Nothing's The Same As Before Quotes & Sayings

Nothing important on Wall Street can be counted on to occur exactly in the same way as it happened before. — Benjamin Graham

It wasn't like there was some obvious change. Actually, the problem was more a lack of change. Nothing about her had changed - the way she spoke, her clothes, the topics she chose to talk about, her opinions - they were all the same as before. Their relationship was like a pendulum gradually grinding to a halt, and he felt out of synch. — Haruki Murakami

It's the same as when I broke the melding bond. Our love doesn't trump the millions of people in the seven worlds. We must think of the greater good."
He pulled back from me and before I could blink he held my chin in his gentle grip. "And I will tell you again, Abigail, that nothing trumps our love. Nothing. — Jaymin Eve

Nearly twenty years before, Hudson Taylor had written in an editorial: "All God's giants have been weak men, who did great things for God because they reckoned on His being with them." As he looked at himself, Hudson Taylor saw nothing but weakness; but as generations of Christians have studied Taylor's life, they have become acquainted with a man who dared to believe the Word of God and, by faith, carried the gospel to inland China - and saw God work wonders! "Want of trust is at the root of almost all our sins and all our weaknesses," he wrote in that same editorial, "and how shall we escape it but by looking to Him and observing His faithfulness. The man who holds God's faithfulness will not be foolhardy or reckless, but he will be ready for every emergency. — Warren W. Wiersbe

Remember God has accepted us. The gospel of grace is a message of breathtaking freedom. It must be embraced with faith and thanksgiving. You are thoroughly accepted just as you are. Jesus Christ is your righteousness and he is never going to change. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. When you wake tomorrow, he will still be your righteousness, before you have done anything to enjoy God's favour. You have to earn nothing. Your spirit needs to bask in the brilliant sunlight of this reality. You need to know it inwardly and celebrate it on a daily basis. — Terry Virgo

And we exhaust ourselves with this playful joust, we look at each other, silently, eye to eye, no smiles, nothing more to be said. All at one, we both leap, like wolf mates reunited, searching for that which identifies us as belonging to each other: the scent of our skin, the taste of our tongues, the smoothness of our hair, the saltiness of our necks, the ridges of our spines, the slopes and creases we know so well yet feel so new. He is tender and I am wild, nuzzling and nipping, both of us tumbling until we lose all memory of who we are before this moment, because at his moment we are the same. — Amy Tan

What is it?'
'Nothing,' he said, and put his arm around her.
'You sighed.'
'I'd like to be further along than I am.'
She snuggled against his side. 'I know that feeling. But don't we make progress in fits and starts? Nothing happens for a long time, then suddenly we get a surprise, have an encounter, reach a decision point, and we're no longer the same as we were before. — Bernhard Schlink

What's going on outside, Ravic?" "Nothing new, Kate. The world goes on eagerly preparing for suicide and at the same time deluding itself about what it's doing." "Will there be war?" "Everyone knows that there will be war. What one does not yet know is when. Everyone expects a miracle." Ravic smiled. "Never before have I seen so many politicians who believe in miracles as at present in France and England. And never so few as in Germany." She remained lying silent for a while. "To think that it should be possible - " she said then. "Yes - it seems so impossible that it will happen some day. Just because one considers it so impossible and doesn't protect oneself against it. — Erich Maria Remarque

Women are far more likely to follow orders to evacuate, especially women with children. At the same time, women were much more likely to die during the South Asian tsunami. In some villages it was 3 to 1. And that was party because of the average strength it takes to hold onto something. Also it was cultural; women were less likely to know how to swim, as were children. So much of this is based on how we develop our own survival skills before something goes wrong: Even if nothing goes wrong, it might be good to know how to swim. — Amanda Ripley

He thought of that heroic Colonel Pontmercy ... who had left upon every field of victory in Europe drops of that same blood which he, Marius, had in his veins, who had grown grey before his time in discipline and in command, who had lived with his sword-belt buckled, his epaulets falling on his breast, his cockade blackened by powder, his forehead wrinkled by the cap, in the barracks, in the camp, in the bivouac, in the ambulance, and who after twenty years had returned from the great wars with his cheek scarred, his face smiling, simple, tranquil, admirable, pure as a child, having done everything for France and nothing against her. — Victor Hugo

It is as if, oddly, you were waiting for someone but you didn't know who they were until they arrived. Whether or not you were aware that there was something missing in your life, you will be when you meet the person you want. What psychoanalysis will add to this love story is that the person you fall in love with really is the man or woman of your dreams; that you have dreamed them up before you met them; not out of nothing - nothing comes of nothing - but out of prior experience, both real and wished for. You recognize them with such certainty because you already, in a certain sense, know them; and because you have quite literally been expecting them, you feel as though you have known them for ever, and yet, at the same time, they are quite foreign to you. They are familiar foreign bodies. — Adam Phillips

Her eyes were dark. Dark as chocolate, dark as coffee, dark as the polished wood of my father's lute. They were set in a fair face, oval. Like a teardrop. Her easy smile could stop a man's heart. Her lips were red. Not the garish painted red so many women believe makes them desirable. Her lips were always red, morning and night. As if minutes before you saw her, she had been eating sweet berries, or drinking heart's blood. No matter where she stood, she was in the center of the room. Do not misunderstand. She was not loud, or vain. We stare at a fire because it flickers, because it glows. The light is what catches our eyes, but what makes a man lean close to a fire has nothing to do with its bright shape. What draws you to a fire is the warmth you feel when you come near. The same was true of Denna. — Patrick Rothfuss

Abruptly, she knew that after this night she was never going to be the same again. Nothing was ever going to be the same. Oh, yes, the man could define himself as the dawning of an epoch if he wanted to. There was, quite simply, before Adam and after Adam. — Karen Marie Moning

You're the same as you were yesterday and the day before. Nothing has changed. Not really. Forget what troubles you. Regret nothing, but learn from any mistakes you make. Tomorrow will be a brighter day, I promise. — Morgan Rhodes

He was wearing brown leather trousers, a darker brown leather vest, and a silk shirt that matched my dress. The sleeves were almost piratical in style, and the collar was unlaced. His boots were the same shade as his vest, a few shades lighter than his hair.
"Uh," I said again, before managing. "Weren't you wearing that the last time you came to Court?"
"She always dresses me in some variation of this attire," said Tybalt. "I can't tell whether she likes the look of it, or whether she's trying to make a point. This would have been a stagehand's garb, once upon a time, and nothing suited for a King."
"Uh," I said for a third time.
Seeing my distress, Tybalt smirked, leaned in, and murmured in my ear, "I have a disturbing assortment of leather trousers, thanks to her. I'd be happy to show you, if you like. — Seanan McGuire

Men and women alike possess the qualities which make a guardian; they differ only in their comparative strength or weakness. Obviously. And those women who have such qualities are to be selected as the companions and colleagues of men who have similar qualities and whom they resemble in capacity and in character? Very true. And ought not the same natures to have the same pursuits? They ought. Then, as we were saying before, there is nothing unnatural in assigning music and gymnastic to the wives of the guardians - to that point we come round again. Certainly not. The law which we then enacted was agreeable to nature, and therefore not an impossibility or mere aspiration; and the contrary practice, which prevails at present, is in reality a violation of nature. That appears to be true. We — Plato

Because they are so emphatically there, and so inconvertibly interior, it is almost inevitable that we take our feelings seriously as reputable guides to the reality that is deep within us--our hearts before God. But feelings are no more spiritual than muscles. They are entirely physical. They are real, and they are important. But they are real and important in the same way that our fingernails and noses are important--we would not want to live without them (although we could if we had to), but their length and shape and colour tell us nothing about our life with God. — Eugene H. Peterson

Nothing like this has been attempted before. ( ... ) It might be called a literary Porto Alegre. That implies a beginning, with much fierce argument and discussion to come. But whatever the outcome of ensuing criticisms or objections, The World Republic of Letters
empire more than republic, as Casanova shows
is likely to have the same sort of liberating impact at large as Said's Orientalism, with which it stands comparison. — Perry Anderson

Nothing can be given or taken away; nothing has been added or subtracted; nothing increased or diminished. We stand on the same shore before the same mighty ocean. The ocean of love. There it is - in perpetuum. As much in a broken blossom, the sound of a waterfall, the swoop of a carrion bird as in the thunderous artillery of the prophet.
We move with eyes shut and ears stopped; we smash walls where doors are waiting to open to the touch; we grope for ladders, forgetting that we have wings; we pray as if God were deaf and blind, as if He were in a space. No wonder the angels in our midst are unrecognizable.
One day it will be pleasant to remember these things. — Henry Miller

This was when he first suspected that the kindly child-loving God extolled by his headmistress might not exist. As it turned out, most major world events suggested the same. But for Theo's sincerely godless generation, the question hasn't come up. No one in his bright, plate-glass, forward-looking school ever asked him to pray, or sing an impenetrable cheery hymn. There's no entity for him to doubt. His initiation, in front of the TV, before the dissolving towers, was intense but he adapted quickly. These days he scans the papers for fresh developments the way he might a listings magazine. As long as there's nothing new, his mind is free. International terror, security cordons, preparations for war - these represent the steady state, the weather. Emerging into adult consciousness, this is the world he finds. — Ian McEwan

Don't depend on death to liberate you from your imperfections. You are exactly the same after death as you were before. Nothing changes; you only give up the body. If you are a thief or a liar or a cheater before death, you don't become an angel merely by dying. If such were possible, then let us all go and jump in the ocean now and become angels at once! Whatever you have made of yourself thus far, so will you be hereafter. And when you reincarnate, you will bring that same nature with you. To change, you have to make the effort. This world is the place to do it. — Paramahansa Yogananda

And certain things around us will change, become easier or harder, one thing or the other, but nothing will ever really be any different. I believe that. We have made our decisions, our lives have been set in motion, and they will go on and on until they stop. But if that is true, then what? I mean, what if you believe that, but you keep it covered up, until one day something happens that should change something, but then you see nothing is going to change after all. What then? Meanwhile, the people around you continue to talk and act as if you were the same person as yesterday, or last night, or five minutes before, but you are really undergoing a crisis, your heart feels damaged ... — Raymond Carver

Everything in the universe is older than it seems. Blame Einstein for that. We see what a thing was when the light left it, and that was long ago. Nothing in the night sky is contemporary, not to us, not to one another. Ancient stars exploded into ruin before their sparkle ever caught our eyes; those glimpsed in glowing "nurseries" were crones before we witnessed their birth. Everything we marvel at is already gone.
Yet, light rays go out forever, so that everything grown old and decayed retains somewhere the appearance of its youth. The universe is full of ghosts.
But images are light, and light is energy, and energy is matter; and matter is real. So image and reality are the same thing, after all. Blame Einstein for that, as well. — Michael Flynn

Everything good or bad in my life had started and ended within the limits of that town. It was over now, though, and a new chapter was beginning. Nothing would ever be the same as it had been before. I just hoped this chapter wouldn't be the final one in the book. — Rose Wynters

But most of all, as summer slanted to an end, he was learning to love idleness, idleness no longer as stretches of freedom reclaimed by stealth here and there from involuntary labour, surreptitious thefts to be enjoyed sitting on his heels before a flowerbed with the fork dangling from his fingers, but as a yielding up of himself to time, to a time flowing slowly like oil from horizon to horizon over the face of the world, washing over his body, circulating in his armpits and his groin, stirring his eyelids. He was neither pleased nor displeased when there was work to do; it was all the same. He could lie all afternoon with his eyes open, staring at the corrugations in the roof-iron and the tracings of rust; his mind would not wander, he would see nothing but the iron, the lines would not transform themselves into pattern or fantasy; he was himself, lying in his own house, the rust was merely rust, all that was moving was time, bearing him onward in its flow. — J.M. Coetzee

We would have known nothing of the nature and reach of her sorrow if she had come back. But she left us and broke the family and the sorrow was released and we saw its wings and saw it fly a thousand ways into the hills, and sometimes I think sorrow is a predatory thing because birds scream at dawn with a marvelous terror, and there is, as I have said before, a deathly bitterness in the smell of ponds and ditches. When we were children and frightened of the dark, my grandmother used to say if we kept our eyes closed we would not see it. That was when I noticed the correspondence between the space within the circle of my skull and the space around me. I saw just the same figure against the lid of my eye or the wall of my room, or in the trees beyond my window. Even the illusion of perimeters fails when families are separated. — Marilynne Robinson

So far, she had nothing but fear and the nauseating sensation that the hour would pass and she would be just as helpless as when she'd first left the Fuller house. The same problems that had plagued her before were on an endless loop that took up every conscious thought. Her mother: persistently unavailable. Huckleberry: worthless. Jacob Mayhew: probably working for the congressman. Fred Nolan: ditto, or maybe he had his own agenda. Congressman Johnny Jackson: Paul's secret uncle. Powerful and connected, and duplicitous enough to stand with the Kilpatrick family during press conferences, as if he had no idea what had happened to their precious child. Adam Quinn: possible friend or foe. — Karin Slaughter

He no longer cared about anything (as before) but now he also cared about everything in principle; that is to say, it was all the same to him and he belonged to the world and there was nothing he could do about it. — Jack Kerouac

Damn it. Why didn't the United States know when to declare a real war? Those running the country he loved were making a mockery of it. Misusing the word war had become a joke, like The War on Drugs or The War on Women. What was taking place in Guatemala was being run the same way as the fake War on Terror. Similar to Afghanistan, it didn't take long before he realized he was in a no man's land where the dead piled up in silence and the living had nothing to say. Hordes of beggars and gang members roamed the area seeking food, money or young women to rape. Life was cheap. People were killed for a pair of shoes or a handful of pills. — Ava Armstrong

Wasn't it Pieter Stuyvesant who said that first boatload of Jews could stay in New Amsterdam only as long as they took care of their own and asked for nothing? So take care of ourselves we did. They always told us how lucky we were to grow up in the Orphaned Hebrews Home, schooling us in its illustrious history. Didn't we weather the blizzard of 1888, kept warm by our own stockpile of coal, fed from the ovens of our own bakery? And while children all over the city succumbed to cholera at the turn of the century, didn't we emerge unscathed, the city's water filtered before it reached our lips? After the Great War, people fell to influenza by the tens of thousands, but in the Home not a single child died. No matter how impressive, though, our Home was a kind of ghetto, the scrape of metal as the gates swung shut the same sound in Manhattan as in Venice. I — Kim Van Alkemade

Nothing that ever was changes. Yet nothing that is can ever be the same as what went before. — Gore Vidal

My heart stopped beating, I know it did. Hearts do that sometimes, for just a beat or two. Then they start up again. But they never regain those missed beats, and nothing is ever the same afterwards. Life proceeds to a different cadence, and never again as harmonious as before — Ann Rinaldi

When you stop relying on aversive controls such as threats, intimidation, and punishment, and when you know how to use reinforcement to get not just the same but better results, your perception of the world undergoes a shift. You don't have to become a wimp. You don't have to give up being in charge. You lose nothing of yourself. You just see things you didn't see before. — Karen Pryor

The father and mother themselves talk before the children in the most disparaging way about the teacher and the school and they are much more inclined to insult the teachers than to put their offspring across the knee and knock sound reason into him. What the little fellow hears at home does not tend to increase respect for his human surroundings. Here nothing good is said of human nature as a whole and every institution, from the school to the government, is reviled. Whether religion and morals are concerned or the State and the social order, it is all the same; they are all scoffed at. When the young lad leaves school, at the age of fourteen, it would be difficult to say what are the most striking features of his character, incredible ignorance in so far as real knowledge is concerned or cynical impudence combined with an attitude towards morality which is really startling at so young an age. — Adolf Hitler

And as for the Ellison Fellow's feelings towards Katherine Potter
to be honest, they involve a good deal of confusion. He reacts before Katherine Potter, in fact, as he has reacted before all new, strange (attractive) women who happen, since a certain event, to have crossed his path. He does not know how to deal with them. He is filled with dismay, a giddy sense of arbitrariness, an apprehension that the universe holds nothing sacred; all of which is only to be stilled by the imperative of loyal resistance.
He is not immune to the prickle of passing lust. But he deals defensively with it. He reacts either with disdainful dismissal (Not your type, definitely not your type) or with a rampant if covert seizure of lecherousness (Christ, what tits! What legs! What an arse!), which serves the same forestalling function by reducing its object to meat and its subject (he is past fifty, after all) to a pother of shame. — Graham Swift

hat was then Now Johannes Cabal and Joey Granite stood before Billy Butler and said nothing. The smell of smoke said it all for them. Butler smiled nastily. "Oh. It's - " As famous last words go, they lacked a certain something. "Uppercut, Joey," said Cabal. Joey Granite delivered an uppercut of surpassing science and pugilistic artistry. It was a thing of beauty and kinetic poetry that might be long admired among people who enjoy watching other people beat the living daylights out of one another. It was also powerful enough to lift a small building off its foundations. Anything up to a branch library would have tottered and fallen. Billy Butler, despite a bit of a gut, simply wasn't in the same league weight-wise. By some miracle, his head stayed on his body, but there was little doubt that the police would be making enquiries long before he hit the ground again. "Let us leave, Joey," said Cabal as Butler vanished through the cloud base. — Jonathan L. Howard

For a week the sun had been nothing but a puffy, seamless sheet of white, and this Tuesday had begun the same. But as the day progressed, the grayness receded like a mist, the sky's white became more illumined from behind, then occasionally a patch of blue would open. Then another here and there, until blue touched blue and they became background for streaks and wisps of cloud. Sunlight, rays of it, gave a brightness like spring, a direct and golden-yellow brightness unlike the trapped, refracted glow of a winter's day, and to that homogeneous cityscape that lay so inert and wide and flat, just a few spring rays of sunshine gave a sudden depth and dimension to everything. Individual things came alive, as if each stood brightly before you, each with its own story. — Geoffrey Wood

Their ascent was accomplished via a wide spiral staircase that sat within the reflective tube. Each of the metal steps were welded to its core. But even here in this elegant construct, the infernal touch hadn't been neglected. Each of the steps was set not at ninety degrees to the core, but at ninety-seven, or a hundred, or a hundred and five, each one different from the one before but all sending out the same message: nothing was certain here; nothing was safe. There was no railing to break the slide should someone lose their footing, only step after disquieting step designed to make the ascent as vertiginous as possible. — Clive Barker

Most people believe that sharing the same flesh and blood, the same basic DNA structure, makes them your family. How sad that is. Because, you see, as a spiritual person, I believe you must deserve a family, not just own it. If those that are my family, don't behave as such, they are not my family. If I have chosen them before I was born, I have been betrayed. I owe them nothing, in this or the many lives to come. In fact, if they betray me in this life, they will return as my enemies in the next. And their karma will make me victorious in that future confrontation. — Robin Sacredfire

Son: Father, you are my father. You sired me. I have sired no one because I left the primordial. I left you, I studied, I suffered, and my visions were pure. Before me, my father, new horizons were opened.

Father: Yes, I am your father. I sired you and nowhere did I go. Where I was in the beginning, there I remained. I dwell in the old home, my estate is as it was. I spawned, I lived with your mother. Then I lived with peasant women and girls, spawning. I surrounded myself with chickens, roosters, turkeys. My poultry lay dozens of eggs a day. But I studied nothing, never did I suffer. My horizons remain the same, oh just the same. These spaces, ancient, veritably Russian, assembled around us are all - all just the same.

("Adam") — Andrei Bely

I'll tell you now before you can speak: strength is a myth. It's not what it is, when it looks like what it is. It's usually what it is when it looks like something else. It takes bravery to admit that you're petrified and keep soldiering on despite it. Oh,and, "easy"? Also a hoax! If it existed it would be sold for the same as you got it for- nothing! Ha! — Mary-Louise Parker

Why do we see no change? Because just as many molecules are leaving as are coming back! In the long run "nothing happens." If we then take the top of the vessel off and blow the moist air away, replacing it with dry air, then the number of molecules leaving is just the same as it was before, because this depends on the jiggling of the water, but the number coming back is greatly reduced because there are so many fewer water molecules above the water. Therefore — Richard Feynman

The reality is that if we do nothing it will take 75 years, or for me to be nearly a hundred before women can expect to be paid the same as men for the same work. — Emma Watson

When we were children, Bapi used to dress us up in the same clothes, going to Apsara for 'Titanic' or reruns of 'Dadar Kirti' and we used to be so embarrassed by that, even at six. Day before yesterday when I saw Neev and you wearing matching purple shirts, I encountered envy for the first time. You had taken on his colors, as though you were in his house already. I felt as though that moment you had stopped needing me to make you feel whole and nothing was ever going to remain the same.'
('Left from Dhakeshwari') — Kunal Sen

Erica's despair has nothing to do with lack of motherly love. She loved Maja fiercely and sincerely. At the same time she felt as if she'd been invaded by an alien parasite that sucked all joy out of her and forced her into a shadow existence that had nothing in common with the life she'd lived before. — Camilla Lackberg

I don't know what I'm trying to say. I don't know what any of this is really about. Why we bother. Why we're here. Why we love. I had a family, and they were everything to me, and I didn't even know it when I had them. I had a girl, and she was everything to me, and I knew it every second I had her. I lost them all. Everything a guy could ever want. I found my way home again, but don't be fooled. Nothing's the same as before. I'm not sure I'd want it to be. — Kami Garcia

My sister Emily first declined. The details of her illness are deep-branded in my memory, but to dwell on them, either in thought or narrative, is not in my power. Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. Yet, while physically she perished, mentally, she grew stronger than we had yet known her. Day by day, when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with anguish of wonder and love. I have seen nothing like it; but, indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. The awful point was, that, while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity; the spirit inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling hand, the unnerved limbs, the faded eyes, the same service exacted as they had rendered in health. To stand by and witness this, and not dare to remonstrate, was pain no words can render. — Charlotte Bronte

Before she could rethink her actions, she slugged Mara as hard as she could in her perfect face. And even that was a light punishment for everything she'd done to Syn. Mara fell to the ground, sobbing. But she took no pity on her. "Syn may be too much of a gentleman to hit you, but I'm not. I'm not only ashamed to call you human, I'm completely disgusted that we share the same gender. You want to know the truth? The only filth in this room is you, and you're the one who doesn't deserve to breathe our air. Decent's got nothing to do with birthright. It's all about actions, and trust me, you're the lowest form I've ever met and I've taken in the worst scum imaginable. But I'd rather sit at the table with them than you any day." She — Sherrilyn Kenyon

The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that make it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one. — Walter Brueggemann

[from Some words about 'War and Peace']

In those days also people loved, envied, sought truth and virtue, and where carried away by passions; and there was the same complex mental and moral life among the upper classes, where were in some instances even more refined than now. If we have come to believe in the perversity and coarse violence of that period, that is only because the traditions, memoirs, stories, and novels that have been handed to us, record for the most part exceptional cases of violence and brutality. To suppose that the predominant characteristic of that period was turbulence, is as unjust as it would before a man, seeing nothing but the tops of trees beyond a hill, to conclude that there was nothing to be found in that locality but trees. — Leo Tolstoy

If your goal is to be a disciple of Jesus Christ and most of your focus has been on finding the church that will best meet your needs, figuring out which translation of the Bible is the best, or reading the best books on discipleship that you can find, but your life is the same as it was before - I would argue that you aren't becoming a disciple. Nothing other than following Jesus Christ can make you his disciple. — Kevin Watson

You haven't given me any ink," he said.
"Oh, you won't need ink," said Professor Umbridge with the merest suggestion of a laugh in her voice.
Harry placed the point of the quill on the paper and wrote: I must not tell lies.
He let out a gasp of pain. The words had appeared on the parchment in what appeared to be shining red ink. At the same time, the words had appeared on the back of Harry's right hand, cut into his skin as though traced there by a scalpel - yet even as he stared at the shining cut, the skin healed over again, leaving the place where it had been slightly redder than before but quite smooth.
Harry looked around at Umbridge. She was watching him, her wide, toadlike mouth stretched in a smile.
"Yes?"
"Nothing," said Harry quietly. — J.K. Rowling

TIME THERE SEEMED TO PASS DIFFERENTLY. WHEN YOU ARE shut off from the world, every day is exactly the same as the one before. This sameness has a way of wearing down your soul until you become nothing but a breathing, toiling, consuming thing that awakes to the sun and sleeps at the dawning of the dark. The emptiness runs deep, deeper with each slowing day, and you become increasingly invisible and inconsequential. That's how I felt at times, a tiny insect circling itself, only to continue, and continue. There, in that relentless vacuum, nothing moved. No news came in or out. No phone calls to or from anyone. — Suki Kim

I began to feel again something that I had been only dimly aware of before. It was a small, surprising sense of disappointment even as he was kissing me, but the violins were so loud at the time I could hear nothing else. Now the disappointment was returning and with it the realization that the magic had come only from the moment, not from him. It was different with you. In the eyes and ears of my heart, you and the magic are one and the same. The setting never mattered. On the sidewalk in front of my house, at the enchanted place in the desert, walking the halls at school- where I was with you, I heard violins. — Jerry Spinelli

Dear God, master of the universe, compassionate and merciful: we who are steeped in sin, kneel in supplication before your throne and beseech you to recall from this world Saadat Hasan Manto, son of Ghulam Hasan Manto, who was a man of great piety. Take him away, Lord, for he runs away from fragrance and chases after filth. He hates the bright sun, preferring dark labyrinths. He has nothing but contempt for modesty but is fascinated by the naked and the shameless. He hates sweetness, but will give his life to taste bitter fruit. He will not so much as look at housewives but is in seventh heaven in the company of whores. He will not go near running waters, but loves to wade through filth. Where others weep, he laughs; and where others laugh, he weeps. Faces blackened by evil, he loves to wash with tender care to make visible their real features. He never thinks about you but follows Satan everywhere, the same fallen angel who once disobeyed you. — Saadat Hasan Manto

And then again, maybe people and things are the same as emotions: Even when you can't see them or feel them or be with them, and even when they have died and even before they are born, they still exist somewhere. Far away or close, they're always somewhere. Maybe nothing in the world is truly lost, I think. — Cristina Henriquez

She had imagined her mind would be bare before his, naked under a scorching desert sun, with neither shelter nor refuge. Instead, it was like playing hide-and-seek in the light and shadow of a forest, discovering and inventing a new language of double meaning, subtlety, poetry, and image. As a linguist, she was captivated; as a lover, she was enraptured. Nothing could be said the same way twice. — Karen Lord

Without will there is no concept and no world. Before us, certainly, nothing remains. But what resists this transition into annihilation, our nature, is only that same wish to live
Wille zum Leben
which forms ourselves as well as our world. That we are so afraid of annihilation or, what is the same thing, that we so wish to live, merely means that we are ourselves nothing else but this desire to live, and know nothing but it. And so what remains after the complete annihilation of the will, for us who are so full of the will, is, of course, nothing; but on the other hand, for those in whom the will has turned and renounced itself, this so real world of ours with all its suns and milky way is nothing. — Arthur Schopenhauer

I moaned. "Gonna make this fast and hard," he murmured against my skin. He lifted up my leg and pushed inside of me, stretching and filling me in two hard long thrusts. He started pumping into me before my body was ready for him and the bite of pain made each stroke torturously erotic. "Never felt nothing like this, Ti. Wanna fuck you and smack the living shit out of you all at the same time. Don't know what this is, but it makes me want to keep you filled with my cock all day long and dripping with my cum. I want to mark you. I want to fucking own you." He grunted as his thrusts became harder, more frantic, more erratic. Just more. "What the fuck are you doing to me?" he asked on a ragged exhale. Sparks — T.M. Frazier

The differences were plain enough, and yet I saw that they were as nothing compared with what we had in common. As I lay in bed at night, the sky outside my window reflecting the city's dim glow, I thought about Abuelita's fierce loyalty to blood. But what really binds people as family? The way they shore themselves up with stories; the way siblings can feud bitterly but still come through for each other; how an untimely death, a child gone before a parent, shakes the very foundations; how the weaker ones, the ones with invisible wounds, are sheltered; how a constant din is medicine against loneliness; and how celebrating the same occasions year after year steels us to the changes they herald. And always food at the center of it all. — Sonia Sotomayor

One hundred and seven. Since charity obliges us to wish well to the souls of all men, and religion ought to alter nothing in any man's civil estate or right, it shall be lawful for slaves, as well as others, to enter themselves, and be of what church or profession any of them shall think best, and, therefore, be as fully members as any freeman. But yet no slave shall hereby be exempted from that civil dominion his master hath over him, but be in all things in the same state and condition he was In before. — John Locke

My pulse was racing, my skin searing, and suddenly I felt light-headed. I sat back and put hands over my mouth. My room looked exactly the same as it had before I'd picked up his call. I threw my phone at the wall. Halfway through its flight, I realized that my father would kill me if I destroyed it, but it smacked the wall and slid to the ground without any pieces falling off it. It looked exactly the same as before. Nothing had changed. Nothing. — Maggie Stiefvater

As soon as I decided I'd have to dig down still deeper to uncover the root of my listless withdrawal from life, I became aware of some interference from the past distracting and confusing my thoughts, causing me a sensation that was at the same time oppressive, expectant and empty. In these somewhat contradictory feelings, I came to recognize my childish sense of having run down like a clock that needed someone to wind it before it could go again; and saw that I was now no less helpless than in those far-off days when I waited for somebody to take me by the hand and tell me what to do. On my own initiative I could do nothing, take no responsibility, make no decisions only watch my existence unroll. — Anna Kavan

I see nothing but Becoming. Be not deceived! It is the fault of your limited outlook and not the fault of the essence of things if you believe that you see firm land anywhere in the ocean of Becoming and Passing. You need names for things, just as if they had a rigid permanence, but the very river in which you bathe a second time is no longer the same one which you entered before — Heraclitus

He would never want to diminish that event, that blow. It was nothing less than a calamity. It has shrunk his world, turned him into a prisoner. But escaping death ought to have shaken him up, opened windows inside him, renewed his sense of the preciousness of life. It has done nothing of the sort. He is trapped with the same old self as before , only greyer and drearier. Enough to drive one to drink. — J.M. Coetzee

You told me mornings were the best time to break your own heart. So here I am, smoking your brand of cigarettes for the scent. I wonder if you still sing Beatles songs as you make coffee. You said your mother used to sing them to you when you couldn't sleep, nineteen years before we met, twenty before you moved your clothes out of our closet while I was at work. By the way, I hate you for leaving all the photographs on the fridge. Taking them down felt like peeling off new scabs, like slapping a sunburn. I spent so many nights carving your body into pillows, I can promise you nothing feels like sleeping with your arm around me and your breath in my ear. Still, it's comforting to know we sleep under the same moon, even if she's so much older when she gets to me. I like to imagine she's seen you sleeping and wants me to know you're doing well. — Clementine Von Radics

From MARS Volume 3 by Fuyumi Soryo:
Kira: Why do you go through all that just to race? I guess asking that is the same thing as asking why I draw ... .probably because I'm alive ... .that's all there is to it. I sense colors in you. They're strong and beautiful ... .and sad. I wondered what your colors were for a long time. They're the colors of the sunset ... the blazing shades of a sunset that burn just before the darkness sets in. You said it was nothing, but there's no one as alive as you. — Fuyumi Soryo

for a brief moment it is his fate, and nothing else, that is frozen into immobility on the stage. The moment of the minor figure. Both before and after this he remains the same, the man who reels off those smart lines, one of which has acquired an immortal status in Norwegian literature: 'If you take the life-lie away from an average person, you take away his happiness as well. — Dag Solstad

You don't turn a river by abruptly trying to get it to change direction. You don't have that much power. No matter how strong you are. The river will just overwhelm you and obstinately carry on pretty much as before. You can't make it change direction overnight. No one can. On the contrary, you have to start by flowing with it. You have to capture its own force and then slowly but surely lead it in the desired direction. The river won't notice it's being led if the curve is gentle enough. On the contrary, it will think it's flowing just the same as usual, seeing as nothing seems to have changed. — Jonas Karlsson

Everyone has a few little quirks in their preparation - I just tend to do the same sort of things as I did in previous competitions - but there's nothing too weird, sticking with lucky knickers or socks! For instance, I'll see my family the day before a fight but won't see them on the day. — Jade Jones

For creation is not a change, but that dependence of the created existence on the principle from which it is instituted, and thus is of the genus of relation; whence nothing prohibits it
being in the created as in the subject. Creation is thus said to be a kind of change, according to the way of understanding, insofar as our intellect accepts one and the same thing as not
existing before and afterwards existing. — Thomas Aquinas

Mosca said nothing. The word 'damsel' rankled with her. She suddenly thought of the clawed girl from the night before, jumping the filch on an icy street. Much the same age and build as Beamabeth, and far more beleaguered. What made a girl a 'damsel in distress'? Were they not allowed claws? Mosca had a hunch that if all damsels had claws they would spend a lot less time 'in distress'. — Frances Hardinge

Nonetheless, a question remains before us all the same: what is a novelist to do with ordinary, completely "usual" people, and how can he present them to the reader so as to make them at least somewhat interesting? To bypass them altogether in a story is quite impossible, because ordinary people are constantly and for the most part the necessary links in the chain of everyday events; in bypassing them we would thus violate plausibility. To fill novels with nothing but types or even simply, for the sake of interest, with strange and nonexistent people, would be implausible
and perhaps uninteresting as well. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

He cannot freshly harm me here, and for that I am grateful, but the harm he previously inflicted reverberates and grows. There is nothing to heal it but time. Even here, there is no other cure for heartbreak. I wish that death were a magical cure for all that ailed my spirit in life; it is one more thing I expected and found false. I arrive with the same baggage I carried with me in life. There is nowhere to lay it down here either, no more than a woman with child can lay aside her babe before its birth, for it is within me. I am as I was, just not encumbered with flesh. — Nell Gavin

Devlin was as sleek and muscular as the black-and-gold tiger she had seen on exhibition at the park menagerie. Divested of his clothes, he seemed even larger, his broad shoulders and long torso looming before her. The texture of his flesh was heavy and tough, covered with skin that seemed hard but silken at the same time. His midriff was scored with rows of muscle. She had seen statues and illustrations of the male body, but nothing had ever conveyed this sense of warm, living strength, this potent virility. — Lisa Kleypas

Nothing I had written before 'Mary Poppins' had anything to do with children, and I have always assumed, when I thought about it at all, that she had come out of the same wall of nothingness as the poetry, myth and legend that had absorbed me all my writing life. — P.L. Travers