Krivak Quotes & Sayings

Each believed that God was on his side, for no one raises a hand without convincing himself first that he is right. — Andrew Krivak

What is left to be afraid of?' And he said, 'The possibility that a life itself may prove to be the most worthy struggle. — Andrew Krivak

Like the body, courage, too, is a thing weakened, especially when we are young and invincible. We can't give one the rest it needs and expect the other to protect us. Don't anger Nature with talk of wishing she had chosen differently. See to your own nature. — Andrew Krivak

The Northwestern Carpathians, in which I was raised, were a hard place, as unforgiving as the people who lived there, but the Alpine landscape into which Zlee and I were sent that early winter seemed a glimpse of what the surface of the earth looked and felt and acted like when there were no maps or borders, no rifles or artillery, no men or wars to claim possession of land, and snow and rock alone parried in a match of millennial slowness so that time meant nothing, and death meant nothing, for what life there was gave in to the forces of nature surrounding and accepted its fate to play what role was handed down in the sidereal march of seasons capable of crushing in an instant what armies might--millennia later--be foolish enough to assemble on it heights.

And yet there we were, ordered to march ourselves, for God, not nature, was with us now, and God would deliver us, in this world and next, when the time came for that. — Andrew Krivak

Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him. — H.L. Mencken

Life can be the worst bully in the world," Grandpa said and pointed a finger at Mathieu. "And you will stand up to that bully. — Francois Houle

I prayed for death so as not to live in madness. — Andrew Krivak

I longed only to turn back and climb and begin life all over again in a place where I might find the peace I'd once known in mountains of another time and another place, and I wondered-if I could slip out of camp unobserved-whether I just might be able to stay hidden and uncaptured until this war came to an end. — Andrew Krivak

If you close your eyes and begin to feel your breath, it will instantly become deeper and slower, and your mind will become calmer. Then gradually you'll become aware of your body, or more precisely the subtle sense of energy inside and around your body. At that moment, you exist as Energy-Consciousness, not as names, jobs, duties, roles, desires, and so on. — Ilchi Lee

I had never seen anyone fight and I had never been taught to defend myself. But I knew hurt and never wondered that day what it was I had to do if I didn't want to be hurt again. — Andrew Krivak

Krivak slammed the hatch shut and waited for the depth gauge to show the ship coming shallow, listening to the other missile launches. What a beautiful sound, he thought. The fourth-launched Mark 98 Tigershark torpedo struggled to an angry consciousness, its — Michael DiMercurio

Good old Pete. That's me. But I find it hard to think of myself in the first person when I'm writing about The Who. So many times he has willingly sat down to write about the good old Who. Isn't he too old to masturbate? — Pete Townshend

A panic state is not helpful to good decision making. — Max Barry

Women are amazing creatures-sweet, soft, gentle, and far more savage than we are. — Robert A. Heinlein

Water was a wild, capricious substance: nothing solid, nothing permanent, nothing as it appeared. — Anthony Doerr

A new civil rights movement cannot be organized around the relics of the earlier system of control if it is to address meaningfully the racial realities of our time. Any racial justice movement, to be successful, must vigorously challenge the public consensus that underlies the prevailing system of control. Nooses, racial slurs, and overt bigotry are widely condemned by people across the political spectrum; they are understood to be remnants of the past, no longer reflective of the prevailing public consensus about race. Challenging these forms of racism is certainly necessary, as we must always remain vigilant, but it will do little to shake the foundations of the current system of control. The new caste system, unlike its predecessors, is officially colorblind. We must deal with it on its own terms. — Michelle Alexander

The ship slipped her lines and a tug nudged her into mid-river, where she stalled briefly, waiting to see that everything that lay before her on the course below was clear. Then Hamburg, and Europe, and all her empires, all I had ever known--the only ground that up until then had fed me, the only well from which I had drunk--receded in slow swaths of wash and sky as we surrendered to the outgoing tide on the Elbe. — Andrew Krivak

Like a couple that communicates by intention nearly as much as by word, so in tune are they to each other and their surroundings. — Andrew Krivak

The expression 'to lose one's faith', as one might a purse or a ring of keys, has always seemed to me rather foolish. It must be one of those sayings of bourgeois piety, a legacy of those wretched priests of the eighteenth century who talked so much.

Faith is not a thing which one 'loses', we merely cease to shape our lives by it. That is why old-fashioned confessors are not far wrong in showing a certain amount of scepticism when dealing with 'intellectual crises', doubtless far more rare than people imagine. An educated man may come by degrees to tuck away his faith in some back corner of his brain, where he can find it again on reflection, by an effort of memory: yet even if he feels a tender regret for what no longer exists and might have been, the term 'faith' would nevertheless be inapplicable to such an abstraction, no more like real faith, to use a very well-worn simile, than the constellation of Cygne is like a swan. — Georges Bernanos

But I suppose there's a lot to see everywhere, if only you keep your eyes open. — Norton Juster

The only difference between life here and on the battlefield was there we believed that the outcome of the war would be different, and so fought to that end. Here we were reminded of our defeat, for although they died among comrades, death came quietly to those who couldn't hold out any longer, and into that silence, too, went all hope that we might have fought for some purpose. — Andrew Krivak

Those, that with haste will make a mighty fire,
Begin it with weak straws. — William Shakespeare

Our minds are a battle ground between good and bad ideas; we are whatever side wins the battle — Bangambiki Habyarimana

Banquo asked me how it felt to be alive when I saw so many of my comrades dead or dying, and I said that I had ceased to think of life or death because it seemed that I was destined to serve out the sentence of one for having delivered so well of the other, and that I saw the dead every night before I went to sleep as though they were still alive and standing before me. — Andrew Krivak