Thalen Germany Quotes & Sayings

The orchestra had ceased and were now climbing onto their chairs, with their instruments. The floral offerings flew; the coffin teetered. "Catch it!" a voice shouted. They sprang forward, but the coffin crashed heavily to the floor, coming open. The corpse tumbled slowly and sedately out and came to rest with its face in the center of a wreath. "Play something!" the proprietor bawled, waving his arms; "play! Play! — William Faulkner

I often will write a scene from three different points of view to find out which has the most tension and which way I'm able to conceal the information I'm trying to conceal. And that is, at the end of the day, what writing suspense is all about. — Dan Brown

We live without feeling the country beneath our feet,
our words are inaudible from ten steps away.
Any conversation, however brief,
gravitates, gratingly, toward the Kremlin's mountain man.
His greasy fingers are thick as worms,
his words weighty hammers slamming their target.
His cockroach moustache seems to snicker,
and the shafts of his high-topped boots gleam.
Amid a rabble of scrawny-necked chieftains,
he toys with the favors of such homunculi.
One hisses, the other mewls, one groans, the other weeps;
he prowls thunderously among them, showering them with scorn.
Forging decree after decree, like horseshoes,
he pitches one to the belly, another to the forehead,
a third to the eyebrow, a fourth in the eye.
Every execution is a carnival
that fills his broad Ossetian chest with delight. — Osip Mandelstam

I feel we don't really need scriptures. The entire life is an open book, a scripture. Read it. Learn while digging a pit or chopping some wood or cooking some food. If you can't learn from your daily activities, how are you going to understand the scriptures? (233) — Swami Satchidananda

Indeed, the existence of class, of social hierarchy, is as old as man himself. It prevails in the jungle where strength determines hierarchy; among men, it has also been savagely the same, whereby rulers vested with power through personal combat, or through lineal heritage as in the case of royalty, ravage their subjects. — F. Sionil Jose

I was in the Navy and saw, first-hand, the effects of front-line combat. — Billy Casper

Finland, and all the other European countries, we are too dependent on imported energy. We should be using a broader variety of energy resources. — Tarja Halonen

Teaching high school was my real training as a novelist: it got me out of my head, and (at least a little) out of books, and invested me in the lives of others and the world around me. — Garth Greenwell

I wish to understand [Plato], but to treat him with as little reverence as if he were a contemporary English or American advocate of totalitarianism. — Bertrand Russell

death poem of Hyakka, — Richard Flanagan

I have so many people who still talk to me about The Long Kiss Goodnight, about that being one of their favorite movies, and it really was a fun movie. — David Morse

Nothing is impossible. I'm possible. — Barbara Silkstone

It may not be possible to get rare roast beef but if you're willing to settle for well done, ask them to hold the sweetened library paste that passes for gravy. — Marian Burros

There have been vast changes in the composition and role of the news media over the decades, and that is a cause for concern as well. When I first entered government nearly forty-eight years ago, three television networks and a handful of newspapers dominated coverage and, to a considerable degree, filtered the most extreme or vitriolic points of view. Today, with hundreds of cable channels, blogs, and other electronic media, too often the professional integrity and long-established standards and practices of journalists are diluted or ignored. Every point of view - including the most extreme - has a ready vehicle for rapid dissemination. And it seems the more vitriolic the opinion, the more attention it gets. This system is clearly more democratic and open, but I believe it has also fueled the coarsening and dumbing down of our national political dialogue. — Robert M. Gates