Quotes about split (307 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“You know something? There's been a lot of rumors lately about a certain band called Queen. The rumors are that... The rumors are that we're gonna split up. What do you think? [audience replies "No!"] [Pointing to his posterior] They're talking from here! [audience replies "Yes"!] My apologies, but I say what I want. You know what I mean? So forget those rumors. We’re gonna stay together until we fucking well die, I’m sure of it. I keep — I must tell you — I keep wanting to leave, but they won’t let me. Also, I suppose we’re not... We're not bad for four aging queens, are we? Really, what do you think?”

Freddie Mercury (1946–1991) British singer, songwriter and record producer

"Queen: Live at Wembley" (1986), shortly before performing "Who Wants To Live Forever." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GNJ1SQpxFI

Forgetting , Bad luck , Thinking , Age

“I think that I'm really, I was a reactionary, and now I don't do that any more. Same person, but I don't react. Before, I reacted. I didn't like the cameras, I split.”

Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) rapper and actor

1990s, MTV interview with Tabitha Soren (1995)

Thinking , Personality

“We get together with people because they're the same or because they're different, and in the end we split with them for exactly the same reasons.”

Nick Hornby book Juliet, Naked

Source: Juliet, Naked

People

“What then is the place and role of the writer in this cruel, dynamic, split world on the brink of its ten destructions? After all we have nothing to do with letting off rockets, we do not even push the lowliest of hand-carts, we are quite scorned by those who respect only material power. Is it not natural for us too to step back, to lose faith in the steadfastness of goodness, in the indivisibility of truth, and to just impart to the world our bitter, detached observations: how mankind has become hopelessly corrupt, how men have degenerated, and how difficult it is for the few beautiful and refined souls to live amongst them?
But we have not even recourse to this flight. Anyone who has once taken up the WORD can never again evade it; a writer is not the detached judge of his compatriots and contemporaries, he is an accomplice to all the evil committed in his native land or by his countrymen.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Nobel lecture (1970)

Men , Truth , World , Faith

“This is nihilism; or this is truth. He has to push past his boundaries. There is the outline of a body, distinct, separate, its integrity an illusion, a tragic deception, because un seen there is a slit between the legs, and he has to push into it. There is never a real privacy of the body that can coexist withe intercourse: with being entered. The vagina itself is muscled and the muscles have to be pushed apart. The thrusting is persistent invasion. She is opened up, split down the center. She is occupied - physically, internally, in her privacy.”

Andrea Dworkin book Intercourse

Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter 7, "Occupation/Collaboration"

Truth , Past

“Healing hurts. But what hurts more is the refusal of the call. The true pain of living is the abandonment of self, the mind-body split that makes us fear life. Our ache may be heavy and our souls tired today, but resistance makes it all feel a thousand times worse. Rejection of where we are amplifies suffering. Until we cannot take it anymore. Until there is no way out but in. Diving into the blackness, we discover not death but more abundant life. This is the great paradox of healing, which all great artists and poets and seers have known. We die into our trauma and discover our courage. The fiercest warriors are the ones who have let life break and remake them a thousand times over. The gods of healing are calling through your pain today. Healing hurts, yes, but the hurt itself may eventually heal you.”

Jeff Foster (1980) Spiritual teacher

Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/B-16fjMHi5o/

“As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. (…) You don't pick out the rain that soaks you to the skin when you come out of a concert.”

Julio Cortázar book Hopscotch

Source: Hopscotch

Love

“The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) American poet

God , Soul , Heart , Sea

“I said I fell down.
Ah. The ground bloodied your nose, split yer lip, and punched ye in th' eye, all at once.
I said I don't want to talk about it.”

Tamora Pierce book Alanna: The First Adventure

Source: Alanna: The First Adventure

“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"The Tower of the Elephant" (1933)

Men

“All the gang of those who rule us
Hope our quarrels never stop
Helping them to split and fool us
So they can remain on top.”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

"Solidarity song" [Solidaritätslied] (1931), trans. John Willett in Poems, 1913-1956, p. 186
Poems, 1913-1956 (1976)

Hope , Fools , Help

“As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Palm Sunday

The People One Knows
Palm Sunday (1981)

Rage , Personality

“During my most recently controlled near-death experience, I got to interview William Shakespeare. We did not hit it off. He said the dialect I spoke was the ugliest English he had ever heard, “fit to split the ears of groundlings.””

Kurt Vonnegut book God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian

He asked if it had a name, and I said “Indianapolis.”
God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (1999)

Death

“So, I first chose the name Wotanism over Odinism. First because W. O. T. A. N. makes a perfect acronym for the Will Of The Aryan Nation. Secondly because he was called Wotan on the European continent and only called Odin in Scandinavia. Therefore Wotan appeals to the genetic memory of more of our ancestors. And finally because a split had to be made with the game players, deceivers and universalists who had usurped the name Odin.”

David Lane (white nationalist) (1938–2007) American white supremacist, convicted felon

page ?
Wotanism (Odinism)

Game , Memory , Perfection

“Poor old Spotty Muldoon. He thought of splitting the atom the other day. If only he could have had the idea about thirty years ago, he'd have made a bloody fortune.”

Peter Cook (1937–1995) British architect

"The Man Who Invented The Wheel" (1964)
E. L. Wisty

Idea

“Every genus is natural, created as such in the beginning, hence not to be rashly split up or stuck together by whim or according to anyone's theory.”

Carl Linnaeus book Systema Naturae

Systema naturae (1735) (quoted in Ramsbottom 1938:197)
Original in Latin: Genus omne est naturale, in primordio tale creatum, hinc pro libitu & secundem cujuscimque theoriam non proterve discindendum aut conglutinandum.
Systema Naturae

Nature

“We have taller buildings but shorter tempers; wider freeways but narrower viewpoints; we spend more but have less; we buy more but enjoy it less; we have bigger houses and smaller families; more conveniences, yet less time; we have more degrees but less sense; more knowledge but less judgment; more experts, yet more problems; we have more gadgets but less satisfaction; more medicine, yet less wellness; we take more vitamins but see fewer results. We drink too much; smoke too much; spend too recklessly; laugh too little; drive too fast; get too angry; stay up too late; get up too tired; read too seldom; watch TV too much and pray too seldom.
We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values; we fly in faster planes to arrive there quicker, to do less and return sooner; we sign more contracts only to realize fewer profits; we talk too much; love too seldom and lie too often. We've learned how to make a living, but not a life; we've added years to life, not life to years. We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor. We've conquered outer space, but not inner space; we've done larger things, but not better things; we've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul; we've split the atom, but not our prejudice; we write more, but learn less; plan more, but accomplish less; we make faster planes, but longer lines; we learned to rush, but not to wait; we have more weapons, but less peace; higher incomes, but lower morals; more parties, but less fun; more food, but less appeasement; more acquaintances, but fewer friends; more effort, but less success. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but have less communication; drive smaller cars that have bigger problems; build larger factories that produce less. We've become long on quantity, but short on quality.
These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion; tall men, but short character; steep in profits, but shallow relationships. These are the times of world peace, but domestic warfare; more leisure and less fun; higher postage, but slower mail; more kinds of food, but less nutrition. These are the days of two incomes, but more divorces; these quick trips, disposable diapers, cartridge living, throw-away morality, one-night stands, overweight bodies and pills that do everything from cheer, to prevent, quiet or kill. It is a time when there is much in the show window and nothing in the stock room.”

Bob Moorehead

"The Paradox of Our Age"; these statements were used in World Wide Web hoaxes which attributed them to various authors including George Carlin, a teen who had witnessed the Columbine High School massacre, the Dalai Lama and Anonymous; they are quoted in "The Paradox of Our Time" at Snopes.com http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/paradox.asp
Words Aptly Spoken (1995)

Love , Life , Men , Lie

“The guy was dead as hell. He lay on the floor in his pajamas with his brains scattered all over the rug and my gun was in his hand. I kept rubbing my face to wipe out the fuzz that clouded my mind but the cops wouldn't let me. One would pull my hand away and shout a question at me that made my head ache even worse and another would slap me with a wet rag until I felt like I had been split wide open.”

Mickey Spillane (1918–2006) American writer

Vengeance is Mine! (1950)

Guy , Hell , Question , Dead

“(Unlike Muslims), the other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty to them, save only for purposes of defence… They are merely required to establish their religion among their own people. This is why the Israelites after Moses and Joshua remained unconcerned with royal authority for about four hundred years. Their only concern was to establish their religion… The Israelites dispossessed the Canaanites of the land that God had given them as their heritage in Jerusalem and the surrounding region, as it had been explained to them through Moses. The nations of the Philistines, the Canaanites, the Armenians, the Edomites, the Ammonites, and the Moabites fought against them. During that time political leadership was entrusted to the elders among them. The Israelites remained in that condition for about four hundred years. They did not have any royal power and were harassed by attacks from foreign nations. Therefore, they asked God through Samuel, one of their prophets, that he permit them to make someone king over them. Thus, Saul became their king. He defeated the foreign nations and killed Goliath, the ruler of Philistines. After Saul, w:David became king, and then Solomon. His kingdom flourished and extended to the borders of the land of the Hijaz and further to the borders of Yemen and to the borders of the land of the Byzantines. After Solomon, the tribes split into two dynasties. One of the dysnaties was that of the ten tribes in the region of Nablus, the capital of which is Samaria(Sabastiyah), and the other that of the children of Judah and Benjamin in Jerusalem. Their royal authority had had an uninterrupted duration of a thousand years.”

Ibn Khaldun book Muqaddimah

Muqaddimah, Translated by Franz Rosenthal, pp.183-184, Princeton University Press, 1981.
Muqaddimah (1377)

God , War , Children , People

“Well, I kind of split my life into two pieces. One was where my chess career lies. There, I kept my sanity, so to speak, and my logic. And the other was my religious life. I tried to apply what I learned in the church to my chess career too. But I still was studying chess. I wasn't just "trusting in God" to give me the moves.”

Bobby Fischer (1943–2008) American chess prodigy, chess player, and chess writer

1970s, BOBBY FISCHER SPEAKS OUT! (1977)

Life , God , Study , Learning

“A simple calculation shows that from the classical theory follows that we should find a broadening of the beam with the maximum intensity on the place of the beam without field. However, from the quantum theory follows that we should find there no intensity at all, and deflected molecules on both sides. The beam should split up in two beams corresponding to the two orientations of the magnet. The experiment decided in favor of the quantum theory.”

Otto Stern (1888–1969) German physicist

the conclusion of the historical Stern-Gerlach experiment, in The Method of Molecular Rays http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1943/stern-lecture.html, Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1946.

“I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen. The first of those came as a terrible shock and, like anything else that changes you forever, split my life into halves: Before and After.”

Ransom Riggs book Miss Peregrine's Home of Peculiar Children

Prologue, Page 8
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2011)

Life , Change

“It is a bad thing to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words. Consequently, the government has given me back my freedom.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge (25 January 1843), after the Prussian government dissolved the newspaper Neue Rheinische Zeitung, of which Marx was the editor.

Stupidity , Freedom , Fight

“There is violence and injustice in our world that must be confronted. We must confront it not by splitting apart but by standing together as free nations, as free people. I know that a call to arms can stir the souls of men and women more than a call to lay them down. But that is why the voices for peace and progress must be raised together.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2009, A World without Nuclear Weapons (April 2009)

Women , Men , People , World

“Sky—what a scowl of cloud
Till, near and far,
Ray on ray split the shroud:
Splendid, a star!”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

The two Poets of Croisic.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Star

“If, in the very intense electric field in the neighbourhood of the cathode, the molecules of the gas are dissociated and are split up, not into the ordinary chemical atoms, but into these primordial atoms, which we shall for brevity call corpuscles; and if these corpuscles are charged with electricity and projected from the cathode by the electric field, they would behave exactly like the cathode rays.”

J. J. Thomson (1856–1940) British physicist

"Cathode rays" http://web.lemoyne.edu/~GIUNTA/thomson1897.html Philosophical Magazine, 44, 293 (1897).
Quotes eat me

“She was always present and ready to do things either with me or for me if I couldn’t do them, Let’s say the change is that we worked as a team and the team has been split up.”

Rainier III, Prince of Monaco (1923–2005) Prince of Monaco

Rainier said of his late wife in a 1983 interview.
washingtonpost.com http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30672-2005Apr6_2.html

Change

“It's just natural, it's not a great disaster. People keep talking about it like it's The End of The Earth. It's only a rock group that split up, it's nothing important. You know, you have all the old records there if you want to reminisce.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

Interview on Scene And Heard by David Wigg (25 October 1971)

People , Nature

“When I write these notes, it is not to describe my own life. I am writing a study of the soul as I observe myself closely and use myself as an anatomical testing-ground. It would therefore be wrong to look on these notes as confessions. I have chosen – in accordance with Søren Kierkegaard – to split the work into two parts; the painter and his distraught friend the poet. Just as Leonarda da Vinci studied the recesses of the body and dissected human cadavers, I try from self-scrutiny to dissect what is the universal in the soul”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

written after 1908
in The Mad Poet's Diary, T 2734
1896 - 1930

Life , Soul , Study , Universe

“On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis. The split in the world is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Harvard University address (1978)

Life , World , Disease , Hope

“Ready to split his sides with laughing.”

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright

Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part I, Book III, Ch. 13.

“As a people we must be united. If we are not united we shall slip into the gulf of measureless disaster. We must be strong in purpose for our own defense and bent on securing justice within our borders. If as a nation we are split into warring camps, if we teach our citizens not to look upon one another as brothers but as enemies divided by the hatred of creed for creed or of those of one race against those of another race, surely we shall fail and our great democratic experiment on this continent will go down in crushing overthrow.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, Address to the Knights of Columbus (1915)
Context: Even in the matter of national defense there is such a labyrinth of committees and counsels and advisors that there is a tendency on the part of the average citizen to become confused and do nothing. I ask you to help strike the note that shall unite our people. As a people we must be united. If we are not united we shall slip into the gulf of measureless disaster. We must be strong in purpose for our own defense and bent on securing justice within our borders. If as a nation we are split into warring camps, if we teach our citizens not to look upon one another as brothers but as enemies divided by the hatred of creed for creed or of those of one race against those of another race, surely we shall fail and our great democratic experiment on this continent will go down in crushing overthrow. I ask you here tonight and those like you to take a foremost part in the movement a young men's movement for a greater and better America in the future.

War , People , Justice , Strong

“Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this One World that can no longer be split into isolated fragments.”

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) Indian lawyer, statesman, and writer, first Prime Minister of India

Quicktime excerpt http://www.harappa.com/nehrumov.html
A Tryst With Destiny (1947)
Context: The ambition of the greatest men of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but so long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over.
And so we have to labour and to work, and work hard, to give reality to our dreams. Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart. Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this One World that can no longer be split into isolated fragments.

World , Peace , Freedom

“The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won't get us very far.”

Niels Bohr (1885–1962) Danish physicist

Remarks after the Solvay Conference (1927)
Context: I feel very much like Dirac: the idea of a personal God is foreign to me. But we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of truth as science. But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won't get us very far.

Age , Religion , Way , Reality

“Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and those who followed them accurately foresaw this growing split between truth and reality in Western culture, and they endeavored to call Western man back from the delusion that reality can be comprehended in an abstracted, detached way.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: The Discovery of Being (1983), p. 51-52
Context: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and those who followed them accurately foresaw this growing split between truth and reality in Western culture, and they endeavored to call Western man back from the delusion that reality can be comprehended in an abstracted, detached way. But though they protested vehemently against arid intellectualism, they were by no means simple activists. Nor were they antirational. Anti-intellectualism and other movements in our day which make thinking subordinate to acting must not at all be confused with existentialism. Either alternative-making man subject or object-results in loosing the living, existing person.

Truth , Way , Reality

“Any liberal system must proceed from the assumption that freedom is one and indivisible and that elementary human freedom in all spheres of life must go hand in hand with political, religious, economic and spiritual freedom. The strategy of collectivist thinking has always been to split up this most essential and most universal of human values as a means of making inroads into the free system itself.”

Ludwig Erhard (1897–1977) German politician

The Economics of Success (D. van Nostrand & Co., 1963), pp. 291–292

Freedom , Universe , Thinking , Life

“And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before--and thus was the Empire forged.”

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Life is full of screwups," he said, chucking another paper at the split-level before taking the corner. "You're supposed to fail sometimes. It's a required part of the human existence.”

Sarah Dessen book Along for the Ride

Source: Along for the Ride

Life , Parting

“the next morning, fang and i broke up. now let me get this strait, i broke up with him. a split second after he broke up with me.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports

“Welcome to the wonderful world of jealousy, he thought. For the price of admission, you get a splitting headache, a nearly irresistable urge to commit murder, and an inferiority complex. Yippee.”

Jessica Bird book Dark Lover

Source: Dark Lover

World , Jealousy

“This is where the evening splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard, and make a wish.”

Richard Siken (1967) American poet

Source: Crush

Love , Death

“Once in a while, life gives you a chance to measure your worth. Sometimes you're called upon to make a split-second decision to do the right thing, defining which way your life will go. These are the decisions that make you who you are.”

Perry Moore (1971–2011) Executive producer of the Narnia films and author of award-winning LGBTQ young adult novel Hero

Life , Way , Decision , Chance

“He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Variant: He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Love , God , People , World

“And if you dont come back from the dorm, I'm the one who has to explain to Micheal how I let you go off and get yourself killed like a Dumbass. First rule in horror movies, Clair-Never split up!”

Rachel Caine book Glass Houses

Source: Glass Houses

“Far below ran the silver ribbon of the East River, braceleted by shining bridges, flecked by boats as small as flyspecks, splitting the shining banks of light that were Manhattan and Brooklyn on either side.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Light

“When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.”

Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) Novelist, screenwriter

In a letter to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly.
Context: By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss-waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have.

God

“The moment we decide to throw more energy into fighting for our mate than with him, the crack of a fist on the enemy's jaw splits the ears of angels.”

Beth Moore (1957) American evangelist

Angels , Fight

“Emma is a mattress who got thrown off the truck when her parents split up. It's not like you can blame a mattress when people don't tie it down tight enough.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Wintergirls

Source: Wintergirls

People , Parent

“You speak of giving up my dreams. Have you ever, since Maeve's coven split, had a dream? Have you ever had anything worth dying for?”

Amelia Atwater-Rhodes book Snakecharm

Source: Snakecharm

Dreams

“But it was the singing that pulled me in and split me wide open.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Singing

“This is a bawdy tale. Herein you will find gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity, as well as non-traditional grammar, split infinitives, and the odd wank.”

Christopher Moore book Fool

Source: Fool

“The saddest thing was actually getting fed up with one another. It's like growing up in a family. When you get to a certain age, you want to go off and get your own girl and your own car, split up a bit.”

George Harrison (1943–2001) British musician, former member of the Beatles

Age , Family , Cars , Girl

“Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Source: The Powerbook

Love , Heart

“What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier? Each moment seems split in two: melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

“Some people say "if we split up, we can cover more ground"-with blood”

Seth Grahame-Smith (1976) US fiction author

Source: How to Survive a Horror Movie

People

“He's splitting me open, I thought. He'll break me and then I'll die.”

Wally Lamb book She's Come Undone

Source: She's Come Undone

“Akhlys lunged at Percy, and for a split second he thought: Well, hey, I’m just smoke. She can’t touch me, right?
He imagined the Fates up in Olympus, laughing at his wishful thinking: LOL, NOOB!”

Rick Riordan book The House of Hades

Source: The House of Hades

Fate , Imagination , Thinking

“Doesn't seem right, does it? A split second to lose him and a lifetime to grieve over him.”

Tim Bowler book Frozen Fire

Source: Frozen Fire

“Then Jesus changed the situation. When he paid for our sins on the cross, the veil in the temple that symbolized our separation from God was split from top to bottom, indicating that direct access to God was once again available.”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

Source: The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?

God , Change

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”

Natalie Goldberg (1948) American writer

Source: Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

Fear

“I felt a Cleaving in my Mind—
As if my Brain had split—
I tried to match it—Seam by Seam—
But could not make it fit.”

Emily Dickinson book The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Source: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“It’s less the words they say than those they leave unsaid that split old friends apart.”

Frederick Buechner book Godric

Source: Godric (1980)

“I thought about how one tiny decision can change a life. A decision that takes only a split second to make.”

Anita Shreve (1946–2018) American writer

Source: Light on Snow

Life , Decision , Change

“I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split.”

Raymond Chandler book The Long Goodbye

Source: The Long Goodbye

“The longer I live the more I mistrust
theatricality, the false glamour cast
by performance, the more I know its poverty beside
the truths we are salvaging from
the splitting-open of our lives.

-from "Transcendental Etude”

Adrienne Rich book The Dream of a Common Language

Source: The Dream of a Common Language

Truth , Falseness

“Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.”

Toni Morrison book The Bluest Eye

Source: The Bluest Eye

Death , World , Spring , Grass

“I choose to love this time for once
with all my intelligence

-from "Splittings”

Adrienne Rich book The Dream of a Common Language

Source: The Dream of a Common Language

Love , Intelligence , Time

“Sometimes something catastrophic can occur in a split second that changes a person's life forever; other times one minor incident can lead to another and then another and another, eventually setting off just as big a change in a body's life.”

Jeannette Walls book Half Broke Horses

Source: Half Broke Horses

Life , Change , Time , Personality

“Many people are more like the earth than we know. Maybe they have fault lines that sooner or later are going to split open under pressure.”

Rebecca Wells book Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Source: Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

People

“If a coin comes down heads, that means that the possibility of its coming down tails has collapsed. Until that moment the two possibilities were equal.
But on another world, it does come down tails. And when that happens, the two worlds split apart.”

Philip Pullman book Northern Lights

Source: The Golden Compass

World

“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.”

Scott Lynch The Lies of Locke Lamora

Source: The Lies of Locke Lamora

Men , Art , Water

“Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

Source: What America Means to Me (1943), Ch. 10

“I’m supposed to figure out if the glass is half full or half empty,” I told her.

Without a moment’s hesitation, in a split second, my grandmother shrugged and said: “It depends on if you’re drinking or pouring.”

Bill Cosby (1937) American actor, comedian, author, producer, musician, activist

Drink , Dependency

“We’ve arrived,” Leo announced. “Time to Split.”
Frank groaned. “Can we leave Valdez in Croatia?”

Rick Riordan book The House of Hades

Source: The House of Hades

Time

“He turned, registering a face with blond hair, and for a split second he thought it was Will Solace. When Nico realized it was Jason, he was disappointed. Then he felt angry with himself for feeling that way.”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

Disappointment , Way , Feeling

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.”

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) poet and political activist

Life , Truth , World

“Some split between the inner world and outer world is common to all behaviour, and the need to bridge the gap is the source of creative behaviour.”

Anthony Storr (1920–2001) English psychiatrist

World

“For a split second I felt as though she was nobody special in the larger scheme of my life. She was just some girl who had tied me to her leg to help her sink when she jumped off the bridge. Then I blinked and was in love with her again.”

Miranda July (1974) American performance artist, musician and writer

Source: No One Belongs Here More Than You

Love , Life , Girl , Help

“We’re on the enemy’s doorstep. We’re being asked to split up. Isn’t that how people get killed in horror movies?”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

People

“A heart weighs more when it splits in two; it crashes in the chest like a broken plane.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The Time Keeper

Heart

“Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They are not like aches or wounds; they are more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there is not enough material.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Babylon Revisited

"Babylon Revisited"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

Family , Family

“The concepts 'system', 'apparatus', 'environment', immediately imply an artificial division of the world, and an intention to neglect, or take only schematic account of, the interaction across the split. The notions of 'microscopic' and 'macroscopic' defy precise definition. So also do the notions of 'reversible' and 'irreversible'. Einstein said that it is theory which decides what is 'observable'. I think he was right - 'observation' is a complicated and theory-laden business. Then that notion should not appear in the formulation of fundamental theory. Information? Whose information? Information about what? On this list of bad words from good books, the worst of all is 'measurement.”

John S. Bell (1928–1990) Northern Irish physicist

It must have a section to itself.
Against 'measurement' (1990)

Books , World , Business , Thinking

“Let us watch this de Kooning [leading Abstract-Expressionist painter in New York] with his prematurely white hair making his great sleepwalker's movements, as though he was waiting in a dream to open bays of Biscay, to explode islands like pieces of orange or Parma violets, to tear continents from a cerulean blue split by oceans of Naples yellow.... if by good or by ill fortune, in the middle of this Dionysian demiurg the image of 'The Eternal Feminine should appear.. the least that might have happened to her would be that she should emerge (from all this chaos) wearing nothing but a little make-up.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Dali's comment on the 'Woman-paintings', c. 1960 [a.o. Woman-III ] of the American abstract-expressionist painter Willem de Kooning: (MPC 75); as cited in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, (translated by Trista Selous), Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 135
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1951 - 1960

Dreams , Tear , Appearance , Waiting

“And the difficultest job a man can do,
Is to come it brave and meek with thirty bob a week,
And feel that that's the proper thing for you.

It's a naked child against a hungry wolf;
It's playing bowls upon a splitting wreck;
It's walking on a string across a gulf
With millstones fore-and-aft about your neck;
But the thing is daily done by many and many a one.
And we fall, face forward, fighting, on the deck.”

John Davidson (1857–1909) Scottish poet

"Thirty Bob a Week", p. 97
Ballads and Songs (1894)

Feeling , Wolf , Fight

“Our own British Communist Party – if it is our own and British – might at any time suffer a change of heart and go back to bloody revolution. For all I know it may there already, underground. Anything is possible for a party which at one and the same time shouts for a United Front and puts up candidates against us with a view to splitting the Labour vote. All this is alien to our honest, straightforward, native, Socialist thought. … But you can't all the time say 'No, No, No' to the Communists. The real answer to the Communists is a positive answer. We have to show more vigorous fighting enthusiasm, more faith, more sense of high adventure.”

Herbert Morrison (1888–1965) British Labour politician

Peter Howard, "Men on Trial" (Blandford Press, 1945), p. 37-8
Speech in December 1944

Faith , Sense , Suffering , Change

“It makes no difference abroad,
The seasons fit the same,
The mornings blossom into noons,
And split their pods of flame.

Wild-flowers kindle in the woods,
The brooks brag all the day;
No blackbird bates his jargoning
For passing Calvary.

Auto-da-fé and judgment
Are nothing to the bee;
His separation from his rose
To him seems misery.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Nature, p. 120
Collected Poems (1993)

Flowers , Bee , Season

“Quantum theory was split up into dialects. Different people describe the same experiences in remarkably different languages. This is confusing even to physicists.”

David Finkelstein (1929–2016) American physicist

in Physical Process and Physical Law, in an edition by [Timothy E. Eastman, Hank Keeton, Physics and Whitehead: quantum, process, and experience, SUNY Press, 2004, 0791459136, 181]

People

“The laurel-tree grew large and strong,
Its roots went searching deeply down;
It split the marble walls of Wrong,
And blossomed o'er the Despot's crown.”

Richard Henry Horne (1802–1884) English poet and critic

The Laurel Seed; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 439.

Search , Tree , Strong

“The men who traveled to California in the Gold Rush years had a conscious sense of the need to organize. There are rules. For instance, no swearing -- literally! They have constitutions, they have these rules and orders: No swearing. No drinking. We will observe the Sabbath. Many a company broke up over the argument of whether or not to observe the Sabbath. 'How can we observe the Sabbath? Here it is the middle of June, we're already behind. These people are passing us on Sunday, they're rolling. How can we sit here?' So they have arguments about it, and companies split up over the moral question of whether to observe the Sabbath or not.”

J. S. Holliday (1924–2006) American historian

The West (1996)

Men , People , Travel , Drink

“The experience and ideas of contemporary science lead us to the only integral, the only monistic understanding of the universe. It appears before us as an in nitely unfolding fabric of all types of forms and levels of organization, from the unknown elements of ether to human collectives and star systems. All these forms, in their interlacement and mutual struggle, in their constant changes, create the universal organizational process, in nitely split in its parts, but continuous and unbroken in its whole.”

Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) Physician, philosopher, writer

Source: Essays in tektology, 1980, p. 6

Star , Idea , Understanding , Universe

“Once emotions are set in motion, and men pitted against men along these unspoken lines, you will have the kind of warfare that will split the nation from top to bottom and undo Malaysia. Everybody knows it. I don't have to say it. It is the unspoken word!”

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

Lee Kuan Yew in the Parliament of Malaysia, 1965 http://www.jeffooi.com/archives/2005/11/i_went_into_act.php
1960s

Men

“In thinking about the costs of this war, and thinking about renewing it, we have to reconsider what it has done to America. It has turned the U. S. military into a force at ease with abuse of captives and civilians, occupying a Muslim nation. Some of this is surely due to the sheer hell of fighting an enemy you cannot see, surrounded by people you do not understand or trust, and being killed randomly in urban or desert insurgency conditions where friend and foe are close to indistinguishable, and where your buddies are killed on a regular basis by faceless cowards. You can certainly understand how soldiers grow completely numb in the face of abuse in those circumstances. Every "hajji" can seem like the enemy after a while. It requires men and women of almost saintly capabilities to keep their moral bearings among terrorists who massacre scores of innocents as a religious duty, among people whose differences are impossible for young troops to figure out in split-seconds. In such conditions, and as a consequences of grotesque under-manning, the breakdown in ethical discipline is no big surprise. But that doesn't make it any the less of a big deal.”

Andrew Sullivan (1963) Journalist, writer, blogger

"Re-Thinking The War II" http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/05/rethinking_the__5.html, The Daily Dish (8 May 2007)

Women , Men , War , People

“I was playing drums, and I had broken my wrist very bad playing football, and the bass player in the band… he wanted to split. So I just went to the bass; I went from Drums over to Bass. That was it. I was playing the bass within a week.”

Jaco Pastorius (1951–1987) Musician, producer, educator

On how he switched from drums to bass
Modern Electric Bass, Jaco Pastorius (1985)

Football

“Eventually there was a split between my parents about me. My mother obviously knew what was going on with me and the girls my friends lined up. She never came out and said anything directly, but she let me know she was concerned. Things were different between me and my father. He assumed that when I was eighteen, I would just go into the Army and they would straighten me out. He accepted some of the things my mother condemned. He felt it was perfectly all right to make out with all the girls I could. In fact, he was proud I was dating the fast girls. He bragged about them to his friends. 'Jesus Christ, you should see some of the women my son's coming up with'. He was showing off, of course. But still, our whole relationship had changed because I'd established myself by winning a few trophies and now had some girls. He was particularly excited about the girls. And he liked the idea that I didn't get involved. 'That's right, Arnold', he'd say, as though he'd had endless experience, 'never be fooled by them'. That continued to be an avenue of communication between us for a couple of years. In fact, the few nights I took girls home when I was on leave from the Army, my father was always very pleasant and would bring out a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947) actor, businessman and politician of Austrian-American heritage

Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/067122879X (1977), New York: Simon & Schuster.
1970s, Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder (1977)

Women , Fools , Home , Girl

“In general I might agree with you:
women should not contemplate war,
should not weigh tactics impartially,
or evade the word enemy,
or view both sides and denounce nothing.
Women should march for peace,
or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery,
spit themselves on bayonets
to protect their babies,
whose skulls will be split anyway,
or, having been raped repeatedly,
hang themselves with their own hair.
These are the functions that inspire general comfort.
That, and the knitting of socks for the troops
and a sort of moral cheerleading.
Also: mourning the dead.
Sons, lovers, and so forth.
All the killed children.”

Margaret Atwood book Morning in the Burned House

Morning in the Burned House (1995), The Loneliness of the Military Historian

Women , War , Children , Peace

“Then the war came, intensifying the native nationalistic sense of every race in the world. We found alien enemies in spirit among the native-born children of the foreign-born in America; we found old stirrings in the hearts of men, even when they were naturalized citizens, and a desire to take part in the world struggle, not as Americans, but as Jugo-Slavs or Czecho-Slovaks. We found belts and stockings stuffed with gold to be taken home, when peace should be declared, by men who will go back to work out their destinies in a land they thought never to see again. We found strong racial groups in America split into factions and bitterly arraigned against one another. We found races opposing one another because of prejudices and hatreds born hundreds of years ago thousands of miles away. We awoke to the fact that old-world physical and psychological characteristics persisted under American clothes and manners, and that native economic conditions and political institutions and the influences of early cultural life were enduring forces to be reckoned with in assimilation. We discovered that while a common language and citizenship may be portals to a new nation, men do not necessarily enter thereby, nor do they assume more than an outer likeness when they pass through”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)
Context: When the country first tried in 1915 to Americanize its foreign-born people, Americanization was thought of quite simply as the task of bringing native and foreign-born Americans together, and it was believed that the rest would take, care of itself. It was thought that if all of us could talk together in a common language unity would be assured, and that if all were citizens under one flag no force could separate them. Then the war came, intensifying the native nationalistic sense of every race in the world. We found alien enemies in spirit among the native-born children of the foreign-born in America; we found old stirrings in the hearts of men, even when they were naturalized citizens, and a desire to take part in the world struggle, not as Americans, but as Jugo-Slavs or Czecho-Slovaks. We found belts and stockings stuffed with gold to be taken home, when peace should be declared, by men who will go back to work out their destinies in a land they thought never to see again. We found strong racial groups in America split into factions and bitterly arraigned against one another. We found races opposing one another because of prejudices and hatreds born hundreds of years ago thousands of miles away. We awoke to the fact that old-world physical and psychological characteristics persisted under American clothes and manners, and that native economic conditions and political institutions and the influences of early cultural life were enduring forces to be reckoned with in assimilation. We discovered that while a common language and citizenship may be portals to a new nation, men do not necessarily enter thereby, nor do they assume more than an outer likeness when they pass through.

Life , Men , War , Children