Quotes about use

page 55

“The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.”

“We carry within us the wonders we seek without us.”

“Persons appear to us according to the light we throw upon them from our own minds. -Laura Ingalls Wilder, author (1867-1957)”

“The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.”

“You use your brain much as you would use a radio crystal; you tune in different frequencies.”

“I used to ask for an easy life, now I ask to be strong.”

“The innocent should never have to suffer from the battles of others. (Valerius)
I know, but it seems to always be the case. (Acheron)
A furore infra, libera nos - spare us from the fury within. (Valerius)”

“When we read, it is not ours to absorb all that is written. Our thoughts are jealous and they constantly blank out the thoughts of others, for there is not room enough in us for two scents at one time.”

“All good people agree,
And all good people say,
All nice people, like Us, are We
And every one else is They:
But if you cross over the sea,
Instead of over the way,
You may end by (think of it!) looking on We
As only a sort of They!”

“And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.”

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. The Talmud tells us that by saving a single human being, man can save the world.”

“There is room in history for all of us.”

“Let us be those creative dissenters who will call our beloved nation to a higher destiny. To a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humanness.”

“Every day, God gives us the sun — and also one moment in which we have the ability to change everything that makes us unhappy.”

“To be free is to learn, to test yourself constantly, to gamble. It is not safe. I had learnt to use my fears as stepping stones rather than stumbling blocks, and”

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.”

“How had this happened? Everyone in the world knew more than us, about everything, and this I hated then found hugely comforting.”

“For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.”

“It's human to make mistakes and some of us are more human than others.”

“If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?”

“If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.”

“Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially of the lower class of people, are so extremely wise and useful, that, to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.”

“Only he who has no use for the empire is fit to be entrusted with it.”

“How memories lie to us. How time coats the ordinary with gold. How it breaks the heart to go back and attempt to re-live them. How crushed we are when we discover that the gold was merely gold-plating thinly coated over lead, chalk and peeling paint.”

“People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us… It's people who claim that they're good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”

“School made us 'literate' but did not teach us to read for pleasure.”

“The moment we begin to seek love, love begins to seek us.
And to save us.”

“For every action, there’s an infinity of outcomes. Countless trillions are possible, many milliards are likely, millions might be considered probable, several occur as possibilities to us as observers—and one comes true.”

“I thought about all the people I knew who spent many of their waking hours feeling sorry for themselves. How useful it would be to put a daily limit on self-pity. Just a few tearful minutes, then on with the day.”

“Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter.”

“I will not fall in love with you," she said. "I can't let myself. I won't."

"That's all right. I'll love you enough for the both of us.”

“First we build the tools, then they build us.”

“We could all be lucky. We could all be what we want to be, instead of who someone else told us to be.”

“You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.”

“When one reads hurriedly and nervously, having in mind written tests and examinations, one's brain becomes encumbered with a lot of bric-a-brac for which there seems to be little use.”

“We flatter those we scarcely know,
We please the fleeting guest,
And deal full many a thoughtless blow
To those who love us best.”

“Each of us guard a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside.”

“He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.”

“Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are.”

“If God had wanted us to be concerned for the plight of the toads, he would have made them cute and furry.”

“… sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.”

“We reap a reward merely in the act of helping others. We never know how, or if, that reward will come back to us. Helping is the reward; none other is needed nor better.”

“To use an electronics analogy, closing a book on a bookmark is like pressing the Stop button, whereas when you leave the book facedown, you've only pressed Pause.”

“Metaphor is one of a group of problem-solving medicines known as figures of speech which are normally used to treat literal thinking and other diseases.”

“Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.”

“Once you teach me something, it's mine to use.”

“people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our most ordinary moments. They’re with us in the grocery store, as we turn a corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles.”

“God wants us to know we are saved, for saved people are dangerous people, willing to face off with the world, unafraid of the consequences since they know that, whatever happens, they will have eternal life.”

“Inside each of us resides the truth, I began, the absolute truth. But sometimes the truth is hidden in a hall of mirrors. Sometimes we believe we are viewing the real thing, when in fact we are viewing a facsimile, a distortion.”

“The light of a new day always chases the shadows of the night away, and shows us that the shape of our fears is only the ghost of our own minds.”

“She asked me what type of contraceptive I use.
Underwear. Keeping it on prevents pregnancy.”

“One should use common words to say uncommon things”

“I gotta go to the bathroom," Emby mumbles.
"You should have thought of that before you left," says Hayden, putting on his best mother voice. "How many times do we have to tell you? Always use the potty before climbing into a shipping crate.”

“We'd never get anything fixed to suit us if we waited for things to suit us before we started.”

“It's just that none of us had the wit or talent to make them into songs. We made them into life, which much messier, and more time consuming, and leaves nothing for anybody to whistle.”

“A lot of people never use their initiative because nobody told them to.”

“We all make mistakes, some bigger than others, but none of us is perfect.”

“The meeting was like a war council with donuts. Then again, back at Camp Half-Blood they used to have their most serious discussions around the Ping-Pong table in the rec room with crackers and Cheez Whiz, so Percy felt right at home.”

“Everything that's innocent to us is crazy to them.”

“I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them.”

“We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.”

“You can curse the dead or pray for them, but don't expect them to do a thing for you. They're far too interested in watching us, to see what in heaven's name we will do next.”

“Closer of lovely eyes to lovely dreams,
Lover of loneliness, and wandering,
Of upcast eye, and tender pondering!
Thee must I praise above all other glories
That smile us on to tell delightful stories.”

“The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.”

“… love is the sum of our choices, the strength of our commitments, the ties that bind us together.”

“[W]e only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.”

“You're a great brother. You give us a heart attack worrying about your heart attack, which you didn't even have the decency to have!”

“We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.”

“Drinking would shut down my seeing and my hearing and my feeling,' she used to say. 'Why would I want to be in the world if I couldn't touch the world with all of my senses intact?”

“Five years of destruction and mayhem, lives lost everywhere, shortages of food and fuel and clothing - and the insane mind behind it just urges us all on and on to more destruction. And we all keep playing.”

“Because reason… is the only thing that makes us men, and distinguishes us from the beasts, I would prefer to believe that it exists, in its entirety, in each of us…”

“As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.”

“People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone.”

“I have gotten so used to melancholia that I greet it like an old friend.”

“Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.”

“Yeah, and Mr. Cuddles is a jealous sort. He doesn’t share us well. (Geary)
Does this mean I’ll have to fight him? (Arik)
You’d never win. Mr. Cuddles cheats. You think he’s just a pushover teddy bear, but he’s vicious, I tell you. Vicious. (Geary)”

“There's the beautiful people and then there's the rest of us.”

“Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.”

“There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us - these are just the hazards of being free”

“Valentine Weather

Kiss me with rain on your eyelashes,
come on, let us sway together,
under the trees, and to hell with thunder.”

“I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.”

“But neither of us knows, because a fight's worth nothing if you know from the start that you're going to win it.”

“People hardly ever make use of the freedom which they have, for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as compensation.”

“Our virtues make us; but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times.”

“People who think they know everything are annoying to those of us who do.”

“Christianity is a life, not a doctrine… I'm not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I'm saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own.”

“He is great who is what he is from Nature, and who never reminds us of others.”

“Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.”

“Libraries store the energy that fuels the imagination. They open up windows to the world and inspire us to explore and achieve, and contribute to improving our quality of life. Libraries change lives for the better.”

“If we recognize our talents and use them appropriately, and choose a field that uses those talents, we will rise to the top of our field.”

“To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.”

“If you haven't been in a war and are wondering how long it takes to get used to losing everything you think you need or love, I can tell you the answer is no time at all.”

“I used to think the world was broken down by tribes,' I said. 'By Black and White. By Indian and White. But I know this isn't true. The world is only broken into two tribes: the people who are assholes and the people who are not.”

“I looked at Micah, who shrugged. I looked at Rafael, who shook his head. Nice that none of us knew why he was undressing.”

“We wanted to define her, to wrap her up as we did each other, but we could not seem to get past "weird" and "strange" and "goofy." Her ways knocked us off balance.”

“Your religious beliefs are your business. They are not and should not be the basis for law. If you use them as justification to discriminate against others, don’t be upset when others decide you’re an asshole."

[]”

“There is a hard law. When an injury is done to us, we never recover until we forgive.”

“My father always used to say, "Don't raise your voice. Improve your argument." Good sense does not always lie with the loudest shouters, nor can we say that a large, unruly crowd is always the best arbiter of what is right.”

“Work is a blessing when it helps us to think about what were doing; but it become a curse when its sole use is to stop us thinking about the meaning of our life.”