The Great Passage Quotes & Sayings

Old Etonians are the most charming people in the world. It's not just the analytic ability and the great education; there is a really easy confidence to them that draws people to them and makes their passage though the world a little easier. — Laura Wade

I suggest this passage from the German "philosopher" (this passage was detected, translated, and reviled by Karl Popper): Sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material parts, and in the negation of this condition; merely an abstract or an ideal ideality, as it were, of that specification. But this change, accordingly, is itself immediately the negation of the material specific subsistence; which is, therefore, real ideality of specific gravity and cohesion, i.e. - heat. The heating up of sounding bodies, just as of beaten and or rubbed ones, is the appearance of heat, originating conceptually together with sound. Even a Monte Carlo engine could not sound as random as the great philosophical master thinker (it would take plenty of sample runs to get the mixture of "heat" and "sound." People call that philosophy and frequently finance it with taxpayer subsidies! — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A Farewell For a while I shall still be leaving, Looking back at you as you slip away Into the magic islands of the mind. But for a while now all alive, believing That in a single poignant hour We did say all that we could ever say In a great flowing out of radiant power. It was like seeing and then going blind. After a while we shall be cut in two Between real islands where you live And a far shore where I'll no longer keep The haunting image of your eyes, and you, As pupils widen, widen to deep black And I am able neither to love or grieve Between fulfillment and heartbreak. The time will come when I can go to sleep. But for a while still, centered at last, Contemplate a brief amazing union, Then watch you leave and then let you go. I must not go back to the murderous past Nor force a passage through to some safe landing, But float upon this moment of communion Entranced, astonished by pure understanding - Passionate love dissolved like summer snow. — May Sarton

Most women have learned a great deal about how to set goals for our First Adulthood and how to roll with the punches when we hit a rough passage. But we're less prepared for our Second Adulthood as we approach life after retirement, where there are no fixed entrances or exits, and lots of sand into which it is easy to bury our heads. — Gail Sheehy

Most lives are not distinguished by great achievements. They are measured by an infinite number of small ones. Each time you do a kindness for someone or bring a smile to his face, it gives your life meaning. Never doubt your value, little friend. The world would be a dismal place without you in it. (tweaked version of a passage from Scandal in Spring) — Lisa Kleypas

Once when I went over my work with my Washington University professor, the late great Stanley Elkin, he pointed to a passage of mine and said: 'Stop vamping.' It has remained a caution. — Adam Ross

Young as she is, the stuff / Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy: / I wish her a lucky passage. — Richard Wilbur

Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you? — Walt Whitman

As my visits with Morrie go on, I begin to read about death, how different cultures view the final passage. There is a tribe in the North American Arctic, for example, who believe that all things on earth have a soul that exists in a miniature form of the body that hold it -so that a deer has a tiny deer inside it, and a man has a tiny man inside him. When the large being dies, that tiny form lives on. It can slide into something being born nearby, or it can go to a temporary resting place in the sky, in the belly of a great feminine spirit, where it waits until the moon can send it back to earth.
Sometimes, they say, the moon is so busy with the new souls of the world that it disappears from the sky. That is why we have moonless nights. But in the end, the moon always returns, as do we all.
That is what they believe. — Mitch Albom

Steerforth, laughing, took me by the arm and led me out. We went downstairs, one behind another. Near the bottom, somebody fell, and rolled down. Somebody else said it was Copperfield. I was angry at that false report, until, finding myself on my back in the passage, I began to think there might be some foundation for it. A very foggy night, with great rings round the lamps in the streets! There was an indistinct talk of its being wet. I considered it frosty. Steerforth dusted me under a lamp-post, and put my hat into shape, which somebody produced from somewhere in a most extraordinary manner, for I hadn't had it on before. Steerforth then said, 'You are all right, Copperfield, are you not?' and I told him, 'Neverberrer. — Charles Dickens

I got an image in my head that never got out. We see a great many things and can remember a great many things, but that is different. We get very few of the true images in our heads of the kind I am talking about, the kind that become more and more vivid for us as if the passage of the years did not obscure their reality but, year by year, drew off another veil to expose a meaning which we had only dimly surmised at first. Very probably the last veil will not be removed, for there are not enough years, but the brightness of the image increases and our conviction increases that the brightness is meaning, or the legend of meaning, and without the image our lives would be nothing except an old piece of film rolled on a spool and thrown into a desk drawer among the unanswered letters. — Robert Penn Warren

In New York, he tried in vain to forget her. The first few days were tinged with melancholy and regret and JT thought he would never recover. Anyway: recover why? And yet, with the passage of time, in his heart he understood that he'd gained much more than he'd lost. At least, he said to himself, I've met the woman of my dreams. Other people, most people, glimpse something in films, the shadow of great actresses, the gaze of true love. But I saw her in the flesh, heard her voice, saw her silhouetted against the endless pampa. I talked to her and she talked back. What do I have to complain about? — Roberto Bolano

I won't waste your time with the injuries of my childhood, with my loneliness, or the fear and sadness of the years I spent inside the bitter capsule of my parents' marriage, under the reign of my father's rage, after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of a childhood? I have no desire to describe mine; I only want to say that in order to survive the dark and often terrifying passage of my life I came to believe certain things about myself. — Nicole Krauss

I am a survivor. But I am not unique of the people that survived the great late war. We all have our stories to tell. But for most of us the hardened corners have soften with the passage of time. — Nancy B. Brewer

I mourn for the quicksilvery racehorse passage of time. Its swiftness has caught me with the same ineffable start that comes to every man and woman who lives long enough. It remains as the single great surprise of any life. In — Pat Conroy

Struggling to end the war and to eliminate slavery once and for all by way of the 13th Amendment, with the amendment's prospective passage undermining the effort to make peace with the Confederacy and vice versa, Lincoln embodied the Great Man theory that leftists disdain. — Steve Erickson

All these years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately. But what I've discovered since is that lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it. — Anne Lamott

The army of the sea shall stand before the city, then shall go away for a passage that shall not be very long, as a great prey of citizens shall be holding the ground. The fleet returns. The great emblem recovered. — Nostradamus

In our passage from the Cape of Good Hope the winds were mostly from the westward with very boisterous weather: but one great advantage that this season of the year has over the summer months is in being free from fogs. — William Bligh

Working with the dying is like being a midwife for this great rite of passage of death. Just as a midwife helps a being take their first breath, you help a being take their last breath. — Ram Dass

If I were reading a book and happened to strike a wonderful passage I would close the book then and there and go for a walk. I hated the thought of coming to the end of a good book. I would tease it along, delay the inevitable as long as possible, But always, when I hit a great passage, I would stop reading immediately. Out I would go, rain, hail, snow or ice, and chew the cud. — Henry Miller

Hidden away amongst Aschenbach's writing was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame, the key to his work. — Thomas Mann

Water began to drip steadily through the dormer window. Outside, in the treacherous city, a thaw had come, giving the streets the unreliable consistency of wet cardboard. Slow masses of whiteness slid from sloping, grey-slate roofs. The footprints of delivery vans corrugated the slush. First light; and the dawn chorus began, chattering of road-drills, chirrup of burglar alarms, trumpeting of wheeled creatures clashing at corners, the deep whirr of a large olive-green garbage eater, screaming radio-voices from a wooden painter's cradle clinging to the upper storey of a Free House, roar of the great wakening juggernauts rushing awesomely down this long but narrow pathway. From beneath the earth came tremors denoting the passage of huge subterranean worms that devoured and regurgitated human beings, and from the skies the thrum of choppers and the screech of higher, gleaming birds. — Salman Rushdie

I think our shepherds, our pastors, can take for instance, Chapter Four [of Amoris Laetitia], 'Vive l'amore' ('How to live love'). It's a great catechesis. You can take it chapter by chapter, passage by passage, and work through it in the parish, in the communities. It's a great catechesis on marital and familial love. And I think as pastors, we can use this for our pastoral work. — Christoph Schonborn

I had another reason for seeking Him, for trying to espy His face, a professional one. God and literature are conflated in my mind. Why this is, I'm not sure. Perhaps because great books seem heavensent. Perhaps because I know that each nove is a puny but very valiant attempt at godlike behavior. Perhaps because there is no difference between the finest poetry and most transcendent mysticism. Perhaps because writers like Thomas Merton, who are able to enter the realm of the spirit and come away with fine, lucid prose. Perhaps because of more secular writers, like John Steinbeck, whose every passage, it seems to me, peals with religiousity and faith. It once occured to me that literature - all art really - is either talking to people about God, or talking to God about people. — Paul Quarrington

As you know so well, the passage of time never really heals the tragic memory of such a great loss, but we carry on, because we have to, because our loved one would want us to, and because there is still light to guide us in the world from the love they gave us. — Edward Kennedy

In 1846 on of his Academy exhibits was a painting called The Angel Standing in the Sun. Turner found this passage for the Academy catalogue in the Book of Revelation:
And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, both free and bond, both small and great.
To reinforce the note of voracious doom, he added two lines from Samuel Rogers' Voyage of Columbus:
The morning march that flashes to the sun;
The feast of vultures when the day is done. — Anthony Bailey

The day that I spearheaded the passage of America Fast Forward ... the newspaper of record did not put it in the newspaper; what they put was my breakup with my ex-girlfriend. I took umbrage with that. A great newspaper ought to be printing things that people care about, issues that people care about. — Antonio Villaraigosa

The afternoon breeze would incite to a weird and flabby activity all that crowded mass of clothing, with its vague suggestions of drowned, mutilated and flattened humanity. Trunks without heads waved at you arms without hands; legs without feet kicked fantastically with collapsible flourishes; and there were long white garments, that taking the wind fairly through their neck openings edged with lace, became for a moment violently distended as by the passage of obese and invisible bodies. On these days you could make out that ship at a great distance by the multi-coloured grotesque riot going on abaft her mizzen-mast. — Joseph Conrad

Awareness born of love is the only force that can bring healing and renewal. Out of our love for another person, we become more willing to let our old identities wither and fall away, and enter a dark night of the soul, so that we may stand naked once more in the presence of the great mystery that lies at the core of our being. This is how love ripens us
by warming us from within, inspiring us to break out of our shell, and lighting our way through the dark passage to new birth. — John Welwood

Is it within us all, when the memories of war have faded, to so want to be a part of something great that we throw aside the quiet, the calm, the mundane, the peace itself? Do we collectively come to equate peace with boredom and complacency? Perhaps we hold these embers of war within us, dulled only by sharp memories of the pain and the loss, and when that smothering blanket dissipates with the passage of healing time, those fires flare again to life. — R.A. Salvatore

The allure is a passage behind the parapet of a castle wall. Great for defense when the enemy is approaching. You know you're safe on the allure." She tucks her head beneath my chin, twining her hand with mine. "Like we're safe with each other. — Nina Lane

Unquestionably, New York enjoyed enormous strategic significance. As Adams had already apprised Washington, it was the nexus of the Northern and Southern colonies ... the key to the whole Continent, as it is a Passage to Canada, to the Great Lakes, and to all the Indian Nations. — Joseph J. Ellis

In the great Bible passage on spiritual warfare, the word stand appears four times, while the word translated wrestle, battle, fight, or struggle appears only once. In essence, God is asking you to spend the majority of your time in warfare standing! — Pedro Okoro

To B-major or B-minor: that is the question. Consider that the major and minor chords are separated by the smallest tonal step which is one half-step carrying in its pitch the gravity of all humanity which needs the major to recognize its relative, inherent tragedy which once given expression seeks the resurrection that only the major can procreate which self-expression gives beauty to the harmony of the major which then confirms the whole truth of the tragic minor saga which overcomes the hidden hand of destiny in the great ellipse of being and the greater cosmic void of nothingness which passage of time has sadly destined to be replayed in the same octave of the ineluctable modality of the audible which ellipse with such a simple twist resonates as infinity which is both meaningless beyond all human capacity for understanding but which holds within it the ubiquitous mystic beauty and truth of the pulsing human heart. — David B. Lentz

Stormy Llewellyn, a woman of unconventional views, believes instead that our passage through this world is intended to toughen us for the next life. She says that our honesty, integrity, courage, and determined resistance to evil are evaluated at the end of our days here, and that if we come up to muster, we will be conscripted into an army of souls engaged in some great mission in the next world. Those who fail the test simply cease to exist. — Dean Koontz

Mithridates, he died old. Housman's passage is based on the belief of the ancients that Mithridates the Great [c. 135-63 B.C.] had so saturated his body with poisons that none could injure him. When captured by the Romans he tried in vain to poison himself, then ordered a Gallic mercenary to kill him. — A.E. Housman

Did Jesus Christ, he asked, suspect that someday his church would spread to the farthest corners of Earth? Did Jesus Christ, he asked, ever have what we, today, call an idea of the world? Did Jesus Christ, who apparently knew everything, know that the world was round and to the east lived the Chinese (this sentence he spat out, as if it cost him great effort to utter it) and to the west the primitive peoples of America? And he answered himself, no, although of course in a way having an idea of the world is easy, everybody has one, generally an idea restricted to one's village, bound to the land, to the tangible and mediocre things before one's eyes, and this idea of the world, petty, limited, crusted with the grime of the familiar, tends to persist and acquire authority and eloquence with the passage of time. — Roberto Bolano

The allure, huh?"
"I've learned a few things about castle architecture over the years." Liv wraps one arm around my waist. "The allure is a passage behind the parapet of a castle wall. Great for defense when the enemy is approaching. You know you're safe on the allure." She tucks her head beneath my chin, twining her hand with mine. "Like we're safe with each other."
"No doubt about it, beauty." I press my face against her sweet-smelling hair. "You'll always be my allure. — Nina Lane

So if any man think philosophy and universality to be idle studies, he doth not consider that all professions are from thence served and supplied. And this I take to be a great cause that hath hindered the progression of learning, because these fundamental knowledges have been studied but in passage. — Francis Bacon

In the heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they'd never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy. — James Surowiecki

Victor Serge died in exile and obscurity, apparently no more than a splinter of a splinter in the Marxist movement. But with the passage of the years, he looms up as one of the great moral figures of our time, an artist of such integrity and a revolutionary of such purity as to overshadow those who achieved fame and power. His failure was his success. I know of no participant in Russia's revolution and Spain's agonies who more deserves the attention of our concerned youth. — I. F. Stone

HAVE you learned lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you?
Have you not learned the great lessons of those who rejected you, and braced themselves against you? or who treated you with contempt, or disputed the passage with you?
Have you had no practice to receive opponents when they come? — Walt Whitman

The silences here are retreats of sound, like the retreat of the surf before a tidal wave: sound draining away, down slopes of acoustic passage, to gather, someplace else, to a great surge of noise. — Thomas Pynchon

Almost all great writers have as their motif, more or less disguised, the passage from childhood to maturity, the clash between the thrill of expectation and the disillusioning knowledge of truth. 'Lost Illusion' is the undisclosed title of every novel. — Andre Maurois

I'm always intrigued by my nonsensical concern with picking out a bunch of things that look exactly alike the ones that somehow I feel are the best and belong to me. It's that same crazy urge or superstition, or whatever it is, that makes me open a Bible in a hotel room, hoping for some great happenstance spiritual word of advice. More often than not, I hit a long passage of begats and begots, which contain little inspiration other than the fact that procreation is the highest aim of life. — Vincent Price

Not that this deterred him and his friend Klapaucius from further experimentation, which showed that the extent of a dragon's existence depends mainly on its whim, though also on its degree of satiety, and that the only sure method of negating it is to reduce the probability to zero or lower. All this research, naturally enough, took a great deal of time and energy; meanwhile the dragons that had gotten loose were running rampant, laying waste to a variety of planets and moons. What was worse, they multiplied. Which enabled Klapaucius to publish an excellent article entitled Covariant Transformation from Dragons to Dragonets, in the Special Case of Passage from States Forbidden by the Laws of Physics to Those Forbidden by the Local Authorities. — Stanislaw Lem

Fuck!" he snarled.
He tilted her up again, her legs now resting on his shoulders, and positioned himself and began to push.
Into her back entrance.
Kimber drew in a great, shocked gasp, her hazel eyes wide. "Deke?"
"What the hell are you doing?" Luc barked.
Tensing a little more with every inch he pushed inside Kimber's tight passage, the tendons on his neck standing out, the muscles in his arms shaking, assailed by the amazing sensations of being slowly enveloped by her tight, ready flesh, Deke could barely form a word. "Fucking her ass. Saving her life. — Shayla Black

They said their sufferings were great on the passage, and several of their number had died. — Lewis Tappan

I don't see the use of reading the same thing over and over again,' said Phillip. 'That's only a laborious form of idleness.'
But are you under the impression that you have so great a mind that you can understand the most profound writer at a first reading?'
I don't want to understand him, I'm not a critic. I'm not interested in him for his sake but for mine.'
Why do you read then?'
Partly for pleasure, because it's a habit and I'm just as uncomfortable if I don't read as if I don't smoke, and partly to know myself. When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me; I've got out of the book all that's any use to me and I can't get anythning more if I read it a dozen times ... — W. Somerset Maugham

But at some point in her passage, the trees began to change. They stretched taller, and the soft, pale bark darkened, roughened. She put her hand to a tree and touched the lichen growing dark green upon brown, and it felt like old cork, dry and crumbling. Here the sun mellowed, took on the cast of late afternoon, and the shadows seemed to fall a bit longer; the forest had sunk into a deeper silence, magnifying what sounds did arise. The sudden, quick crash of a fox bounding through the brush was as loud as the slam of a great wooden door. — Malinda Lo

The family took all the seeds from the garden and then they buried Nokomis there, deeply, wrapped in her blanket with gifts and tobacco for the spirit world. They buried her simply. There was no stone, no grave house, nothing to mark where she lay except the exuberant and drying growth of her garden.
Nokomis had said:
I do not need a marker of my passage, for my creator knows where I am. I do not want anyone to cry. I lived a good life, my hair turned to snow, I saw my great grandchildren, I grew my garden. That is all. — Louise Erdrich

Against firelight, he sees the face of the woman / Lean over, and the lips purse sweet as to bestow a kiss, but / This is not true, and the great glob of spit / Hangs there, glittering, before she lets it fall.
The spit is what softens like silk the passage of steel / On the fine-grained stone. It whispers. — Robert Penn Warren

It is my contention that a really great novel is made with a knife and not a pen. A novelist must have the intestinal fortitude to cut out even the most brilliant passage so long as it doesn't advance the story. — Frank Yerby

[Referring to passage by Alice Munro] Finally, the passage contradicts a form of bad advice often given young writers
namely, that the job of the author is to show, not tell. Needless to say, many great novelists combine "dramatic" showing with long sections of the flat-out authorial narration that is, I guess, what is meant by telling. And the warning against telling leads to a confusion that causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out
don't tell us a character is happy, show us how she screams "yay" and jumps up and down for joy
when in fact the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language. — Francine Prose

There are a great number of peoples who need more than just words of sympathy from the international community. They need a real and sustained commitment to help end their cycles of violence, and launch them on a safe passage to prosperity. — Kofi Annan

I'm reticent to say much more, but we would like to begin in the coming year. We'd like to shoot through the seasons because of the passage of time. This project is the great love of my life. — Madeleine Stowe

Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra. — John Steinbeck

When God's children pass under the shadow of the cross of Calvary, they know that through that shadow lies their passage to the great white throne. For them Gethsemane is as paradise. God fills it with sacred presences; its solemn silence is broken by the music of tender promises, its awful darkness softened and brightened by the sunlight of Heavenly faces and the music of angel wings. — Frederic Farrar

The thought of suicide is a great source of comfort: with it a calm passage is to be made across many a bad night. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I suppose there may be a branch president or a high councilor or an elders quorum president or a visiting teacher in the room who wants to know what it is we are to accomplish as Church members when we get together, even if it's only in a home evening group or an opportunity to pray together. Well, this passage indicates that it may have something to do with remembering each other. We all count. Everyone matters. We have a name and it's recorded and we need to remember that here. No one must get lost. "And their names were taken, that they might be remembered and nourished by the good word of God ... to keep them continually watchful unto prayer, relying alone upon the merits of Christ ... to fast and to speak with one another concerning the welfare of their souls ... to observe that there should be no iniquity among them"
what a great thought about meetings and what they are supposed to do, what a Sunday School class can be, what a scriptural discussion in an apartment can be. — Jeffrey R. Holland

It was shameless how life made fun of one; it was a joke, a cause for weeping! Either one lived and let one's senses play, drank full at the primitive mother's breast - which brought great bliss but was no protection against death; then one lived like a mushroom in the forest, colorful today and rotten tomorrow. Or else one put up a defense, imprisoned oneself for work and tried to build a monument to the fleeting passage of life - then one renounced life, was nothing but a tool; one enlisted in the service of that which endured, but one dried up in the process and lost one's freedom, scope, lust for life...
Ach, life made sense only if one achieved both, only if it was not split by this brittle alternative! To create, without sacrificing one's senses for it. To live, without renouncing the mobility of creating. Was that impossible? — Hermann Hesse

You think you know. Then you lower your guard and act as though everything's just great. With the passage of time, you stop paying as much attention to things as you should. You're confident. What more can you do? Life is smiling on you. So is luck. You can afford your dreams. Everything's fine, everything blesses you ... and then, without warning, the sky falls in on your head. And once you're flat on your back, you realize that your life, your whole life - with its ups and downs, its pains and pleasures, its promises and failures, hangs and has always hung by a thread as flimsy and imperceptible as the threads in a spider's web. Suddenly, the slightest sound terrifies you, and no longer feel like believing in anything whatsoever. All you want to do is close your eyes and think no more — Yasmina Khadra

Mackay had a low opinion of all Crusades. The Children's Crusade struck him as only slightly more sordid than the ten Crusades for grown-ups. O'Hare read this handsome passage out loud: History in her solemn page informs us that the crusaders were but ignorant and savage men, that their motives were those of bigotry unmitigated, and that their pathway was one of blood and tears. Romance, on the other hand, dilates upon their piety and heroism, and portrays, in her most glowing and impassioned hues, their virtue and magnanimity, the imperishable honor they acquired for themselves, and the great services they rendered to Christianity. — Kurt Vonnegut

Star canto: star speaks light, and world to world
Repeats the passage of the universe
To God; the name of Christ
the one great word
Well worth all languages in earth or heaven. — Philip James Bailey

Unless you first do the hard work of answering those questions about a text, your meditations won't be grounded in what God is actually saying in the passage. Something in the passage may "hit" you - but it may hit you as expressing almost the opposite of what the biblical author, inspired by the Spirit, was saying. When that happens, you are listening to your own heart or to the spirit of your own culture, not to God's voice in the Scripture. A great number of books advise "divine reading" of the Bible today, and define the activity uncarefully as reading "not for information but to hear a personal word of God to you." This presents a false contrast. It is certainly true that meditation personalizes the Word, but before we can meditate on what the text personally means to us and our time, we must first need to know as much as possible what the author meant to say to his readers when he wrote it. — Timothy Keller

Outward objects cannot take hold of the soul, nor force their passage into her, nor set any of her wheels going. No, the impression comes from herself, and it is her own motions which affect her. As for the contingencies of fortune, they are either great or little, according to the opinion she has of her own strength. — Marcus Aurelius

Whatever reader desires to have a thorough comprehension of an author's thoughts cannot take a better method than by putting himself into the circumstances and postures of life that the author was in upon every important passage as it flowed from his pen; for this will introduce a parity and strict correspondence of ideas between the reader and the author. Now, to assist the diligent reader in so delicate an affair, as far as brevity will permit, I have recollected that the shrewdest pieces of this treatise were conceived in bed in a garret; at other times (for a reason best known to myself) I thought fit to sharpen my invention with hunger; and in general, the whole work was begun, continued, and ended under a long course of physic and great want of money. — Jonathan Swift

These Taoists' ideas have greatly influenced all our theories of action, even to those of fencing and wrestling. Jiu-jitsu, the Japanese art of self-defence, owes its name to a passage in the Tao-teking. In jiu-jitsu one seeks to draw out and exhaust the enemy's strength by non-resistance, vacuum, while conserving one's own strength for victory in the final struggle.
In art the importance of the same principle is illustrated by the value of suggestion. In leaving something unsaid the beholder is given a chance to complete the idea and thus a great masterpiece irresistibly rivets your attention until you seem to become actually a part of it. A vacuum is there for you to enter and fill up the full measure of your aesthetic emotion. — Okakura Kakuzo

The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren't carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth. — P. J. O'Rourke

From the beginning I've searched out those writers unafraid to stir up the emotions, who entrust me with their darkest passions, their most indestructible yearnings, and their most soul-killing doubts. I trust the great novelists to teach me how to live, how to feel, how to love and hate. I trust them to show me the dangers I will encounter on the road as I stagger on my own troubled passage through the complicated life of books that try to teach me how to die. — Pat Conroy

Sometimes you read a passage by a great writer, and you know what he says and how he says it will always be, for you, the only possible way it could be. Less often a painter will describe an event in a way that fits into your interpretation of that event so perfectly that it becomes the event itself. — Vincent Price

Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything. He is a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage. And the land he will come to is unknown - as is, once he disembarks, the land from which he comes. He has his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him. — Michel Foucault

And when the twilight of that ride is finally upon us, we will look at the trail we have taken and at the signs of our passage. And though our tears will be many, we will know that great lives have been lived, and that our memories will forever bind us together. — John Shors

The great crimes of the twentieth century were committed not by money-grubbing capitalists but by dedicated idealists. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler were contemptuous of money. The passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century has been a passage from considerations of money to considerations of power. — Eric Hoffer

Those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly and as privately as possible. But what I've discovered since is that the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal — Anne Lamott

It takes the passage of time before an image of a commonplace subject can be assessed. The great difficulty of what I attempt is seeing beyond the moment; the everydayness of life gets in the way of the eternal. — George A Tice

St. Augustine says something which is a great thought and a great comfort here. He interprets the passage from the Psalms 'seek his face always' as saying: this applies 'for ever'; to all eternity. God is so great that we never finish our searching. He is always new. With God there is perpetual, unending encounter, with new discoveries and new joy. Such things are theological matters. At the same time, in an entirely human perspective, I look forward to being reunited with my parents, my siblings, my friends, and I imagine it will be as lovely as it was at our family home. — Pope Benedict XVI

It takes great faith in Easter, particularly faith in the gift of the Holy Spirit, to be honest with our people that we have not a clue to the meaning of some biblical passage, or that we have no sense of a satisfying ending for a sermon, or that we are unsure of precisely what the congregation ought to do after hearing a given text. The most ethically dangerous time within a sermon is toward the end of the sermon, when we move from proclamation to application and act as if we know more than God. 133 — William H. Willimon

If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest. — Karen Armstrong

We fear our passage will be attended with difficulties by reason of the great number of passingers which are one hundred and eighty and upwards in number. — Nathaniel Smith

But now she could not bear the way she sounded. She was not a person anyone could love.
...
And thus fled to her room. There she wept, bitterly, an ugly sound punctuated by great gulps. She could not stop herself. She could hear his footsteps in the passage outside. He walked up and down, up and down.
'Come in,' she prayed. 'Oh dearest, do come in.'
But he did not come in. He would not come in. This was the man she had practically contracted to give away her fortune to. He offered to marry her as a favour and then he would not even come into her room.
Later, she could smell him make himself a sweet pancake for his lunch. She thought this a childish thing to eat, and selfish, too. If he were a gentleman he would now come to her room and save her from the prison her foolishness had made for her. He did not come. She heard him pacing in his room. — Peter Carey

Let dissolution come when it will, it can do the Christian no harm, for it will be but a passage out of a prison into a palace; out of a sea of troubles into a haven of rest; out of a crowd of enemies, to an innumerable company of true, loving, and faithful friends; out of shame, reproach, and contempt, into exceeding great and eternal glory. — John Bunyan

Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished. — H.L. Mencken

Sexual frenzy is our compensation for the tedious moments we must suffer in the passage of life. 'Nothing in excess,' professed the ancient Greeks. Why if I spend half the month in healthy scholarship and pleasant sleep, shouldn't I be allowed the other half to howl at the moon and pillage the groins of Europe's great beauties? — Roman Payne

Suddenly she came upon a little three-legged table, all made of solid glass; there was nothing on it except a tiny golden key, and Alice's first thought was that it might belong to one of the doors of the hall; but, alas! either the locks were too large, or the key was too small, but at any rate it would not open any of them. However, on the second time round, she came upon a low curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little door about fifteen inches high: she tried the little golden key in the lock, and to her great delight it fitted! Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into — Lewis Carroll

It's ahead of us. All I can tell you is, not even courage will help." "Are you reading Alma Mahler again?" "No." Her voice was even and knowing. The underground river. The ceiling lowers, grows wet, the water rushes into darkness. The air becomes damp and icy, the passage narrows. Light is lost here, sound; the current begins to flow beneath great, impassable slabs. — James Salter

If the president is the head of the American body politic, Congress is its gastrointestinal tract. Its vast and convoluted inner workings may be mysterious and unpleasant, but in the end they excrete a great deal of material whose successful passage is crucial to our nation's survival. This is Congress's duty. — Jon Stewart