Quotes about form

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“Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.”

“If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.”

“Great minds may have cold hearts. Form but no color. It is an incompleteness. And so they are afraid of any woman who both thinks and feels deeply.”

“You must make, always. You must act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you're going to paint. The most terrible bad form.”

“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. … We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it.”

“Every form of happiness if one, every desire is driven by the same motor--by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence--and every achievement is an expression of it.”

“But love is much like a dam; if you allow a tiny crack to form through which only a trickle of water can pass, that trickle will quickly bring down the whole structure and soon no one will be able to control the force of the current.”

“While money can't buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.”

“Slippery slope. I carry a spare shirt, pretty soon I'm carrying spare pants. Then I'd need a suitcase. Next thing I know, I've got a house and a car and a savings plan and I'm filling out all kinds of forms.”

“Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavoured and coloured and put into cans.”

“Did I feel a physical desire for him? I did. Was I moved by a passion of my body? I was. Have I experienced the most violent form of sensual pleasure? I have.”

“Isolation offered its own form of companionship”

“a poet is someone who is abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement. Which is to say the highest form of concentration possible: fascination; to report on the electrifying experience of being”

“Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.”

“We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches.”

“I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.”

“Walking out in the middle of a funeral would be, of course, bad form. So attempting to walk out on one's own was beyond the pale.”

“There is a moon shaped rictus in the streetlamp's globe where a stone has gone and from this aperture there drifts down through the constant helix of aspiring insects a faint and steady rain of the same forms burnt and lifeless.”

“You ever think that school dances are a form of legalized prostitution?”

“The person doing the worrying experiences it as a form of love; the person being worried about experiences it as a form of control.”

“The only really good place to buy lumber is at a store where the lumber has already been cut and attached together in the form of furniture, finished, and put inside boxes.”

“For gods' sake, Strider," Torin snapped. "Open your mouth and form some words. While you're at it, stop staring at the angel like he's a tasty treat.”

“If a person is confident enough in the way they feel, whether it's an art form or whether it's just in life, it comes off---you don't have anything to prove; you can just be who you are.”

“There were thousands and thousands of forms of joy in the world, but that all were essentially one and the same, namely, the joy of being able to love.”

“The water caught the Falselight glimmer like layers of shifting, translucent mirrors and formed split-second works of art in the air, but men cursed it anyway, because it made their heads wet.”

“Do this. Don't do that. Stay back in line. Where's tax receipt? Fill out form. Let's see license. Submit six copies. Exit only. No left turn. No right turn. Queue up and pay fine. Take back and get stamped. Drop dead— but first get permit.”

“Advanced life-forms, my seweet patootie. Jerks. Both of them.”

“Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.”

“Imagination is a form of seeing”

“Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief.”

“Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person's silence.”

“We are formed by what we desire”

“For a writer, only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.”

“Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.”

“To forgive is the highest, most beautiful form of love. In return, you will receive untold peace and happiness”

“An environment-based education movement--at all levels of education--will help students realize that school isn't supposed to be a polite form of incarceration, but a portal to the wider world.”

“I would say that there is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect.”

“Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.”

“Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.”

“Those people who develop the ability to continuously acquire new and better forms of knowledge that they can apply to their work and to their lives will be the movers and shakers in our society for the indefinite future.”

“In the end anti-black, anti-female, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing: anti-humanism.”

“The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.”

“Superman is, after all, an alien life form. He is simply the acceptable face of invading realities.”

“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.”

“There are as many forms of love as there are moments in time.”

“No one is born fully-formed: it is through self-experience in the world that we become what we are.”

“History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance.”

“Can you take human form in daylight? (Talon)
Obviously so. Ever tried to answer a phone without opposable thumbs? (Vane)”

“There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.”

“People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. -Studs Terkel”

“Doesn't reincarnation strike you as just another form of procrastination?”

“Victories and defeats form part of everyone's life - everyone, that is, except cowards, as you call them, because they never lose or win.”

“You said I killed you-haunt me, then! […] Be with me always-take any form-drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!”

“To give your positive or negative attention to something is a way of giving energy. The most damaging form of behavior is withholding your attention.”

“Only those few who are able to surpass their fear of death completely can fully experience the highest forms of life; not the mundane life of the mortal, but the godly life of the resurrected.”

“There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.”

“I believe that we form our own lives, that we create our own reality, and that everything works out for the best.”

“Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.”

“Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.”

“Sick and disoriented, I'm able to form only one thought: Peeta Mellark just saved my life.”

“Things that have form will all disappear. But certain feelings stay with us forever.”

“In France, cooking is a serious art form and a national sport.”

“as the spirit wanes the form appears”

“Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison. Think about how often we compare our lives to a memory that nostalgia has so completely edited that it never really existed.”

“YOU DO NOT need to be a victim of worry. Reduced to its simplest form, what is worry? It is simply an unhealthy and destructive mental habit.”

“A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man.”

“turn and turn and turn again
you see the what, but not the when
remedy and wrong entwine
and so they form a single vine”

“Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near water, begin to rust. Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.”

“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.”

“A compassion swirled form nowhere in the high I was lost in. She needed me. She needed me to accept her for what she was. And when I realized that I had it within myself to give her at least this small part of me, the last of my fear melted away.”

“Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit”

“They say sarcasm is the lowest form of wit," Valkyrie said.

China glanced at her. "They've obviously never met me.”

“I am too much a moralist at heart, and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form, rather than entertain them.”

“Love is a form of prejudice. I have too many other prejudices.”

“Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.”

“In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is formed a bubble organism, and that bubble lasts a while and bursts, and that bubble is Me.”

“There's no way I can stop writing, it's a form of insanity.”

“The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.”

“No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.”

“If there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying. "I'm from the government and I'm here to help.”

“I am the planet's most affectionate life-form, something like the cross between a golden retriever and a barnacle.”

“When at last we are sure
You’ve been properly pilled,
Then a few paper forms
Must be properly filled
So that you and your heirs
May be properly billed.”

“And I told you, I'm not going to pursue another man's girlfriend. You want to talk honor. There it is in its purest form”

“Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long.”

“The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms”

“It’s hard not
to jump out
instead of
waiting to be
found. It’s
hard to be
alone so long
and then hear
someone come
around. It’s
like some form
of skin’s developed
in the air
that, rather
than have torn,
you tear.

"Hide and Seek”

“No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.”

“To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil.”

“Nothing is really lost or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form--no object of the world,
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing…
The body, sluggish, aged, cold--the embers
left from early fires,
… shall duly flame again”

“Research is the highest form of adoration”

“If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

“Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.”

“Devotion to duty is the highest form of worship of God.”

“He had been standing still; for an artist, one of the more painful forms of death.”

“We all live in our own world. But if you look up at the starry sky - you'll see that all the different worlds up there combine to form constellations, solar systems, galaxies.”

“agony sometimes changes
form
but
it never ceases for
anybody.”

“Sometimes it's a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.”

“Love is so exquisitely elusive. It cannot be bought, cannot be badgered, cannot be hijacked. It is available only in one rare form: as the natural response of a healthy mind and healthy heart.”