Refleter Quotes & Sayings

The celebrated opening image of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' is another case in point:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table ...
How, the reader wonders, can the evening look like an anaesthetised body? Yet the point surely lies as much in the force of this bizarre image as in its meaning. We are in a modern world in which settled correspondences or traditional affinities between things have broken down. In the arbitrary flux of modern experience, the whole idea of representation - of on thing predictably standing for another - has been plunged into crisis; and this strikingly dislocated image, one which more or less ushers in 'modern' poetry with a rebellious flourish, is a symptom of this bleak condition. — Terry Eagleton

Bring together things that have not yet been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so. — Robert Bresson

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility. — Neil Postman

All men hate the nagging. — Kevin Hart

Attitude is the first quality that marks the successful man. If he has a positive attitude and is a positive thinker, who likes challenges and difficult situations, then he has half his success achieved. — John C. Maxwell

I get a lot of kids distracted. Sometimes they got to go cover left field, but they're over here talking to me, getting an autograph. — Pedro Martinez

Even scientists and academics are frequent prey to the delusion that reality is reducible. Fear, deep and wide, is the secret motive force of much human behavior, and I think reduction is often rooted in fear. Passing over fear, I think, is the beginning of every liberatory project. — Stan Goff

There is a sort of magic in striking a match and lighting a cigarette, the way the match flares and the tobacco singes, the way the smoke rises in curls, that feeling of peace as the nicotine hits the back of the throat. I will give up smoking when they invent something better than smoking. — Chloe Thurlow

The wound healed and the pain receded from me just as memories do, like landmarks on a distant, foggy shore. — Gregory David Roberts

You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone. — Margaret Atwood

That in this town prostitutes may give sewing lessons to ladies of the church, pirates my be consulted for their opinions on seaworth by shipbuilders, Christians and Jews may stroll together on a Sunday, and Indians my play dice games with leatherstockings, but let one silver piece fall in a crack between two members of the same profession and it's bloody war. — Robert McCammon

You're absolutely gorgeous, you know that? — C.M. Stunich

Every man and every nation at one time or other becomes the weak. That's why nobody should tolerate persecution, let alone extermination, as a precedent. (p581) — Franz Werfel

When you're told to be good, you have to get rid of whatever is bad. I sure identify with that. — Jane Fonda