Phantasmic Quotes & Sayings

I do not believe that any peacock envies another peacock his tail, because every peacock is persuaded that his own tail is the finest in the world. The consequence of this is that peacocks are peaceable birds. — John Ruskin

Perhaps we should keep our monsters about us, lest we become them ourselves. — Adam Dunn

And at that moment, out of nowhere, Janet knew that she herself would never have children. Probably she'd known it for a while, but it was the first time she'd admitted it to herself. Let others breed. Let them, and God be with them. She would be the witness - she was tough enough to see everything break and not break herself. They also serve who fly around on hippogriffs and watch. — Lev Grossman

I think that a true economics thinker or a Marxist thinker would make nonsense of my argument, although I have given massive seminars and no one has demolished it so far. I did think that this idea from an artisanal and trading perception of the auratic quality of goods when they are given character and inscription, made the stories of phantasmic wealth read more powerfully in the 18th and 19th centuries than the stories of Cinderella's wealth, because they are conjured out of nothing by these magic means. — Marina Warner

As my name might suggest, I'm Jewish. My grandparents were Polish and Russian Jews who came to Australia in the late 1920s, and had they not, we wouldn't be talking now. — Elliot Perlman

We do not know until the shell breaks what kind of egg we have been sitting on. — T. S. Eliot

Everything is getting bigger. The way to go now is to program in a little more sophistication. — Bill Budge

My mother was convinced, and on this head I have retained her firm belief, that to kill animals for the purpose of feeding on their flesh is one of the most deplorable and shameful infirmities of the human state; that it is one of those curses cast upon man either by his fall, or by the obduracy of his own perversity. — Alphonse De Lamartine

I told my boyfriend after three weeks that I wanted to marry him and that we could do it tomorrow. — Ali Larter

I couldn't leave there without carrying some of her sadness and loneliness with me like a cloak. There was a smell that I've come to think of as life rot. Where a life has spoiled, gone bad through lack of use. — Lisa Unger

Simplicity is always a virtue. One kid on a riverbank working out a Stephen Foster tune on his new harmonica heard from the correct esthetic distance projects more magic and power than the entire Vienna Philharmonic and Chorus laboring (once again) through the Mozart Requiem or Bach's B Minor Mass. — Edward Abbey

We get letters every day from people wanting more mountains. As many as I paint, they still say, 'Give me more mountains.' — Bob Ross

If you behave as if you are all right, then one day you will be. You have to go through the motions of surviving in order to survive. — Nicci French

Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself ... what they imitate is a phantasmic ideal of heterosexual identity ... gay identities work neither to copy nor emulate heterosexuality, but rather, to expose heterosexuality as an incessant and panicked imitation of its own naturalized idealization. That heterosexuality is always in the act of elaborating itself is evidence that it is perpetually at risk, that it, that it 'knows' it's own possibility of becoming undone — Judith Butler

Do you know what Christianity is? We believe your religion [Judaism], but you [Jews] have to obey. — Ann Coulter

At Oxford he learned that the importance of human beings has been vastly over rated by specialists. — E. M. Forster

When you're anointed, you become blessed of God such that everything you touch or do prospers. To be "blessed" means to be empowered to prosper. — Chris Oyakhilome