Strainedly Quotes & Sayings

French rhetorical models are too narrow for the English tradition. Most pernicious of French imports is the notion that there is no person behind a text. Is there anything more affected, aggressive, and relentlessly concrete than a Parisan intellectual behind his/her turgid text? The Parisian is a provincial when he pretends to speak for the universe. — Camille Paglia

I do not know everything. I ought to keep learning. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Comen out, leetle rodents," the human called in a language that the companions could not understand. The wizard reiterated the request in another tongue, then in drow, and then in two more unknown tongues, and then in svirfneblin. He continued on for many minutes, — R.A. Salvatore

I remember in grammar school the teacher asked if anyone had any hobbies. I was the only one with any hobbies and I had every hobby there was ... name anything, no matter how esoteric. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had 40 or 50 to take home. — Cormac McCarthy

I have been known to buy e-versions of my books because I was in a hotel room and I needed one right away to look up something in it; very handy for that - you can have it just the next minute; you can press the button and just have it. — Margaret Atwood

If I never do another movie, I will have had the privilege of working on one of the big Hollywood movies with top people, creating a world that can only be described as totally cinematic. — Christine Baranski

Winter had long since come. It was freezing cold. Torn-up sounds and forms appeared with no evident connection from the frosty mist, stood, moved, vanished. Not the sun we are accustomed to on earth, but the crimson ball of some other substitute sun hung in the forest. From it, strainedly and slowly, as in a dream or a fairy tale, rays of amber yellow light, thick as honey, spread and on their way congealed in the air and froze to the trees. — Boris Pasternak

Not so her eyes, which were the flat hostile blue of a midsummer sky in bright sunlight, a blue that shuts you out. — Margaret Atwood

The writers are writing human beings, and they're writing about the human condition and how difficult it is to function in that condition. I think it's one of the charms of the show, the idea of redemption and working towards becoming better people, for everybody involved. — George Dzundza

Logic, too, also rests on assumptions that do not correspond to anything in the real world, e.g., on the assumption that there areequal things, that the same thing is identical at different points in time: but this science arose as a result of the opposite belief (that such things actually exist in the real world). And it is the same with mathematics, which would certainly never have arisen if it had been understood from the beginning that there is no such thing in nature as a perfectly straight line, a true circle, and absolute measure. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Feeling the energy of disconnection is something that I understand and want to eliminate as much as possible. I know in my heart that our veterans can have better days if there is an ever so slight light that is able to crack the darkness of the aloneness. — Mike Wanner

'Deadline' is the story of a young man forced to discover who he is, and what's important in life, during the short span of his senior year in high school. — Chris Crutcher

Officers conditioned to conformity in peacetime cannot be expected to behave boldly and flexibly in combat. — Paul Yingling

The town caught fire in several places, shells crashed and burst, and solid shot rained like hail. — James Longstreet

The anarchy that threatens a degrading society is not its punishment, but its remedy. — Nicolas Gomez Davila

This century faded - as did the last several - and she was Aphrodite again, goddess of lust and pleasure and sex, and she was home. — Liz Meldon