Kratzke Swings Quotes & Sayings

My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers. — Emile M. Cioran

For thousands of years, it had been nature
and its supposed creator
that had had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing feeling of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime.
But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs ... Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves. — Alain De Botton

Sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter of an inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky. — Nicole Krauss

Life can dictate that we suffer physical restrictions and limitations, but no one has the ability to restrict or in any way demean our spirit unless we agree to it. — Sonia Choquette

After all, as educated men, we should realize that myths always stand for other things. They are toys for children teething. The man knows that the toy horse is not a true horse but merely suggests the idea of a horse to a baby's mind. When we pray before the statue of Zeus, though the statue contains him as everything must, the statue is not the god himself but only a suggestion of him. Surely, as fellow priests, we can be frank with one another about these grown-up matters. — Gore Vidal

Controlling your emotions is the biggest challenge for a horseman. — Buck Brannaman

I was getting better at controlling my emotional reactions. When feelings overwhelmed me, I learned to thwart the burning temptation to act self-destructively and to sit with the feelings instead. — Rachel Reiland

My father had a deep and lifelong contempt for politicians in general ("They tell lies," he used to say with wonder, "even when they don't have to"). — Gore Vidal

Life is nothing without passion. — Emma Michelle

I'm actually quite good at being friends with my exes. I'm friends with almost everyone. In fact, everyone! So I let them burn to a certain degree, and then I put out the fire for a while. — Ella Eyre

Papa had always told Justine that guns had a remarkable capacity to focus the mind. She couldn't say with any confidence that her actions had cleared the minds of the drunken louts before her, but she'd sharpened their attention. They gaped at her, slack-mouth and stupefied, trying to make sense of what their bleary eyes told them. — Vanessa Kelly

If we allow our self-congratulatory adoration of technology to distract us from our own contact with each other, then somehow the original agenda has been lost. — Jaron Lanier

What could you do better for your children and your children's children than to record the story of your life, your triumphs over adversity, your recovery after a fall, your progress when all seemed black, your rejoicing when you had finally achieved? Some of what you write may be humdrum dates and places, but there will also be rich passages that will be quoted by your posterity. — Spencer W. Kimball

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea. And few ideas are worse than the ones we have about art. — Julia Cameron