Dennery Island Quotes & Sayings

There is one further distinguishing characteristic of man which is very specific indeed and about which there can be no dispute, and that is the faculty of self-improvement - a faculty which, with the help of circumstance, progressively develops all our other faculties. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

As long as we're caught up in always looking for certainty and happiness, rather than honoring the taste and smell and quality of exactly what is happening, as long as we're always running from discomfort, we're going to be caught in a cycle of unhappiness and discomfort, and we will feel weaker and weaker. This way of seeing helps us develop inner strength. And what's especially encouraging is the view that inner strength is available to us at just the moment when we think that we've hit the bottom, when things are at their worst. — Pema Chodron

The world is a very abnormal place. — Salman Rushdie

The transition from sports into acting was something I got blindsided by. I had a full scholarship to law school. I had a different life planned. I started a business, and I was all ready to go. I suddenly got in a local movie, just to say to my kids one day, "Yeah, your old man was in a movie," and I caught the bug. — Marc Blucas

To My Mother
You too, my mother, read my rhymes
For love of unforgotten times,
And you may chance to hear once more
The little feet along the floor. — Robert Louis Stevenson

The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages. — David Foster Wallace

Alone with my wine and my misery, I was convinced that life was composed of a string of "if only's" leading from one self-inflicted bungle to the next until at some point, one's final iteration of the excuse became one's final utterance, and one expired. — Andrew Levkoff

Forgetting is like a great alchemy free of secrets, limpid, transforming everything to the present. In the end it makes our lives into this visible and tangible thing we hold in our hands, with no folds left hidden in the past. — Cesar Aira

I'll give my jewels for a set of beads,
My gorgeous palace for a hermitage,
My gay apparel for an almsman's gown,
My figured goblets for a dish of wood,
My scepter for a palmer's walking staff
My subjects for a pair of carved saints
and my large kingdom for a little grave. — William Shakespeare

We are by now so accustomed to the cult of expertise that the very notion of honoring and paying heed to our directly felt experience of things - of insects and wooden floors, of broken-down cars and bird-pecked apples and the scents rising from the soil - seems odd and somewhat misguided as a way to find out what's worth knowing. — David Abram

There were moments when life at school became a matter of utter indifference to him. Then the putty of his everyday concerns dropped out and, with nothing more to bind them together, the hours of his life fell apart. — Robert Musil