat, in the old feudal ordeal, do in fact accept a trial by combat as deciding all human history. In the war of the North and South in America, some of the Southern rebels wrote on their flags the rhyme, "Conquer we must for our cause is just." The philosophy was faulty; and in that sense it served them right that their opponents copied and continued it in the form "Conquer they didn't; so their cause wasn't." But the latter logic is as bad as the former. — G.K. Chesterton

Prosecutors say it would be next to impossible to get one teen to testify in court that another had slipped him or her a copied disc at lunchtime. And besides, isn't sharing music a time-honored part of teen friendship? — Charles Duhigg

When you have the money- and "you" are a big, economically and culturally vital nation- you get more than just a higher standard of living for your citizens. You get power and influence, and a much-enhanced ability to act out. When the money drains out, you can maintain the edge in living standards of your citizens for a considerable time (as long as others are willing to hold your growing debt and pile interest payments on top). But you lose power, especially the power to ignore others, quite quickly, though hopefully, in quiet, nonconfrontational ways.And you lose influence- the ability to have your wishes, ideas, and folkways willingly accepted, eagerly copied, and absorbed into daily life by others. — Stephen S. Cohen

The stuff of life turned out to be not a quivering, glowing, wondrous gel but a contraption of tiny jigs, springs, hinges, rods, sheets, magnets, zippers, and trapdoors, assembled by a data tape whose information is copied, downloaded and scanned. — Steven Pinker

Whatever, I copied all through school, and look how well I'm doing today. — Adrian Young

If Bradley Manning was the person who copied the secret US diplomatic cables to WikilLeaks, he is a hero for exposing human rights abuses. — Peter Tatchell

Billy copied Casey to a 'T.' — Mickey Mantle

So whatever you think of me, don't pity me. I had a beautiful life. I was loved, admired, feted, copied, mocked, treasured, and feared. I am one hundred years old and I am no longer afraid of anything. — Adrienne Sharp

Welcome to Tartarus, the griffin said. The first time I'd arrived in Tartarus, I'd expected them to have screechy, high-pitched bird voices, and when they spoke in their own language to one another, it did sound like birds chirping, with the occasional low growl. But when speaking in a human tongue, they copied the accent of the language and spoke in a much lower humanlike tone, which gave the slightly weird side effect of them all having British accents when they spoke English. — Steve McHugh

If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, it's a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can't be any rights of authorship. — Jaron Lanier

We didn't have the phrase 'style icon' when I was young, but I have to say, I really copied Bob Dylan when I was younger: a little bit of Bob Dylan or a lot of Bob Dylan and the French symbolist poets - I liked how they dressed - and Catholic school boys. — Patti Smith

(Catholic) monks taught metallurgy, introduced new crops, copied ancient texts, preserved literacy, pioneered in technology, invented champagne, improved the European landscape, provided for wanderers of every stripe, and looked after the lost and shipwrecked. — Thomas E. Woods Jr.

I think I copied my style from Louis Armstrong. Because I used to like the big volume and the big sound that Bessie Smith got when she sang ... So I liked the feeling that Louis got and I wanted the big volume that Bessie Smith got. But I found that it didn't work with me, because I didn't have a big voice. So anyway between the two of them I sorta got Billie Holiday. — Billie Holiday

Including a mention of your impressive record ... The man who had penetrated and copied over a thousand techniques.. Kakashi the mirror ninja. — Masashi Kishimoto

The physician had asked the patient to read aloud a paragraph from the statutes of Trinity College, Dublin. 'It shall be in the power of the College to examine or not examine every Licentiate, previous to his admission to a fellowship, as they shall think fit.' What the patient actually read was: 'An the bee-what in the tee-mother of the trothodoodoo, to majoram or that emidrate, eni eni krastei, mestreit to ketra totombreidei, to ra from treido a that kekritest.' Marvellous! Philip said to himself as he copied down the last word. What style! What majestic beauty! The richness and sonority of the opening phrase! 'An the bee-what in the tee-mother of the trothodoodoo.' He repeated it to himself. 'I shall print it on the title page of my next novel,' he wrote in his notebook. — Aldous Huxley

To put it differently, we have accepted one another's notions, copied one another's lives and made one another's experiences the model for our own. And for a generation the trend has been downward. Now we have reached a low place of sand and burnt wire grass and, worst of all, we have made the Word of Truth conform to our experience and accepted this low plane as the very pasture of the blessed. — A.W. Tozer

Everything I touched in the kitchen turned out crappy, no matter how closely I followed the recipe or copied the cooking show. — Drew Barrymore

It would be a very accurate historian who could pinpoint the precise day when the Japanese changed from being fiendish automatons who copied everything from the West, to becoming skilled and cunning engineers who would leave the West standing. But the Wasabi had been designed on that one confused day, and combined the traditional bad points of most Western cars with a host of innovative disasters the avoidance of which had made firms like Honda and Toyota what they were today. Newt — Terry Pratchett

It would not be easy, indeed, to catch their expression, but their colour and shape, and the eyelashes, so remarkably fine, might be copied. — Jane Austen

The campaign of anti-Islamic slander was so successful that to this day some textbooks in European and American schools refer to Muhammad as having epilepsy, the Qur'an as being copied from Bible, Muslim armies forcing conversions on people (by the sword), and Islam as being against science and learning. All of these are quite untrue, and enlightened Western authors from Arnold Toynbee and Bertrand Russell to Yvonne Haddad and John Esposito have been dispelling these myths on book after book for decades; nevertheless, the message hasn't reached the masses, who still believe numerous myths concerning Islam. — Yahiya Emerick

Tolstoy's wife copied out the entire manuscript of War and Peace in longhand seven times. — David Markson

I rather want my things to be copied than me copying. I would feel ashamed! — Karl Lagerfeld

I was now ordered to have my writings copied, and put into the printer's hand. — Joanna Southcott

A poem was a box for your soul. That was the point. It was the place where you could save bits of yourself, and shake out your darkest feelings, without worrying that people would think you were strange. While I was writing, I would forget myself and everyone else; poetry made me feel part of something noble and beautiful and bigger than me. [ ... ] I slid them under the carpet as soon as they were done, all the images and rhymes wrestled into place. By the time I had copied them out, I found I had memorized every line. Then they would surprise me by surging through me, like songs I knew by heart. — Andrea Ashworth

It is evident that the gospels were not copied from each other, for they often relate different events, and when they relate the same occurrence, each man relates those parts of it which he saw himself, and which impressed him most. — Anonymous

Fundamentally, Eva is just my life copied out onto film. I'm [still] alive, so the story hasn't finished. — Hideaki Anno

People who confuse social behavior with manners naturally think of it as something that can be donned and doffed, a fashion that can be copied. But social behavior is nerve and bone, not clothes, and is never just a copy, however derivative it may look. — Nick Joaquin

Among our neighbors of Central and Southern America, we see the Caucasian mingled with the Indian and the African. They have the forms of free government, because they have copied them. To
its benefits they have not attained, because that standard of civilization is above their race. Revolution succeeds Revolution, and the country mourns that some petty chief may triumph, and
through a sixty days' government ape the rulers of the earth. — Jefferson Davis

Beauty is no material thing. Beauty cannot be copied. Beauty is the sensation of pleasure on the mind of the seer. No thing is beautiful. But all things await the sensitive and imaginative mind that may be aroused to pleasurable emotion at sight of them. This is beauty. — Robert Henri

When you work with a legend as I do, it's wonderful. There's so many things I've learned working with Keith. He's so patient, not only with me, but with everyone in our crew and with the audience and with the game. He has a style that is so easy and will never be copied. — Dan Fouts

The book didn't want to be copied?
I should introduce it to the house that doesn't want any occupants. — A.W. Exley

We have tried to get closer to them, but we never copied anybody, we always tried to play our football — Arsene Wenger

It's one of the finest highway networks in the world - and nobody seems to care that the basic idea was copied from the Nazis.6 EISENHOWER, — T.R. Reid

No writer can be fully convicted of imitation except there is a concurrence of more resemblance than can be imagined to have happened by chance; as where the same ideas are conjoined without any natural series or necessary coherence, or where not only the thought but the words are copied. — Samuel Johnson

The theme of counterfeits, of those that produce and sell them, has always been part of the culture of M.I.A. When I was contacted by Versace, it seemed a great idea to invert the circle. Versace's designs have always been copied; now it's Versace that copies the copies, so those that copy must copy the copies. So this will continue. — M.I.A.

What happens is that the people who are leaders in any field are copied. I mean, there's a reason why every wine newsletter tends to look like mine. They see someone who's been successful, so they sort of copy these same ideas. — Robert M. Parker Jr.

For a long time, my uniform consisted of a trench coat, wide flared jeans, and little bottines - I copied a pair that my mother had in this theater place. I had, like, 10 pairs of the same shoes. — Nicolas Ghesquiere

Men simply copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons. — Richard Wright

In the early days of the software industry, people cared about copyright and didn't give a damn about patents - they copied each other willy-nilly. — Nathan Myhrvold

Jasper!' said Katie. 'Your machine was supposed to be making duplicate copies of all of the things that were photocopied during the week!'
Yes indeed. And so it did.' He flung open a panel. 'All ingeniously copied and transcribed onto one convenient wax roll, quite easily carried between the three of us.' He hefted one end of the wax roll; it was as big as a carpet. 'Come along. It's a mere two hundred and twenty pounds. Try to keep one hand free for making fists. We may have to bash our way out of here. — M T Anderson

I was so raw I didn't know about the Lambeau Leap-a Packer player celebrates catching a touchdown by leaping into the stands. It was started by Leroy Butler years before and has been copied by players all over the league. Don't be fooled, though. The only legitimate Lambeau Leap is celebrated by a Packer at Lambeau Field. — Donald Driver

It had been a long time since I felt the fragrance of summer: the scent of the ocean, a distant train whistle, the touch of a girl's skin, the lemony perfume of her hair, the evening wind, faint glimmers of hope, summer dreams.
But none of these were the way they once had been; they were all somehow off, as if copied with tracing paper that kept slipping out of place."
-from "Hear the Wind Sing — Haruki Murakami

Week after week we were reduced to starting the same letter over again and copying out the same appeals, so that after a certain time words which had at first been torn bleeding from our hearts became void of sense. We copied them down mechanically, trying by means of these dead words to give some idea of our ordeal. And in the end, the conventional call of a telegram seemed to us preferable to this sterile, obstinate monologue and this arid conversation with a blank wall. — Albert Camus