Rindomam Quotes & Sayings

Taxation is neither good nor bad in itself. Everything depends on how taxes are collected and what they are used for. — Thomas Piketty

I did not buy a book called Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen Donaldson, which has the temerity to compare itself, on the front cover, to 'Tolkien at his best.' The back cover attributes the quote to the Washington Post, a newspaper whose quotations will always damn a book for me from now on. How dare they? And how dare the publishers? It isn't a comparison anyone could make, except to say 'Compared to Tolkien at his best, this is dross.' I mean you could say that even about really brilliant books like A Wizard of Earthsea. I expect Lord Foul's Bane (horrible title, sounds like a Conan book) is more like Tolkien at his worst, which would be the beginning of The Simarillion.
The thing about Tolkien, about The Lord of the Rings, is that it's perfect. — Jo Walton

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance - nothing more," says the twentieth-century philosopher-essayist Walter Benjamin. "But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for quite a different schooling." To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin's terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography. — Rebecca Solnit

We labor to preserve the life of the body, but ultimately life and death are out of our hands. If the patient lives awhile longer, a certain kind of good will result. If God ordains that this is the time to die, another kind of good will result. — Michael D. O'Brien

This is the age of science, of steel -- of speed and the cement road. The age of hard faces and hard highways. Science and steel demand the medium of prose. Speed requires only the look -- the gesture. What need then, for poetry?

Great need!

There are souls, in these noise-tired times, that turn aside into unfrequented lanes, where the deep woods have harbored the fragrances of many a blossoming season. Here the light, filtering through perfect forms, arranges itself in lovely patterns for those who perceive beauty... — Roy J. Cook

Are you taking me off to the woods where no one will see when you kill me?" Becky asked. — Kim Law

It is quite affecting to observe how much the olive tree is to the country people. Its fruit supplies them with food, medicine and light; its leaves, winter fodder for the goats and sheep; it is their shelter from the heat and its branches and roots supply them with firewood. The olive tree is the peasant's all-in-all. — Fredrika Bremer

I hate mankind. I hate what we do to each other, how we wage war, how we 'fight' for peace, how we say we love each other then stab each other in the back. — L.V. Birdsong

Art does not organize parties, nor is it the servant or colleague of power. Rather, the work of art becomes a political force simply through the faithful representation of the spirit. It is a political act to create an image of the self or of the collective. — Lewis Hyde

Tonight I am going to take a party to the headquarters of the fire department, where I have a cinch on the captain, a very nice fellow, who is unusually grateful for something I wrote about him and his men. They are going to do the Still Alarm act for me. — Richard H. Davis

Had they known the difficulties that were to befall them, they might not have been so rash in falling in love. But perhaps there was no way of avoiding it. Fate, karma, the will of the Gods ... call it what you like, it was surely meant to happen. After all, in all the vastness of the Universe they had been thrown together. — Isabel Greenberg

Never leave a friend behind. Friends are all we have to get us through this life
and they are the only things from this world that we could hope to see in the next. — Dean Koontz