“Long after the fact, it occurred to me that this was a metaphor for life- blisters come before calluses, vulnerability before maturity- but not even the thickest of skins could have spared us the lash of Daddy's tongue.”
Pages 25-26
2000s, (2008)
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Clarence Thomas100
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States 1948Related quotes
“The child speaks words with his memory long before he speaks them with his tongue.”
Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist
Nicholas Sparks book True Believer
Lexie Darnell, Chapter 13, p. 205
Source: 2000s, True Believer (2005)
Context: In her new, more mature incarnation, she embraced the idea that maturity meant thinking about risk long before you pondered the reward, and that success and happiness in life were as much about avoiding mistakes as making your mark in the world.
Anatole France book The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard
Tous les changements, même les plus souhaités ont leur mélancolie, car ce que nous quittons, c'est une partie de nous-mêmes; il faut mourir à une vie pour entrer dans une autre.
Pt. II, ch. 4
The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881)
“Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work.”
Phillips Brooks (1835–1893) American clergyman and author
Literature and Life, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Context: Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.
“The best treasure a man can have is a sparing tongue.”
Hesiod book Works and Days
Source: Works and Days (c. 700 BC), line 719.
Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …
The New Hugo Winners: Award-winning Science Fiction Stories Vol. 1 (1989)<!-- Afterword to "Speech Sounds" -->, p. 215
General sources
Context: We are meant to know, or we are amoebae.
Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know — and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves?
Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know — even if the knowledge endured only for the moment that comes before destruction — than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too.