Severinghaus Pulse Quotes & Sayings

In truth, even if they have an imperfect insight into their own methods, I still slightly mistrust writers of fiction who are assured literary critics; it makes me suspect that they favour the word over the world it should describe. Such scribes fall victim too easily to the solecism of equating style with morality. — Will Self

England is an aquarium, not a nation. — Rita Mae Brown

Music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor. — Edgard Varese

I think life would be so much funnier if every day you saw someone walking down the street getting hit in the head by a monkey, don't you? — Harland Williams

Let us constantly bear in mind the rules and principles of Christian warfare; namely, that we conquer by yielding, we receive by giving, we overcome by being defeated, and we live by dying. There is no other way except the way of the Cross. — George Warnock

In terms of our region, what we need to ensure is that the rise of China [is] conducted in a manner that does not disturb the security and the relative harmony of the region upon which China's prosperity depends. Now - now, that requires careful diplomacy, it requires balancing. — Malcolm Turnbull

She looked at me with gentle indignation. She was what we have after sixty million years of the Cenozoic. There were a lot of random starts and dead ends. Those big plated pea-brain lizards didn't make it. Sharks, scorpions and cockroaches, as living fossils, are lasting pretty well. Savagery, venom and guile are good survival quotients. This forked female mammal didn't seem to have enough tools. One night in the swamps would kill her. Yet behind all that fragility was a marvelous toughness. A Junior Allen was less evolved. He was a skull-cracker, two steps away from the cave. They were at the two ends of our bell curve, with all the rest of us lumped in the middle. If the trend is still supposed to be up, she was of the kind we should breed, accepting sensitivity as a strength rather than a weakness. But there is too much Junior Allen seed around. — John D. MacDonald

If you violate laws of God, you're a sinner.
If you violate laws of men, you're a criminal.
If you violate your own laws, you're pathetic. — Toba Beta

Men, like planets, have both a visible and an invisible history. The astronomer threads the darkness with strict deduction, accounting so for every visible arc in the wanderer's orbit; and the narrator of human actions, if he did his work with the same completeness, would have to thread the hidden pathways of feeling and thought which lead up to every moment of action, and to those moments of intense suffering which take the quality of action
like the cry of Prometheus, whose chained anguish seems a greater energy than the sea and sky he invokes and the deity he defies. — George Eliot

Sarah's father's shoulders began to shake. Tears poured down his cheeks. He took first one hand, and then the other, off the steering wheel to mop his eyes. He drove, weeping and groaning, at 140 kilometres an hour. Sarah's mother would not look at him. Sarah and Saffron stared, dumbstruck. Then it gradually dawned on them that he was laughing. — Hilary McKay

Nora Ephron accidentally ruined a lot of lives. — Chuck Klosterman

There is the sudden. There is the eventual. And in between, there is the living. — David Levithan

My best vacation is somewhere I could hide, somewhere warm and not a lot of people around. — Derek Jeter