Quotes - Page 262 | Just Great DataBase

It gives a fella relief to tell, but it jus' spreads out his sin.

Ralph chose the firm strip as a path because he needed to think, and only here could he allow his feet to move without having to watch them. Suddenly, pacing by the water, he was overcome with astonishment. He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet.

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words HOME, CHRIST, ALE, MASTER, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

We alone, of the thousands who walk this earth, we alone in this hour are doing a work which has no purpose save that we wish to do it.

But the new guy is different, and the Acutes can see it, different from anybody been coming on this ward for the past ten years, different from anybody they ever met outside. He's just as vulnerable, maybe, but the Combine didn't get him.

And he saw the right evening star reflected in her eyes, and he saw the black cloud reflected in her eyes.

Mother indulgent. Said I have a queer mind and have read too much. Not true. Have read little and understood less.

It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended. He felt small and weak. When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric? They had big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry.

There's something I would like to understand. And I don't think anyone can explain it. . . There's your life. You begin it, feeling that it's something so precious and rare, so beautiful that it's like a sacred treasure. Now it's over and it doesn't make any difference to anyone, and it isn't that they are indifferent, it's just that they don't know, they don't know what it means, that treasure of mine, and there's something about it that they should understand. I don't understand it myself, but there's something about it that should be understood by all of us. Only what is it? What?

It occurred to me that anyway one more Sunday was over, that Maman was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that, really, nothing had changed.

If on'y they didn' tell me I got to get off, why, I'd prob'y be in California right now a-eatin' grapes an a-pickin' an orange when I wanted. But them sons-a-bitches says I got to get off-an', Jesus Christ, a man can't, when he's tol' to!

When I was a kid my ol' man give me a haltered heifer an' says take her down an git her serviced. An' the fella says, I done it, an' ever' time since then when I hear a business man talkin' about service, I wonder who's gettin' screwed.

It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be.

I will not say nothing. I will defend my church and my religion when it is insulted and spit on.

Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely reflex action of the nervous system. Our eyelid closes before we are aware that the fly is about to enter our eye.

Casy said solemnly, "This here ol' man jus' lived a life an' just died out of it. I don't know whether he was good or bad, but that don't matter much. He was alive, an' that's what matters. An' now his dead, an' that don't matter...

Daylight might have answered yes; but darkness and the horrors of death said no.

Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds. I am not a sacrifice on their altars.

Your eyes are as a flame, but our brothers have neither hope nor fire. Your mouth is cut of granite, but our brothers are soft and humble. Your head is high, but our brothers cringe. You walk, but our brothers crawl. We wish to be damned with you, rather than blessed with all our brothers. Do as you please with us, but do not send us away from you.

Persuasion