Quotes about door
page 8

“Leaves of brown they fall to the ground.
And it's here, over there leaves around.
Shut the door, dim the lights and relax.
What is more, your desire or the facts?”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Autumn Song
Song lyrics, Hard Nose the Highway (1973)

Light

“Writings such as commentaries and annotations exist to assist people in becoming sages, but in fact they close the doors to sagehood.”

Li Zhi (philosopher) (1527–1602) Chinese philosopher

[Saussy, Haun, Lee, Pauline, Handler-Spitz, Rivi, A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep (Hidden): Selected Writings, 2016, Columbia University Press, 0231541538, https://books.google.com/books?id=4Xm0CwAAQBAJ, Prefaces, 4–5]

People

“Somehow we must transform the dynamics of the world power struggle from the negative nuclear arms race which no one can win to a positive contest to harness man's creative genius for the purpose of making peace and prosperity a reality for all of the nations of the world. In short, we must shift the arms race into a "peace race". If we have the will and determination to mount such a peace offensive, we will unlock hitherto tightly sealed doors of hope and transform our imminent cosmic elegy into a psalm of creative fulfillment.”

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

1960s, The Quest for Peace and Justice (1964)

World, Peace, Hope, Reality

“Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty.”

Toni Morrison book The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye (1969) First lines

Housing

“Arrested Development opened a lot of doors for me, and once I sort of became, I guess what you'd say "available," there was a lot of opportunity out there, and it's been nice; a lot of people have found it in their hearts to offer me movie parts.”

Will Arnett (1970) Canadian actor

"Will Arnett: The TV Squad Interview," TV Squad (August 2, 2006) http://www.tvsquad.com/2006/08/02/will-arnett-the-tv-squad-interview/ 2006

People, Heart, Parting

“It is said that young men of genius come to London with great poems and dramas in their pockets and find every door closed against them. Chatterton's death perpetuated this legend. But when I, George Moore, came to London in search of literary adventure, I found a ready welcome. Possibly I should not have been accorded any welcome had I been anything but an ordinary person.”

George Moore (novelist) (1852–1933) Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist

Source: Confessions of a Young Man http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12278/12278-h/12278-h.htm (1886), Ch. 12.

Death, Men, Search, Personality

“Landscapes are useful to a figure painter, too; out-of-doors one uses colours one would never think of in the weaker studio light. But landscape painting is a thankless job; you waste half a day for the sake of one hour's painting. You only finish one painting out of ten, because the weather keeps changing. You start work on a sunlight effect and it comes on to rain – or you had a few clouds in the sky, and the wind blows them away. It's always the same story!”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

Source: undated quotes, Renoir – his life and work, 1975, p. 196 : on painting landscape in open air, to art-buyer George Riviere.

Thinking, Light, Change, Painting

“Let me tell you about the English War Bow, Joscelyn. It is a simple thing, med of yew, a peasant's tool, really. My huntsman can use one, but he is the only man in Berat who has ever mastered the weapon. Why do you think that is? I'll tell you anyway. It takes years, Joscelyn, many years to master the yew bow. Ten years? Probably that long, and after ten years a man can send an arrow clean through armor at two hundred paces. Splat! A thousand ecus of man, armor, and weaponry fallen to a peasant's bow. And it isn't luck, Joscelyn. My huntsman can put an arrow through a bracelet at a hundred paces. He can pierce mail coat at two hundred. I've seen him put an arrow through an oak door at a hundred and fifty, and the door was three inches thick!”

Bernard Cornwell The Grail Quest

The Count of Berat, p. 111
The Grail Quest, Heretic (2003)

War, Thinking

“O Love, divine Love, why do You lay siege to me?
In a frenzy of love for me, You find no rest.
From five sides You move against me:
Hearing, sight, taste, touch, and scent.
To come out is to be caught; I cannot hide from You.
If I come out through sight I see Love
Painted in every form and color,
Inviting me to come to You, to dwell in You.
If I leave through the door of hearing,
What I hear points only to You, Lord;
I cannot escape Love through this gage.
If I come out through taste, every flavor proclaims:
"Love, divine Love, hungering Love!
You have caught me on Your hook, for you want to reign in me."
If I leave through the door of scent
I sense You in all creation; You have caught me
And wounded me through that fragrance.
If I come out through the sense of touch
I find Your lineaments in every creature;
To try to flee from You is madness.”

Jacopone da Todi (1236–1306) Italian Franciscan mystic

The Lauds

Love, Hunger, Color, Sense

“I really hope that the symbolism isn't lost on you four Superstars in the chamber right now, because it's killing me. Here's four extremely weak individuals that, every day, are locked inside a prison of addiction, like most of these people here today; and now, the four of you are locked inside the Elimination Chamber with me. And be sure, it's not me locked in here with you — it's you locked in here with me. And tomorrow morning, when you're nursing the pain and the wounds that this chamber and myself have caused you, I want you to remember that when your pod door opens and you came out and I defeated you, don't think of it as failure. Think of it as me saving you. [Standing over Rey Mysterio's pod] Think of it as me setting you free.
Punk: [To Undertaker, after elimination R-Truth] You'd better pray that your pod door opens last, 'cause when you come out, I'm gonna make you tap out, just like I did before. [To John Morrison] And I'm gonna prove to you that your decadent rock life will get you nowhere. I'm gonna prove to the world that straight-edge means I'm better than you! For those of you at home, feel free, place your hand on the screen and feel CM Punk flow through you!
Lawler: Matt, did you just put your hand on the screen?
Striker: Yes.
Lawler: Do you feel CM Punk flow through you?
Punk: Nobody can stop me!
Cole: Guys, the sermon's over in [checking the timer] three seconds.”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

Elimination Chamber - February 21, 2010
Friday Night SmackDown

Life, Pain, People, Truth

“Everything takes place in an infinitely greater field than what is framed by the size of the picture or by what is materially in the picture. This matter [door/window/wall] is but a support inviting the viewer to participate in the much larger game of a thousand and one visions and feelings; it is the talisman lifting or sinking walls into the deepest recesses of our spirit, opening and at times closing windows in the construction of our impotence, our bondage, or our freedom. The 'subject-matter' then may be found in the picture or it may exist solely inside the spectator's head.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

1945 - 1970, A Report on the Wall' 1970

Feeling, Game, Support, Freedom

“It seems to me obvious that infants and many animals that do not in any ordinary sense have a language or perform speech acts nonetheless have Intentional states. Only someone in the grip of a philosophical theory would deny that small babies can literally be said to want milk and that dogs want to be let out or believe that their master is at the door.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

Source: Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), P. 5.

Dogs, Sense, Animals, Baby

“The head tumbles between the legs
like a wooden ball
you fall, dark night
in the eyes,
the door a span away
inaccessible
you are on your knees
…”

Caterina Davinio (1957) Italian writer

The Book of Opium (1975 - 1990), Overdose
Source: Caterina Davinio, Il libro dell'oppio 1975 – 1990] (The Book of Opium 1975 – 1990), Puntoacapo Editrice, Novi Ligure 2012. English translation by Caterina Davinio and David W. Seaman.</ref>

Night

“An attic’s the afterlife of a house,” said Otille, opening the door. “Or so my mother used to say.”

Lucius Shepard book Green Eyes

Source: Green Eyes (1984), Chapter 15, p. 201

Housing

“A burgher may acquire merit; by excessive efforts he may even educate his mind; but his personal qualities are lost, or worse than lost, let him struggle as he will. Since the nobleman, frequenting the society of the most polished, is compelled to give himself a polished manner; since this manner, neither door nor gate being shut against him, grows at last an unconstrained one; since, in court or camp, his figure, his person, are a part of his possessions, and it may be the most necessary part, — he has reason enough to put some value on them, and to show that he puts some.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Goethe, translated by Thomas Carlyle (1824), cited in: Jürgen Habermas (1989) Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, English ed. p. 12

Education, Effort, Parting, Personality

“I hoped I might become a debonair, hard-drinking, poetic Irishman like him. I'd be a New York character. I'd set the table on a roar and dominate the bars of Greenwich Village with song and story. At the Lion’s Head Bar I drank whiskey after whiskey to give myself the courage to be colorful. Bartenders suggested I slow down. Friends said they didn't understand a word coming out of my mouth. They lifted me out of the bar and into a taxi, paid the driver and told him to drive nonstop till I reached my door.”

Frank McCourt book Teacher Man

Teacher Man (2005)

Hope, Color, Courage, Drink

“I don't remember what I did after I left her. Maybe I went up to Benny Cohen's room over the Grand Central Market. He had a wooden leg with a little door in it. Inside the door were marijuana cigarets.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust (1939), Chapter Four

Marijuana

“… yet when the Prime Minister and I knock at the door of these great landlords, and say to them: "Here, you know these poor fellows who have been digging up royalties at the risk of their lives, some of them are old, they have survived the perils of their trade, they are broken, they can earn no more. Won't you give them something towards keeping them out of the workhouse?" they scowl at us. We say, "Only a ha'penny, just a copper". They retort, "You thieves!" And they turn their dogs on to us, and you can hear their bark every morning. If this is an indication of the view taken by these great landlords of their responsibility to the people who, at the risk of life, create their wealth, then I say their day of reckoning is at hand.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Limehouse, East London (30 July 1909), quoted in Better Times: Speeches by the Right Hon. D. Lloyd George, M.P., Chancellor of the Exchequer (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), pp. 154-155.
Chancellor of the Exchequer

Life, People, Dogs, Wealth

“If low-wage workers do not always behave in an economically rational way, that is, as free agents within a capitalist democracy, it is because they dwell in a place that is neither free nor in any way democratic. When you enter the low-wage workplace — and many of the medium-wage workplaces as well — you check your civil liberties at the door, leave America and all it supposedly stands for behind, and learn to zip your lips for the duration of the shift. The consequences of this routine surrender go beyond the issues of wages and poverty. We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world's preeminent democracy, after all, if large numbers of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship.”

Barbara Ehrenreich (1941) American writer and journalist

Evaluation (p. 210)
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (2001)

World, Way, Democracy, Learning

“Seeing a guest come, she feels shy;
Her stockings coming down, away she tries to fly.
Her hairpin drops;
She never stops
But to look back.
She leans against the door,
Pretending to sniff at mume blossoms once more.”

Li Qingzhao (1084–1155) Chinese writer

《点绛唇》 ("Rouged Lips"), as translated by Xu Yuan Zhong in Song of the Immortals (New World Press, 1994), p. 227

Feeling, Flying

“If truth were left to a market philosophy, there would be no point in continuing to make an argument for which there are no takers, or to ask a question for which there are no answers. The minority community has other grounds to sustain a wholesome discomfort and thereby keeps the door open for solutions not yet found.”

John Howard Yoder (1927–1997) 20th century American Mennonite theologian

Source: The Priestly Kingdom (1984), p. 99

Truth, Communication, Question

“p>The inherent contradictions and binds men find themselves in in trying to become less macho in their relationship with a woman were poignantly expressed in a letter written by a young man to a New York newspaper in response to an article that addressed itself to a question posed by a woman writer—whether women would be able to think of a non-macho man as sexy. The letter writer wrote:I am by nature a gentle and non-aggressive 27-year-old man who often finds women turned off sexually by my tenderness and non-macho view of the world. I have come to realize that for all their talk, a lot of women still want the hairy, sexy, war-mongering, aggressive machoman of their dreams. So after several fruitless years as a gentle poet-man, I now turn myself into a heavy machismo when I go out with a woman. It works. I open the doors, I order the food and drinks, I decide which movie or play we will see. I keep my shirt unbuttoned down past my nipples and wear a gold chain around my neck with a carved elephant tusk medallion, and if the relationship is not working out, I make the first move and tell my companion that I'm sorry but we're through.The sad thing about all this is that it works.”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

After all those years of being naturally sensitive and gentle, and now I've got to turn myself inside out just to appear sexy. It's fun and it's nice, but I do wish I could just be myself again.</blockquote>
Who Is the Victim? Who Is the Oppressor?, pp. 165–166
The New Male (1979)

Women, Men, War, World

“I get the willies when I see closed doors. Even at work, where I am doing so well now, the sight of a closed door is sometimes enough to make me dread that something horrible is happening behind it, something that is going to affect me adversely; if I am tired and dejected from a night of lies or booze or sex or just nerves and insomnia, I can almost smell the disaster mounting invisibly and flooding out toward me through the frosted glass panes. My hands may perspire, and my voice may come out strange. I wonder why. Something must have happened to me sometime.”

Joseph Heller book Something Happened

Opening Lines
Something Happened (1974)

Sex, Night

“Seven thirty-nine, more than three hundred miles to the north and east, Jack Reacher climbed out of his motel room window. One minute earlier, he had been in the bathroom, brushing his teeth. One minute before that, he had opened the door of his room to check the morning temperature. He had left it open, and the closet just inside the entrance passageway was faced with mirrored glass, and there was a shaving mirror in the bathroom on a cantilevered arm, and by a freak of optical chance he caught sight of four men getting out of a car and walking toward the motel office. Pure luck, but a guy as vigilant as Jack Reacher gets lucky more times than the average.”

Lee Child book Echo Burning

Echo Burning, Ch. 1 (2001).

Men, Cars, Guy, Chance

“The Hungarian lieutenant went around with a basket and retrieved the last possessions from those who chose not to go on tasting the bitterness of fear.
"There are eighty of you in the car," the German officer added. "If anyone goes missing, you will all be shot, like dogs."
The two disappeared. The doors clanked shut. We had fallen into the trap, up to our necks. The doors were nailed, the way back irrevocably cut off. The world had become a hermetically sealed cattle car.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

World, Fear, Dogs, Cars

“[from a skit about airports] You know you're in trouble when at the control tower, there's a note taped to the door that says "Back in five minutes."”

Jeff Foxworthy (1958) American stand-up comedian

Games Rednecks Play (1995)

“It just never occurred to me that the real distance I would have to cross would be in my own mind. In that respect, I had flown half a million miles before I moved an inch, and these three volumes are just the rattling the side of my cot made when I climbed over, on the first stage of that long, momentous journey across the carpet, towards the light of the open door.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

closing lines, p. 249
Memoirs, May Week Was in June (1990)

Light

“But wit cuts its bright way through the glass-door of public favour;”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

Way

“He had a feeling that somewhere in the course of her life something had happened to her, something terrible which in the end had given her a great understanding and clarity of mind. He knew, too, almost at once, on the day she had driven up to the door of the cottage, that she had made a discovery about life which he himself had made long since... that there is nothing of such force as the power of a person content merely to be himself, nothing so invincible as the power of simple honesty, nothing so successful as the life of one who runs alone. Somewhere she had learned all this. She was like a woman to whom nothing could ever again happen.”

Louis Bromfield (1896–1956) American author and conservationist

Early Autumn : A Story of a Lady (1926)

Life, Feeling, Understanding, Learning

“"I see you are looking at my feet," he said to her when car was in motion.
"I beg your pardon?" said the woman.
"I said I see you're looking at my feet".
"I beg your pardon. I happened to be looking at the floor," said the woman, and faced the doors of the car.
"If you want to look at my feet, say so," said the young man. "But don't be a God-damned sneak about it."
"Let me out here, please," the woman said quickly to the girl operating the car.
The car doors opened and the woman got out without looking back.
"I have two normal feet and I can't see the slightest God-damned reason why anybody should stare at them," said the young man.”

Jerome David Salinger book Nine Stories

Nine Stories (1953), A Perfect Day for Bananafish (1948)

God, Cars, Girl

“Any restrictions to freedom of expression will always open the door to possible others, because analogical reasoning can mount arguments showing why this or that class of objects is closely similar to those for which exceptions have been made.”

Randal Marlin (1938) Canadian academic

Source: Propaganda & The Ethics Of Persuasion (2002), Chapter Six, Freedom Of Expression, p. 230

Freedom

“I'd have to lock the door of the paint room. He wouldn't allow anyone in. I was like a prisoner.”

Margaret Keane (1927) American artist

1999, Cited by Amy M. Spindler

Painting

“Being a champion opens lots of doors—I'd like to get a real estate license, maybe sell insurance.”

Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer

http://jco.usfca.edu/boxing/desert.html
On boxing

“I saw Larry King and he was interviewing Pam Anderson. And it was really fun because Pam Anderson…remember when Pam Anderson did her hepatitis tour? Remember when she got hepatitis and then she did a press tour about it, because she is very conscious of woman's issues, and she went on Larry King and she's talking about it. Oh, and by the way, she said she got it from Tommy Lee, which, of course, she did. And Tommy Lee said she got it from a door knob. And…I'm sure that's at least what she got from Tommy Lee. I saw Tommy Lee at an award show two weeks before, I got crabs just from looking at him. So, anyway, she's talking a minute and then she had had her boobs reduced, you know, she keeps getting reduced and bigger and stuff. And then, Larry has the balls to say to her (imitating Larry King), "Aren't you afraid of that plastic surgery?"”

Kathy Griffin (1960) American actress and comedian

and, in the meantime, his ears meeting at the back of his neck.
Allegedly (2004)

Way

“A Prophetess inspir'd thou shalt behold
Down in a Cave, who long hath Fate foretold;
Which writ in Leaves, the Maid in order puts,
And to secure, in hollow Marble shuts.
They keep their Stations just as she design'd:
But the Door op'ning, with the smallest Wind,
The slender leaves do every way disperse.”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro (2nd ed. 1654), Virgil's Æneis

Fate, Way

“A builder. A rough and ready plasterer. A colour grinder. He Courbet is like a Roman bricklayer. And yet he's another true painter. There's no one in this century that surpasses him. Even though he rolls up his sleeves, plugs up his ears, demolishes columns, his workmanship is classical!... His view was always compositional. His vision remained traditional. Like his palette-knife, he used it only out of doors. He was sophisticated and brought his work to a high finish... His great contribution is the poetic introduction of nature - the smell of damp leaves, mossy forest cuttings - into nineteenth century painting; the murmur of rain, woodlands shadows, sunlight moving under trees. The sea. And snow, he painted snow like no one else!”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 198 in: 'What he told me – II. The Louvre'

Nature, Tree, Painting, Sea

“While the door-to-door campaign was already on, we made sure that each and every person and every household in each and every village, town and city gets our party and Narendra Modi’s message. Around 33 per cent of Uttar Pradesh is a dark area, in the sense that there are no newspapers, no TV, nothing.”

Amit Shah (1964) Indian politician

"Exclusive Amit Shah Interview: People are waiting to vote for Modi," 2013, "Sunday Interview: We had 450 video raths with GPS and I’d get feedback on my mobile, says Amit Shah", 2014

Sense, Personality

“When one door closes, fortune will usually open another.”

Fernando de Rojas La Celestina

Act XV.
La Celestina (1499)

“The days of wine and roses laugh and run away like a child at play
Through the meadow land toward a closing door
A door marked "nevermore" that wasn't there before”

Johnny Mercer (1909–1976) American lyricist, songwriter, singer and music professional

Song The Days of Wine and Roses

Wine

“The building itself is hostile: cracked plaster, broken windows, splintered doors and carved up desks, gloomy corridors and metal stairways, dingy cafeteria (they can eat sitting down only in 20 minute shifts) and an auditorium which has no windows. It does have murals, however, depicting mute, muscular harvesters, faded and immobile under a mustard sun.”

Bel Kaufmanová book Up the Down Staircase

Part I, ch. 5 (Sylvia Barrett)
Up the Down Staircase (1965)

Hostility, Sun

“How does the Malay in the kampong find his way out into this modernised civil society? By becoming servants of the 0.3 per cent who would have the money to hire them to clean their shoe, open their motorcar doors?”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

Lee Kuan Yew in the Parliament of Malaysia, 1965 http://maddruid.com/?p=645 1960s

Money, Shoe, Way

“I went up to my room, up the dusty stairs of Bunker Hill, past the soot-covered frame buildings along that dark street, sand and oil and grease choking the futile palm trees standing like dying prisoners, chained to a little plot of ground with black pavement hiding their feet. Dust and old buildings and old people sitting at windows, old people tottering out of doors, old people moving painfully along the dark street. The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sun killed them, tore themselves out by the roots in their last days, deserted the smug prosperity of Kansas City and Chicago and Peoria to find a place in the sun. And when they got here they found that other and greater thieves had already taken possession, that even the sun belonged to the others; Smith and Jones and Parker, druggist, banker, baker, dust of Chicago and Cincinnati and Cleveland on their shoes, doomed to die in the sun, a few dollars in the bank, enough to subscribe to the Los Angeles Times, enough to keep alive the illusion that this was paradise, that their little papier-mâché homes were castles. The uprooted ones, the empty sad folks, the old and the young folks, the folks from back home. These were my countrymen, these were the new Californians. With their bright polo shirts and sunglasses, they were in paradise, they belonged.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Money, People, Sadness, Angels

“Let me tell you this: They shut me down on radio, that's fine, I'll do TV. They shut me down on TV, that's fine, I'll do Internet. They shut me down on the Internet, that's fine, I'll do stage shows. They shut me down on stage shows, that's fine, I'll go door to door. You will have to shoot me in the head. We are not stopping.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

The Glenn Beck Program
Premiere Radio Networks
2010-05-18
After attacking Media Matters, Beck says: "You will have to shoot me in the head. We are not stopping"
2010-05-18
Media Matters for America
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201005180014
2010s, 2010

“The fate of all explanation is to close one door only to have another fly wide open.”

Charles Fort (1874–1932) American writer

Source: The Book of The Damned (1919), Ch. 3, part 2 at resologist.net

Fate, Flying

“Jenna stumbled backward, her eyes on the woman who slammed the door behind her with one foot while both hands held a gun. A big gun. Pointed right at Jenna.”

Lis Wiehl (1961) American legal scholar

Source: Heart of Ice A Triple Threat Novel with April Henry (Thomas Nelson), p. 108

“On the whole we get on pretty smoothly in our domestic relations, except in the lower strata of the Military Classes. There the want of tact and discretion on the part of the husbands produces at times indescribable disasters. Relying too much on the offensive weapons of their acute angles instead of the defensive organs of good sense and seasonable simulation, these reckless creatures too often neglect the prescribed construction of the women's apartments, or irritate their wives by ill-advised expressions out of doors, which they refuse immediately to retract. Moreover a blunt and stolid regard for literal truth indisposes them to make those lavish promises by which the more judicious Circle can in a moment pacify his consort. The result is massacre; not, however, without its advantages, as it eliminates the more brutal and troublesome of the Isosceles; and by many of our Circles the destructiveness of the Thinner Sex is regarded as one among many providential arrangements for suppressing redundant population, and nipping Revolution in the bud.

Yet even in our best regulated and most approximately Circular families I cannot say that the ideal of family life is so high as with you in Spaceland. There is peace, in so far as the absence of slaughter may be called by that name, but there is necessarily little harmony of tastes or pursuits; and the cautious wisdom of the Circles has ensured safety at the cost of domestic comfort.”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART I: THIS WORLD, Chapter 4. Concerning the Women

Life, Wisdom, Women, Truth

“And the look on her face as she opened the door
Was like an old joke told by a friend.
It'd taken ten more years but she'd found her smile
And I watched the corners start to bend.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

Sequel
Song lyrics, Sequel (1981)

Smile

“Either an ancient cursed Egyptian mummy has come back to life and is trying to kill the people next door, or they're watching a movie.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Lullaby (2002)

Life, People

“No change (Marshall replacing former SecDef. Louis Johnson, who, soon after he resigned, was diagnosed with a fatal "brain malady") could have been more welcome to me. It brought only one embarrassment. The General (Marshall) insisted, overruling every protest of mine, in meticulously observing the protocol involved in my being the senior Cabinet officer. Never would he go through a door before me, or walk anywhere but on my left; he would go around an automobile to enter it after me and sit on the left; in meetings he would insist on my speaking before him. To be treated so by a revered and beloved former chief was a harrowing experience. But the result in government was, I think, unique in the history of the Republic. For the first time and perhaps, though I am not sure, the last, the Secretaries of State and Defense, with their top advisors, met with the Chiefs of Staff in their map room and discussed common problems together. At one of these meetings General Bradley and I made a treaty, thereafter scrupulously observed. The phrases 'from a military point of view' and 'from a political point of view' were excluded from our talks. No such dichotomy existed. Each of us had our tactical and strategic problems, but they were interconnected, not separate.”

Dean Acheson book Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), State Department Management, Leadership Perspectives

History, Problem, Thinking, Change

“Do nine tenants in a residential building have the right to place the dumpsters in front of the tenth tenant's door? Seemingly, they enjoy a clear majority. But the role of democracy is not only to assure the governance of the majority, but to protect the rights of the minority.”

Yoel Esteron (1954) Israeli journalist

About the tyranny of the majority.
Who's for destroying democracy? (14-02-2016)

Democracy

“[W]e're creating… an ownership society in this country, where more Americans than ever will be able to open up their door where they live and say, welcome to my house, welcome to my piece of property.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Remarks to the National Association of Home Builders, Columbus, Ohio, October 2, 2004 http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/10/20041002-7.html 2000s, 2004

Housing, Country

“I call on you not to hate, because hate does not leave space for a person to be fair and it makes you blind and closes all doors of thinking.”

Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) Iraqi politician and President

Saddam Hussein Farewell Letter http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16368242/ (MSNBC online) Statement in a farewell letter written to the Iraqi people, written Nov. 5, 2006, released Dec. 27, 2006.

Hate, Thinking, Personality

“[to mr. L. de Haes] Well, go upstairs, you know the way; are you going to take a look? At the moment you will not find many special things, but you find always something; and then we have another chat, anyway. Go ahead, I'll follow you; beware of entering because there is a large painting just in front of the door.”

Paul Gabriël (1828–1903) painter (1828-1903)

translation from the Dutch original: Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch / citaat van Paul Gabriël, in Nederlands: [tegen L. de Haes] Ga maar naar boven, je weet den weg; kom je eens een kijkje nemen? Er is toevallig op 't oogenblik niet veel bizonders, maar je vindt toch altijd wat; en dan maken we nog een praatje nietwaar; ga je gang, ik volg je wel; pas op met het binnengaan want er staat een groot schilderij voor de deur.
Quote of Gabriël, 1893; as cited by L. de Haes, in 'P.J.C. Gabriël'; published in Elsevier's geïllustreerd maandschrift 3., April/May 1893, pp. 453-473
1880's + 1890's

Way, Painting

“Necessity, as well as patriotism and confidence, will make us all eager to receive treasury notes, if founded on specific taxes. Congress may borrow of the public, and without interest, all the money they may want, to the amount of a competent circulation, by merely issuing their own promissory notes, of proper denominations for the larger purposes of circulation, but not for the small. Leave that door open for the entrance of metallic money.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Thomas Cooper, 1814. ME 14:189
Posthumous publications, On financial matters

Money, Confidence

“It is a false idea that drawing in itself can be beautiful. It is only beautiful through the truths and the feelings that it translates. The crowd admires artists, who, strong in subject, elegantly pen contours destitute of significance, and who plant their figures in pretentious poses. It goes into ecstasies over poses which are never seen in nature, and which are considered artistic because they recall the posturings of the Italian models who offer themselves at the studio door. That is what is generally called beautiful drawing. It is really only sleight-of-hand, fit to astonish boobies.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Art, 1912, Ch. V. Drawing and Color, p. 95-96

Truth, Beauty, Feeling, Idea

“I sold electric light bulbs to janitors, candy to drug stores, and Stoddard's Lectures from door to door. I had decided I was a total failure, when I saw an advertisement which indicated that somebody wanted an expert accountant. Not knowing anything about its I applied for the job and got it.
I am convinced that what are commonly known as "the breaks," good or bad, have fully as much to do with one's success or failure as ability. The break I got in this instance lay in the fact that my employer knew even less about the duties of an expert accountant than I did.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) American writer

How I Wrote the Tarzan Books (1929)

Failure, Light, Success

“If heaven is the reason and dieing is the door, than why aren't we all leaving what's the drama for?”

Ralston Bowles (1952) American musician

From the song "Draper" on the album Carwreck Conversations (2004)

“The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightning, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could have stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman.”

John Green book Paper Towns

Quentin "Q" Jacobsen, p. 3
Paper Towns (2008)

Way, Housing, Sea

“We cannot turn back. We cannot choose the dreams of unknowing. We shall, I expect, open the last door in the castle, even if it leads, perhaps because it leads, on to realities which are beyond the reach of human comprehension and control. And we shall do so with that desolate clairvoyance, so marvellously rendered in Bartok's music, because opening doors is the tragic merit of our identity.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"Tomorrow"
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

Dreams, Music, Reality

“The time comes to every dog when it ceases to care for people merely for biscuits or bones, or even for caresses, and walks out of doors. When a dog really loves, it prefers the person who gives it nothing, and perhaps is too ill ever to take it out for exercise, to all the liberal cooks and active dog-boys in the world.”

Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904) Irish writer, social reformer, anti-vivisection activist and leading suffragette

The Confessions of a Lost Dog https://books.google.it/books?id=uNgBAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA3 (London: Griffith & Farran, 1867), pp. 15-16.

Love, People, World, Dogs

“God has opened many doors of opportunity throughout my lifetime, but I believe the greatest of those doors was allowing me to be born in the United States of America.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: America the Beautiful (2012), Ch. 13: 'What's Good about America'

God

“If there's a locked door, I start to make up all kinds of stories about what might be behind it. I feel like it's some kind of secret, and it leads to me making up lies. But if all the doors are open, physically and metaphorically, there's only the one truth.”

Dave Eggers book The Circle

Mae, to Bailey; p. 299
The Circle (2013)

Truth, Secret, Feeling

“This cause will roll on in majesty and power to fill the earth. Doors now closed to the preaching of the gospel will be opened. The Almighty, if necessary, may have to shake the nations to humble them and cause them to listen to the servants of the living God. Whatever is needed will come to pass.”

Gordon B. Hinckley (1910–2008) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Look to the Future, Ensign, Nov.1997, 68.

God

“Standing in the door ready to jump behind Cassidy, I saw the plane on our wing hit by ground fire and flames start licking back from the engine under the fuselage. Cassidy was so fascinated by the sight that I had to nudge him to remind him that the jump signal was on. Later I learned that the Air Force pilots of the burning plane never wavered in their steady course to the drop zone where the parachutists jumped to safety while the pilots crashed to their deaths.”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

Source: Swords and Plowshares (1972), p. 88

Death, Learning

“For the tourist's
brown pennies scattered at the old church door,
the ragged papooses jump, and bite the dust.”

A. M. Klein (1909–1972) writer, journalist, lawyer

Indian Reservation: Caughnawaga (1983)

“Captain or Colonel, or Knight in Arms,
Whose chance on these defenceless doors may seize,
If ever deed of honour did thee please,
Guard them, and him within protect from harms.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Sonnet VIII: When the Assault was Intended to the City

Chance

“They speak their loud dialects, / Sicilians, Sardinians, / Calabrians, / they all have their own taverns. / At the other end of the alley, / on the other side / a quiet spot, / waiters and patrons at tables, / their faces, hairdos / out of Pompeii's frescoes. / Large eyes look at us, / the door does not open out, / it opens in.”

Mirkka Rekola (1931–2014) Finnish writer

“I suppose I’ve been knocking on heaven’s door for about 11 years now, with one sort of high or another. The only kinds of drugs I use, though, are ones that keep me working for longer periods of time. I haven’t gotten involved in anything heavy since ’68. I had a silly flirtation with smack then, but it was only for the mystery and enigma of trying it. I never really enjoyed it at all. I like fast drugs. I’ve said that many times. I hate falling out, where I can’t stand up and stuff. It seems like such a waste of time. I hate downs and slow drugs like grass. I hate sleep. I would much prefer staying up, just working, all the time. It makes me so mad that we can’t do anything about sleep or the common cold.”

David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

As quoted in this interview http://www.theuncool.com/journalism/david-bowie-playboy-magazine/ in Playboy magazine (September 1976)

Hate, Sleep, Grass, Time

“The younger generation will come knocking at my door.”

Henrik Ibsen The Master Builder

Solness, Act I
The Master Builder (1892)

“You will come in any case — so why not now?
How long I wait and wait. The bad times fall.
I have put out the light and opened the door
for you, because you are simple and magical.
Assume, then, any form that suits your wish,
take aim, and blast at me with poisoned shot,
or strangle me like an efficient mugger,
or else infect me — typhus be my lot”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Requiem; 1935-1940 (1963; 1987), To Death

Light, Time, Waiting

“Peace, reconciliation and unity are sentiments meant not only for the person next door but for all people.”

Josefa Vosanibola Fijian politician

Fiji Live, 22 November 2005 http://www.Fijilive.com: Comments on the Reconciliation, Tolerance, and Unity Bill

People, Peace, Personality

““When I get this door open, you’re dead, Jean!“
“When you get that door open? I look forward to many long years of life, then.“”

Scott Lynch book Red Seas Under Red Skies

Reminiscence “The Capa of Vel Virazzo” section 5 (p. 65)
Red Seas Under Red Skies (2007)

Life, Dead

“When Commodore acquired Amiga in 1984, the legion of Amiga loyalists thought the world would beat a path to the better-mousetrap door. It didn't happen. The Amiga languished.”

Jay Miner (1932–1994) American electrical engineer

In Amazing Computer Magazine https://archive.org/details/amazing-computing-magazine-1994-09 (September 1994)

World

“The most reliable joy is to be out of doors, to be a creature among other creatures. I find it very restful.”

Ursula Goodenough (1943) American biologist

Uncommon Knowledge (2005)

Joy

“You can lock the door upon them, but they burst open their shaky lattices and call out over the house-tops so that men cannot but hear. You hounded wild Rousseau into the meanest garret of the Rue St. Jacques and jeered at his angry shrieks. But the thin, piping tones swelled a hundred years later into the sullen roar of the French Revolution, and civilization to this day is quivering to the reverberations of his voice.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Men, Housing

“The slavery debate has been really a death-struggle from that moment. Mr. Clay thought not. Mr. Clay was a shrewd politician, but the difference between him and Calhoun was the difference between principle and expediency. Calhoun's sharp, incisive genius has engraved his name, narrow but deep, upon our annals. The fluent and facile talents of Clay in a bold, large hand wrote his name in honey upon many pages. But time is already licking it away. Henry Clay was our great compromiser. That was known, and that was the reason why Mr. Buchanan's story of a bargain with J. Q. Adams always clung to Mr. Clay. He had compromised political policies so long that he had forgotten there is such a thing as political principle, which is simply a name for the moral instincts applied to government. He did not see that when Mr. Calhoun said he should return to the Constitution he took the question with him, and shifted the battle-ground from the low, poisonous marsh of compromise, where the soldiers never know whether they are standing on land or water, to the clear, hard height of principle. Mr. Clay had his omnibus at the door to roll us out of the mire. The Whig party was all right and ready to jump in. The Democratic party was all right. The great slavery question was going to be settled forever. The bushel-basket of national peace and plenty and prosperity was to be heaped up and run over. Mr. Pierce came all the way from the granite hills of New Hampshire, where people are supposed to tell the truth, to an- nounce to a happy country that it was at peace — that its bushel-basket was never so overflowingly full before. And then what? Then the bottom fell out. Then the gentlemen in the national rope -walk at Washington found they had been busily twining a rope of sand to hold the country together. They had been trying to compromise the principles of human justice, not the percentage of a tariff; the instincts of human nature and consequently of all permanent government, and the conscience of the country saw it. Compromises are the sheet-anchor of the Union — are they? As the English said of the battle of Bunker Hill, that two such victories would ruin their army, so two such sheet- anchors as the Compromise of 1850 would drag the Union down out of sight forever.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Death, Happiness, People, Truth

“Fortunately, the first Islamic invasion of Europe was stopped at Poitiers in 732; the second in Vienna in 1683. [L]et us ensure that the third Islamic invasion, which is currently in full spate, will be stopped too in spite of its insidious nature and notwithstanding the fact that, in contrast to the 8th and 17th centuries, it has no need for an Islamic army because the scared "dhimmis" in the West, also those in Dutch politics, have left their doors wide open to Islam and Muslims.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

Mr Wilders's contribution to the parliamentary debate on Islamic activism, 2007-09-06, Speech before the Dutch Parliament, Internet Archive http://web.archive.org/web/20080614074737/http://www.groepwilders.com/website/details.aspx?ID=44, 2000s

Nature

“The First Amendment is national in scope and, as the Supreme Court said in Tinker, it does not stop at the schoolhouse door. Not all children are the same. Is a 17-year-old on the eve of his 18th birthday the same as a five-year-old? It is not the responsibility of librarians, or online content providers for that matter, to determine what is appropriate. We are at the very beginning of how we will handle this new medium.”

Judith Krug (1940–2009) librarian and freedom of speech proponent

"Library Interests Debate Decency Act" Newsbytes News Network (February 21, 1996)

Children, Birthday

“What made a big difference was the open door policy we had. Anyone who wanted to come backstage could, and it was never a problem. I don't know whether other bands did that. It was good for us to meet people who had come to see the group and converse with them, ask them 'What's it like in your town? What, there are no clubs here? So what do you do?' It was about sharing information and it was good to know what was going on out there, and how people were dealing with their lives. And that spread right across the world.”

Paul Simonon (1955) English musician (Bass guitarist, vocalist, songwriter) and visual artist

As quoted in 3:AM magazine (1994) http://www.3ammagazine.com/musicarchives/2004/nov/interview_paul_simonon.html

People, World, Problem

“I keep the wolf from the door
But he calls me up
Calls me on the phone
Tells me all the ways that he's gonna mess me up
Steal all my children
If I don't pay the ransom
And I'll never see 'em again
If I squeal to the cops”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

"A Wolf at the Door"
Lyrics, Hail to the Thief (2003)

Children, Way, Wolf

“Gothic script seemed to warp every letter that passed through the door of the funeral parlour, as if death were a German village.”

Edward St. Aubyn (1960) British writer

At Last, Chapter 3

Death

“The great joy of being a prosecutor is that you don’t take whatever case walks in the door. You evaluate the case, you make your best judgement, you only go forward if you believe that the defendant is guilty. You may well be wrong, but you have done your best to ensure that as far as the evidence that you are able to attain, the person is guilty. It is the kind of even-handed balancing that a judge should undertake although of course a judge has the advantage of having somebody speak for the other side.”

Merrick Garland (1952) American judge

[Merrick Garland, Confirmation hearing on nomination of Merrick Garland to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, United States Senate, December 1, 1995]; quote excerpted in:
[March 18, 2016, http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2016/03/16/judge-merrick-garland-in-his-own-words/, Judge Merrick Garland, In His Own Words, Joe Palazzolo, March 16, 2016, The Wall Street Journal]
Confirmation hearing on nomination to United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (1995)

Joy, Personality

“[Stating a variation to William Blake's aphorism] When you open the doors of perception, you can see things as they are -- horrible.”

Michael Savage book The Savage Nation

The Savage Nation
The Savage Nation (1995- ), 2016-08-16
Radio, 0:20
2016

“England collapses, turns Chinese with English and American thoughts. Thousands of Chinese characters are turning and twisting; every door is a shop. The rickshaws jostle the vendors, their backs hung with incredible loads. The narrow streets are alive in a way that Broadway isn't alive. Here all is human, even the beasts of burden. The human energy spills itself in multiple forms, writhes, sweats and strains every muscle towards the day’s bowl of rice. The din is terrific.”

Mark Tobey (1890–1976) American abstract expressionist painter

Reminiscence and Reverie, Mark Tobey, Magazine of Art, 44, (October 1951) pp. 230
1950's

Way

“Doubt comes in at the window, when Inquiry is denied at the door.”

Benjamin Jowett (1817–1893) Theologian, classical scholar, and academic administrator

On the interpretation of Scripture http://www.bible-researcher.com/jowett1.html

“When I was a boy I knew the Odes of Horace backwards and forwards, and when I came to manhood year by year those odes came knocking at the door of my heart at the most unexpected times and places. So, even if you do not realise it now, the time will come when you will be thankful that you were steeped in Shakespeare as boys. In him we not only have, as Sir Gerald du Maurier said here not long ago, perhaps the greatest man the world has ever seen, but one who had a profound knowledge of human nature and of the world. Shakespeare was one of those few poets in whom we find the magic which comes straight from heaven, and which is the prerogative of the very greatest…Shakespeare's plays, no matter of what country he may be writing, are redolent of our own soil and of our own country people. The habit of thought and the outlook of Shakespeare's country people and of those wise men, Shakespeare's fools, may be found to-day in our rural counties.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the City of London School (13 June 1924), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), p. 120.
1924

Men, People, World, Fools

“The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001) American aviator and author

Diary entry on the first anniversary of the kidnapping and death of her son Charles Augustus Lindbergh III (1 March 1932); later published in Locked Rooms and Open Doors (1974) ISBN 0156529564

“Outside the wind of Jehovah still beat on the door, trying to enter. There was no other sound. Not a jackal on the earth, nor a crow in the air. Every living thing cowered in fear, waiting for the Lord's anger to pass.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Last Temptation of Christ

Source: The Last Temptation of Christ (1951), Ch. 10

Fear, Waiting, Anger

“Her face kept changing and that bothered me as well. Why were human beings so unstable? The door and the curtains and the supply cabinet didn't continually change their appearance.”

John Twelve Hawks book Spark

Spark (2014)

Appearance, Change

“God knows, it is as much as I can do to put meat and bread on my own table; & hourly some poor starving wretch comes to my door, to put in his claim for a part of it.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Letter to Thomas Poole (23 March 1801)
Letters

God, Parting

“When one crosses a landscape by automobile or express train, it becomes fragmented; it loses in descriptive value but gains in synthetic value. The view through the door of the railroad car or the automobile windshield, in combination with the speed, has altered the habitual look of things. A modern man registers a hundred times more sensory impressions than an eighteenth-century artist; so much so that our language, for example is full of diminutives and abbreviations.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote, 1914, in 'Functions of Painting by Fernand Leger; p. 11
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1910's, Contemporary Achievements in Painting, 1914

Cars, Time, Speed, Training

“Here is the core of evil, the burning hell without let-up,
The canker corrupting all things, Fafnir the worm,
Syphilis of the State, of all kingdoms
Wart of the common-weal,
Wenn-maker, corrupter of all things
Darkness the defiler
Twin evil of envy,
Snake of the seven heads, Hydra, entering all things
Passing the doors of temples defiling the grove of Paphos,
neschek, the crawling evil,
slime, the corrupter of all things,
Poisoner of the fount,
of all fountains, neschek,
The serpent, evil against Nature's increase,
Against beauty”

Ezra Pound (1885–1972) American Imagist poet and critic

Addendum for C
neschek is a transliteration of the Hebrew "נֶשֶׁך" meaning "usury"
Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII

Beauty, Hell, Nature, Evil

“She staggers over to the bathroom door and grabs the edge of it to balance herself and blood starts running down her legs in thin rivulets and when she lifts up the robe we both can see her underwear soaked with blood and she pulls it off, panicking, and suddenly a huge gush of blood expels itself from beneath the robe, splashing all over the bathroom floor.She gasps, a thick noise comes out of her throat and she doubles over, grabbing her stomach, then she screams. Looking surprised and still clutching her stomach, she vomits will staggering backwards, collapsing onto the bathroom floor. There are strands of tissue hanging out of her.”

Bret Easton Ellis book Glamorama

Glamorama (1998)

“I stopped reading the comics page a long time ago. It seems that whoever is in charge of what to put on that page is given an edict that states: “For God’s sake, try to be as bland as possible and by no means offend any one!” Thus, whenever something like Doonesbury would come along, it would be continually censored and, if lucky, eventually banished to the editorial pages. The message was clear: Keep it simple, keep it cute, and don’t be challenging, outrageous or political.
And keep it white!
It’s odd that considering all the black ink that goes into making the comics section (and color on Sundays) that you rarely see any black faces on that page. Well, maybe it’s not so odd after all, considering the makeup of most newsrooms in our country. It is even more stunning when you consider that in many of our large cities like New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago where the white population is barely a third of the overall citizenry, the comics pages seem to be one of the last vestiges of the belief that white faces are just…well, you know…so much more happy and friendly and funny!
Of course, the real funnies are on the front pages of most papers these days. That’s where you can see a lot of black faces. The media loves to cover black people on the front page. After all, when you live in a society that will lock up 30 percent of all black men at some time in their lives and send more of them to prison than to college, chances are a fair number of those black faces will end up in the newspaper.
Oops, there I go playing the race card. You see, in America these days, we aren’t supposed to talk about race. We have been told to pretend that things have gotten better, that the old days of segregation and cross burnings are long gone, and that no one needs to talk about race again because, hey, we fixed that problem.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Sure, the “whites only” signs are down, but they have just been replaced by invisible ones that, if you are black, you see hanging in front of the home loan department of the local bank, across the entrance of the ritzy suburban or on the doors of the U. S. Senate”

Michael Moore (1954) American filmmaker, author, social critic, and liberal activist

100 percent Caucasian and going strong!
Foreword to "The Boondocks Treasury: a Right to be Hostile" by Aaron McGruder, (2003).
2003

Love, Men, God, Happiness

“Now Momma's done away with the old black kettle she used to cook in when I was just little
And the door ain't sprung on her electric range
That little old farm and home we had it ain't there no more and that's too bad
Folks are doing away with the simple things…”

Dolly Parton (1946) American singer-songwriter and actress

Old Black Kettle from the Tennessee Mountain Home album
Song lyrics

Home, Cooking

“It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go—let it die away—go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow—and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life. It is because so few people understand this that you find many middle-aged men and women maundering about their lost youth, at the very age when new horizons ought to be appearing and new doors opening all round them. It is much better fun to learn to swim than to go on endlessly (and hopelessly) trying to get back the feeling you had when you first went paddling as a small boy.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book III, Chapter 6, "Christian Marriage"
Mere Christianity (1952)

Life, Death, Women, Men

“The most precise and complete formulation of the law of higher logic I find in the writing of Plotinus, in his On Intelligible Beauty. I shall quote this passage in the succeeding chapter.
I have called this system of higher logic Tertium Organum because for us it is the third canon — third instrument — of thought after those of Aristotle and Bacon. The first was Organon, the second, Novum Organum. But the third existed earlier than the first.
Man, master of this instrument, of this key, may open the door of the world of causes without fear.”

P. D. Ouspensky book Tertium Organum

Ch. XXI http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/to/to24.htm#page_262 Tertium Organum (1912; 1922)

World, Fear, Law, Beauty

“Look at the resplendent colours on the soap bubbles!
Why is the sea blue?
What makes diamond glitter!
What makes Hubli So Special
Ask the right questions, and nature will open the doors to her secrets”

C. V. Raman (1888–1970) Indian physicist

Opening statement in [Parameswaran, Uma, C.V. Raman: A Biography, http://books.google.com/books?id=RbgXRdnHkiAC, 2011, Penguin Books India, 978-0-14-306689-7] page=xiii

Secret, Question, Nature, Sea

“…A government as large as the modern megastate cannot conceivably be controlled by a well-informed public, since it is literally impossible to be knowledgeable about even a fraction of the many complex matters modern governments are called upon to govern. … The attraction of free markets … is that they have self-correcting features that place far smaller demands on anyone’s knowledge than democracy does. Each person concerns herself with her own life and the system, supposedly, runs itself. Interpreted in this way, the literature on public ignorance could form the basis of the consequentialist argument the postwar free-market economists sought, but never found … against all government economic intervention: for even if it cannot be shown, on economic grounds, that every intervention hurts more than it helps, it might be shown, on political grounds, that by opening the door to helpful interventions, we begin sliding toward the unhelpful ones on a slope slippery with public ignorance.”

Jeffrey Friedman (political scientist) (1959) American political scientist

Source: “What’s wrong with Libertarianism”, p. 455

Life, Way, Democracy, Literature

“She held the car grimly to the road as it negotiated the bends with considerable difficulty and the straight sections with only slightly less. The car had landed her in court on one occasion when one of its front wheels had sailed off on a little expedition of its own and nearly caused an accident. The police witness in court had referred to her beloved Citroën as "the alleged car" and the name had subsequently stuck. She was particularly fond of the alleged car for many reasons. If one of its doors, for instance, fell off she could put it back on herself, which is more than you could say for a BMW.”

Douglas Adams The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 12

Cars

Quotes about door page 8

Quotes about door
page 8