Quotes about center
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“I think I’ve got something else to help center my life.”

Source: The Golden Lily

“Challenges are gifts that force us to search for a new center of gravity. Don't fight them. Just find a new way to stand.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

Way, Search, Fight

“It was only after her death that I realized who she was: the apparently magical force at the center of our family who'd kept us all invisibly spinning in the powerful orbit around her.”

Cheryl Strayed book Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Source: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Death, Family

“Whatever is at the center of our life will be the source of our security, guidance, wisdom, and power. Life just has to go on!”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

Life, Wisdom

“We all agree it's too big to keep up with, that we're surrounded by life, that we'll never understand it, so we center it all in by swigging Scotch from the bottle and when it's empty I run out of the car and buy another one, period.”

Jack Kerouac book Big Sur

Source: Big Sur

Life, Cars, Understanding

“If you stare at the center of the universe, there is coldness there. A blankness. Ultimately, the universe doesn't care about us. Time doesn't care about us. That's why we have to care about each other.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

Universe, Time

“Maybe she'd been drinking too much of the super-sweet Mexican Coca-Cola they had down here. Or maybe she was just tired, alone, and far from home. Because somewhere in the brittle, concrete center of Azrael's dark heart, something was melting.”

Melissa de la Cruz book The Van Alen Legacy

Source: The Van Alen Legacy

Home, Drink, Heart

“Hold on to me," Alec said, and Magnus gave him the sort of smile that made Alec feel like someone had taken an apple corer to his heart and tried to dig out the center.
“I always do, Alexander,” he said. “I always do.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Smile, Feeling, Heart

“I am still the center sister. But I see it differently now. There has to be a middle. Without it, nothing can truly be whole. Because it is not just the space between, but also what holds everything together.”

Sarah Dessen book Just Listen

Source: Just Listen

Sister

“I find myself looking into people's eyes more than I ever did before. And I realize, that's where we stop being a certain gender or color. Just look right into the center of the eye.”

David Levithan book Another Day

Source: Another Day

People, Color

“Choosing with integrity means finding ways to speak up that honor your reality, the reality of others, and your willingness to meet in the center of that large field. It’s hard sometimes.”

Terry Tempest Williams (1955) American writer

Source: When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

Way, Reality

“From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.”

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Life, Pain, Way, Birth

“Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

Source: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

Support, Universe, Personality

“I want to know if you've touched the center of your own sorrow, if you've been opened by life's betrayals, or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain.”

Oriah Mountain Dreamer (1954) Canadian author

Life, Pain, Fear, Betrayal

“Our kinship with Earth must be maintained; otherwise, we will find ourselves trapped in the center of our own paved-over souls with no way out.”

Terry Tempest Williams (1955) American writer

Source: Finding Beauty in a Broken World

Way, Soul

“Think off center.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Thinking

“… her queen danced like a flame in the wind, and the mercurial king like the weight at the center of the earth…”

Megan Whalen Turner The King of Attolia

Source: The King of Attolia

Dance

“Reading is the creative center of a writer's life." -”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Life, Reading

“At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Love

“I don't like people who like me because I'm a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one's own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

Autobiographical Notes (1952)
Context: I don't like people who like me because I'm a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one's own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done.
I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

Love, Life, People, World

“Love what you do and do what you love. Don't listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it. You do what you want, what you love. Imagination should be the center of your life.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Love, Life, Imagination

“Dogs have given us their absolute all. We are the center of their universe. We are the focus of their love and faith and trust. They serve us in return for scraps. It is without a doubt the best deal man has ever made.”

Roger A. Caras (1928–2001) American photographer

Love, Faith, Dogs, Universe

“I don't even feel as if I'm the center of my own world, so how am I supposed to feel as though I'm the center of anyone else's?”

Nick Hornby book High Fidelity

Source: High Fidelity

World, Feeling

“Besides, you're a cat. It's your nature to think you're the center of the universe.”

Rick Riordan book The Serpent's Shadow

Source: The Serpent's Shadow

Cats, Nature, Thinking, Universe

“We are not as Christ-centered and cross-cherishing as we should be, because we do not ponder the truth that everything good, and everything bad that God turns for the good, was purchased by the sufferings of Christ.”

John Piper (1946) American writer

Source: The Passion of Jesus Christ

God, Truth, Suffering, Christ

“When you're a child you're the center of everything. Everything happens for you. Other people? They're only ghosts furnished for you to talk to.”

John Steinbeck book East of Eden

Source: East of Eden

People

“To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence.”

Simone Weil book Waiting for God

Source: Waiting for God

Soul, Imagination, Light, Silence

“The phone rang in the comm. center. Ian consulted the monitor. "It's Dan." He pressed a button. "Kabra here."
Dan's voice crackled through the attic. "Don't say it like that," he complained. "Your name still gives me heartburn.”

Gordon Korman book The Medusa Plot

Source: The Medusa Plot

“People want nothing but mirrors around them. To reflect them while they’re reflecting too… Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes. No beginning and no end. No center and no purpose.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

People

“at the center of every fairy tale lay a truth that gave the story its power.”

Susan Wiggs (1958) American writer

Source: The You I Never Knew

Truth

“The center will hold. I wondered.”

Richelle Mead book The Fiery Heart

Source: The Fiery Heart

“I tell you, deep inside you is a fountain of bliss, a fountain of joy. Deep inside your center core is truth, light, love, there is no guilt there, there is no fear there. Psychologists have never looked deep enough.”

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (1956) spiritual leader

Love, Truth, Fear, Light

“Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

“Retire to the center of your being, which is calmness.”

Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) Yogi, a guru of Kriya Yoga and founder of Self-Realization Fellowship

“I guess since the groin is the center of a guy's world, he rarely guesses it isn't the center of yours.”

Lilith Saintcrow book Strange Angels

Source: Strange Angels

World, Guy

“Every time we start thinking we're the center of the universe, the universe turns around and says with a slightly distracted air, 'I'm sorry. What'd you say your name was again?”

Margaret Maron book Bootlegger's Daughter

Source: Bootlegger's Daughter

Thinking, Universe, Time

“… I remember the first moment I looked at you walking toward me and realized that somehow the rest of the world seemed to vanish when I was with you. That you were the center of everything I did and felt and thought.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

World

“The centerhold.”

“How do you know?”

“Because we are the center.”

Richelle Mead book The Fiery Heart

Source: The Fiery Heart

“It is always from the depths of its impotence that each power center draws its power, hence their extreme maliciousness, and vanity”

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) French philosopher

Source: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Drawing

“Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world.”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Source: Studies in Nature and Literature

World, Star

“Man is not a circle with a single center; he is an ellipse with two focii. Facts are one, ideas are the other.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Idea

“If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil.”

Janet Fitch book White Oleander

Source: White Oleander

Motivation, Universe, Evil

“Every woman has to have something which singles her out, which catches the eyes, which makes her the center of attention. I am going to be french.”

Philippa Gregory book The Other Boleyn Girl

Source: The Other Boleyn Girl

“I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

Thinking, Christ

“Most hatred is based on fear, one way or another. Yeah. I wrapped myself in anger, with a dash of hate, and at the bottom of it all was an icy center of pure terror.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Guilty Pleasures

Source: Guilty Pleasures

Hate, Fear, Way, Anger

“We are not.
We never were; we never shall be. We return to the void we never, for mehay is the center of all, and all is the center of nothing.”

Amelia Atwater-Rhodes Wyvernhail

Source: Wyvernhail

“This has to be the most self-centered thing I've ever said, but no, I think you just wanted to vex me.”

Julia Quinn (1970) American novelist

Source: The Viscount Who Loved Me

Thinking

“Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

Life, Mathematics, Problem

“Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable… The thing that you can't really say because it's too complicated. It's too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.”

Marie Howe (1950) American writer

Silence

“Harry Dresden: Boobs are near the center of the universe, until you turn twenty-five or so. Which is also when young men’s auto insurance rates go down. This is not a coincidence.”

Jim Butcher book Ghost Story

Source: The Dresden Files, Ghost Story (2011), Chapter 9

Men, Universe

“Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must at that moment become the center of the universe.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

Nobel acceptance speech (1986)

Women, Men, Religion, Universe

“And I began to let him go. Hour by hour. Days into months. It was a physical sensation, like letting out the string of a kite. Except that the string was coming from my center.”

Augusten Burroughs book You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas

Source: You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas

“I told you before, we’re the center,” she said. “And the center will hold.”

Richelle Mead (1976) American writer

Source: The Ruby Circle

“Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.”

Jonathan Franzen book How to Be Alone

Source: How to Be Alone

Imagination, Universe

“A mind at peace a mind centered and not focused on harming others is stronger than any physical force in the universe.”

Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer

Peace, Universe

“I call this one the Ninja Center-fold! ~ Naruto”

Masashi Kishimoto book Naruto

Source: Naruto, Vol. 01: The Tests of the Ninja

“Above us our palace waits, the only one I've ever needed. Its walls are space, its floor is sky, its center everywhere. We rise; the shapes cluster around us in welcome, dissolving and forming again like fireflies in a summer evening.”

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (1956) novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayist

Source: The Palace of Illusions

Waiting, Summer

“There is a reason the word belonging has a synonym for want at its center; it is the human condition.”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Source: Vanishing Acts

“I want you to be everything that's you, deep at the center of your being.”
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Life

“In the center was a tiny handprint in red paint.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Reborn

Painting

“I spent a long time trying to find my center until I looked closely at it one night & found it had wheels and moved easily in the slightest breeze. So now I spend less time sitting and more time sailing.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Source: Story People: Selected Stories & Drawings of Brian Andreas

Time, Night

“We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us — the labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”

Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth

Episode 1, Opening introduction voice-over
The Power of Myth (1988)

God, World, Travel, Time

“Self-centered indulgence, pride and a lack of shame over sin are now emblems of the American lifestyle.”

Billy Graham (1918–2018) American Christian evangelist

“But whatever you do, find the God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated passion of your life, and find your way to say it and live for it and die for it. And you will make a difference that lasts. You will not waste your life.”

John Piper (1946) American writer

Source: Don't Waste Your Life

Life, God, Way, Passion

“There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.”

Toni Morrison book Sula

Source: Sula

Death, Silence, Time, Loneliness

“I was like a chocolate in a box, looking well behaved and perfect in place, all the while harboring a secret center.”

Deb Caletti (1963) American writer

Source: Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

Secret, Perfection, Box

“Even the sweetest girl needs a hard center, or she's not gonna make it out there!!" - Sakura”

Masashi Kishimoto book Naruto

Source: Naruto, Vol. 09: Turning the Tables

Girl

“Teaching kids how to feed themselves and how to live in a community responsibly is the center of an education.”

Alice Waters (1944) American chef, restaurateur, activist, and author

Education, Communication

“Assigning central importance to the aesthetic in human experience may seem to be a radical inversion, placing what is usually considered secondary and peripheral at the center of the human world as its nourishing source. Isn’t this an ingenuous simplification of the vast range and complexity of experience?”

Arnold Berleant (1932) American philosopher

Sensibility and Sense: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World (2010), Introduction

World

“The editors of the Blaue Reiter will now be the starting point for new exhibitions... We will try to become the center of the new movement. The association may assume there the role of the new”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

Scholle
Quote from a letter to his brother (4 Dec. 1911); as cited in 'Lankheit, Almanac 14'; as quoted in 'Leaders', in Movement, Manifesto, Melee: The Modernist Group, 1910-1914, Milton A. Cohen, Lexington Books, Sep 14, 2004, p. 67
1911 - 1914

“Darrall Imhoff, who as a 6-foot-10 rookie center for the New York Knicks had the misfortune of guarding Chamberlain during his 100-point game in 1962, said, "I spent 12 years in his armpits, and I always carried that 100-point game on my shoulders. "After I got my third foul, I said to one of the officials, Willy Smith, 'Why don't you just give him 100 points and we'll all go home?' Well, we did." Two nights later, at Madison Square Garden, Chamberlain tried to go for the century mark again. But Imhoff 'held' him to 54 points. The fans gave Imhoff a standing ovation. "He was an amazing, strong man," Imhoff said. "I always said the greatest record he ever held wasn't 100 points, but his 55 rebounds against Bill Russell. Those two players changed the whole game of basketball. The game just took an entire step up to the next level."”

Wilt Chamberlain (1936–1999) basketball player

Scoring

Home, Game, Strong, Change

“Indeed, racist views about the demographic 'threat' that the Palestinians constitute for a Jewish supremacist Israel are not confined to Ariel Sharon and the Israeli Jewish right wing (which is anyway a majority in Jewish Israel), but are also voiced by liberal and leftist Israeli Jews. In December 2000, the Institute of Policy and Strategy at the Herzlia Interdisciplinary Center in Israel held its first of a projected series of annual conferences dealing with the strength and security of Israel, especially with regards to maintaining its Jewish supremacist character. One of the 'Main Points' identified in the 52-page conference report is the concern over the numbers needed to maintain the Jewish supremacy of Israel.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Ibid.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

“I think that what we need is to create policies which deal with immigration in a rational way. And a rational way is not locking children up in detention centers or separating them from their mothers. What we need is Trump to sit down with members of Congress and work on a rational program which deals with this serious issue.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

Answering to Jake Tapper on if he is in favor of abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. [Mirkinson, Jack, Not Good Enough, Bernie Sanders, https://splinternews.com/not-good-enough-bernie-sanders-1827099565, 27 June 2018, Splinter News, 26 June 2018]
2010s, 2018

Children, Way, Thinking

“And just so — if I could, because he insulted a lot of people. I've had more calls on that statement that Ted made — New York is a great place. It's got great people, it's got loving people, wonderful people. When the World Trade Center came down, I saw something that no place on Earth could have handled more beautifully, more humanely than New York. You had two one hundred, you had two 110-story buildings come crashing down. I saw them come down. Thousands of people killed, and the cleanup started the next day, and it was the most horrific cleanup, probably in the history of doing this, and in construction. I was down there, and I've never seen anything like it. And the people in New York fought and fought and fought, and we saw more death, and even the smell of death — nobody understood it. And it was with us for months, the smell, the air. And we rebuilt downtown Manhattan, and everybody in the world watched and everybody in the world loved New York and loved New Yorkers. And I have to tell you, that was a very insulting statement that Ted made.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Full Transcript of the Sixth Republican Debate in Charleston http://time.com/4182096/republican-debate-charleston-transcript-full-text/, Time (14 January 2016). 2010s, 2016, January

Love, Death, People, World

“Dr. Cleland was among the first to see project management strategically as well as tactically, at the center of organizational competencies… It's hard to believe, but there was a time when it was new and unfamiliar. Dr. Cleland was a driving force behind the adoption of project management as a professional competency, and is a key contributor to the success of all organizations that use professional project management standards and methodologies today.”

Gregory Balestrero (1947) American industrial engineer

Balestrero cited in: G.R. Boyet & M. Maguire Kelly (2010) PMI Pays Tribute to Dr. David I. Cleland for a Lifetime of Achievement to Project Management and the Profession http://www.pmi.org/About-Us/Press-Releases/PMI-Pays-Tribute-to-Dr-David-I-Cleland.aspx. at pmi.org. 13 July 2010. 2010s

Time, Success

“They’ll be fine, and wiser for the experience. Young minds are brittle. Oldsters, now, we’ve had some disappointments. We’ve set aside the notion that we’re the center of the universe, so our minds bend with strain instead of meeting it head-on.”

Scott Lynch book The Republic of Thieves

Source: The Republic of Thieves (2013), Chapter 4 “Across the Amathel” section 1 (p. 184)

Disappointment, Universe

“We lived in a large wooden house, with one room succeeding another [Zadkine, recalling in this quote his childhood's days in Smolensk, Russia]. The house was at the end of a blind alley. On one side were a beautiful garden and an orchard. In the summer there was an atmosphere of fragrance and peace. A large room with three windows looked out into the courtyard. Bookshelves along the walls with books and more books; a black table and six ugly Viennese chairs, also black, and in the center of the bare, inhospitable table, a sort of vase in coloured plaster representing a hand holding a goblet. It was the only piece of sculpture in the house!”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

As quoted in: 'The artist, his life and his epoch' (excerpt), Ionel Jianou, 1964; for the Zadkine Research Center https://www.zadkine.com/writing 1960 - 1968

Books, Peace, Beauty, Quotes

“Now it was Liddle, jerking into motion as Wertz poised at the plate, and then the motion smoothed out and the ball came sweeping in to Wertz, a shoulder-high pitch, a fast ball that probably would have been a fast curve, except that Wertz was coming around and hitting it, hitting it about as hard as I have ever seen ball hit, on a high line to dead center field. For whatever it is worth, I have seen such hitters as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, Jimmy Foxx, Ralph Kiner, Hack Wilson, Johnny Mize, and lesser-known but equally long hitters as Wally Berger and Bob Seeds send the batted ball tremendous distances. None, that I recall, ever hit a ball any harder than this one by Wertz in my presence.”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

From A Day in the Bleachers (1955), p. 116; reprinted in The Greatest Baseball Stories Ever Told: Thirty Unforgettable Tales from the Diamond https://books.google.com/books?id=dj6_F7omJZcC&pg=PA151&dq=%22Now+it+was+Liddle%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CBoQ6AEwAWoVChMIwoTj2c7GxwIVRDw-Ch2howea#v=onepage&q=%22Now%20it%20was%20Liddle%22&f=false (2001), edited by Jeff Silverman, p. 151 Sports-related

Jerk, Dead

“Thus the radii of all education run together into one center which is called personality.”

Max Stirner book The False Principle of our Education

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 25

Education, Personality

“Learn from Ali how to fight
without your ego participating.
God's lion did nothing
that didn't originate
from his deep center.”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet

"Ali in Battle" an account of Ali ibn Abi Talib's explanation as to why he declined to kill someone who had spit in his face as Ali was defeating him in battle, in Ch. 20 : In Baghdad dreaming of Cairo
Disputed, The Essential Rumi (1995)

God, Learning, Fight

“As long as poets belonged to a broader class of artists and intellectuals, they centered their lives in urban bohemias, where they maintained a distrustful independence from institutions. Once poets began moving into universities, they abandoned the working-class heterogeneity of Greenwich Village and North Beach for the professional homogeneity of academia.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Universe

“This is an ironic choice for a president-elect who has promised to change Washington, make politics more civil and govern from the center.”

Rahm Emanuel (1959) politician, investment banker, White House Chief of Staff

House Minority Leader John Boehner on Obama's hiring Emanuel as White House Chief of Staff, as quoted in San Francisco Chronicle http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/06/MN6C13VKH5.DTL&type=politics. About

Change

“But if you aren't any religion, how are you going to know if you should join the Y or the Jewish Community Center?”

Judy Blume (1938) American children's writer

Janie
Are You There God? It's Me Margaret. (1970)

Religion, Communication

“Compare Holland with Russia; you see only marshy and sterile islands in the former, which rise from the center of the ocean: a small republic which is only 48 miles length by 40 wide. But this small body is the very nerve-center of the region: immense people live in it, and these industrious people are both powerful and rich. They shook the yoke of the Spanish domination, which was then the most formidable monarchy of Europe. The trade of this republic extends to the ends of the world; and new trade appears almost immediately; it can maintain in times of war an army fifty thousand men, without counting a many and well maintained fleet.”

Frederick II of Prussia book Anti-Machiavel

Source: Anti-Machiavel, Ch. 5 : How It Is Necessary To Control The Cities, Or The Principalities, Which Are Controlled By Their Own Laws Before They Were Conquered

Men, War, People, World

“This is my little disquisition about football: the quarterback, the center, and the towel. Page 116”

Renata Adler (1938) American author, journalist and film critic

Pitch Dark (1983)

Football

“There was a white man sitting at the kitchen table, warming his hands by wrapping them around a hot cup of tea. He had kind of an oblong face, curly red hair piled on top, a close-cropped but dense red beard, shocking blue eyes that always looked wide open. He face was ruddy with the outdoors, and the way he was sitting there with that tea, he looked so calm, so centered, almost like he was in meditation. When I came in, he looked at me and smiled just a trace, without showing his teeth…”

Neal Stephenson book Zodiac

The legendary S.T. finally meets the legendary Hank Boone (proto-Enoch Root character), end of chapter 24
Zodiac (1988)

Smile, Way, Tea

“There is a gap between industry and academia. Industry views academia as publication-focused: self-centered, lacking innovation, unaware of IP. Academia views industry as money-focused: driven by the bottom-line, innovating too quickly, product-focused. I would like to see more input from industry and emphasis on understanding 'innovation' to close this gap.”

Stephen F Bush

Stephen F. Bush, Director - Standardization Programs Development http://www.comsoc.org/blog/voice-new-ieee-comsoc-leadership-team Voices from the IEEE ComSoc Leadership Team

Money, Understanding

“It has been remarked that when one passes among the patients of the psychiatric ward, he encounters among the several sufferers every aspect of normal personality in morbid exaggeration. … As one passes through the modern centers of enterprise and of higher learning, he is met with similar autonomies of development. … The scientist, the technician, the scholar, who have left the One for the Many are puffed up with vanity over their ability to describe precisely some minute portion of the world. Men so obsessed with fragments can no more be reasoned with than other psychotics.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 62.

Men, World, Suffering, Learning

“The cosmos exploded, actualizing its potentiality of space and time. The centers of power, like fragments of a bursting bomb, were hurled apart. But each one retained in itself, as a memory and a longing, the single spirit of the whole; and each mirrored in itself aspects of all the others throughout all the cosmical space and time.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 162)

Memory, Time

“America really has no Left party. We have a center-right party -- which I would call what the Democrats are now -- and then we have the Republicans, a party that drove the Crazy Bus straight into Nut Town.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

Source: Interview with the Oxford Union http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPb1VNt2EOo (25 May 2015)

“I never thought I would see the day when America (which is based on the idea of liberty, from which the world Liberal comes) would become so self-centered and hypocritical. I mean if democracy considers liberal to be a term of abuse, then we should be terrified. A liberal is someone who belives in liberty. And if it is wrong to be liberal, then the other side has to be facist.”

Derek Walcott (1930–2017) Saint Lucian–Trinidadian poet and playwright

Conversations with Derek Walcott (University Press Mississippi, 1996, page.165)

World, Democracy, Idea

“For an aggregate of sensations to have become a remembrance capable of classification in time, it must have ceased to be actual, we must have lost the sense of its infinite complexity, otherwise it would have remained present. It must, so to speak, have crystallized around a center of associations of ideas which will be a sort of label. It is only when they have lost all life that we can classify our memories in time as a botanist arranges dried flowers in his herbarium.”

Henri Poincaré book The Value of Science

Pour qu’un ensemble de sensations soit devenu un souvenir susceptible d’être classé dans le temps, il faut qu’il ait cessé d’être actuel, que nous ayons perdu le sens de son infinie complexité, sans quoi il serait resté actuel. Il faut qu’il ait pour ainsi dire cristallisé autour d’un centre d’associations d’idées qui sera comme une sorte d’étiquette. Ce n’est que quand ils auront ainsi perdu toute vie que nous pourrons classer nos souvenirs dans le temps, comme un botaniste range dans son herbier les fleurs desséchées.
Source: The Value of Science (1905), Ch. 2: The Measure of Time

Life, Flowers, Idea, Sense

“With Vytautas Juozapaitis as a perfectly evil Don Giovanni, the Teatro Lirico d'Europa seduced an audience of about 850 at the Garde Arts Center Monday night. Juozapaitis, a singer with the Lithuanian National Opera, stood out as the despicable title character of this most famous of Mozart operas. He took over the stage with both his supple and strong voice as well as a stage presence that seemed so natural it was hard to look at him without thinking he was Don Giovanni.”

Vytautas Juozapaitis (1963) Lithuanian opera singer

Lee Howard, "'Don Giovanni' Delights Opera Fans at the Garde". The New London Day (April 1, 2004)

Art, Nature, Thinking, Strong

“[Regarding how the L Word change how she selects her roles] I really have a lot less tolerance for being subjugated to simply being the emotional center of a story, rather than being the active portion of the plot. It's as if women can't drive the action so often in stories. I don't know who made up that rule but it can get very frustrating if there's not more to play.”

Jennifer Beals (1963) American actress and a former teen model

Interview on AfterEllen.com (3 June 2010) http://archive.is/20130628093754/http://www.afterellen.com/people/2010/6/jennifer-beals-interview?page=0,1

Women, Change

“Once early in the morning, at two or three in the morning, when the master was asleep, the books in the library began to quarrel with each other as to which was the king of the library. The dictionary contended quite angrily that he was the master of the library because without words there would be no communication at all. The book of science argued stridently that he was the master of the library for without science there would have been no printing press or any of the other wonders of the world. The book of poetry claimed that he was the king, the master of the library, because he gave surcease and calm to his master when he was troubled. The books of philosophy, the economic books, all put in their claims, and the clamor was great and the noise at its height when a small low voice was heard from an old brown book lying in the center of the table and the voice said "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want."”

Louis Nizer (1902–1994) American lawyer

And all of the noise and the clamor in the library ceased, and there was a hush in the library, for all of the books knew who the real master of the library was.
"Ministers of Justice", Address delivered at the Eighty-Second Annual Convention of the Tennessee Bar Association at Gatlinburg, June 5, 1963; published in 31 Tennessee Law Review 1 (Fall 1963), p. 19.

Books, World, Communication, Lying