Quote Engine: Words that make me think a little more
"No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in," says Hemingway. "That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better." He opens two bottles of beer and continues: "I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true."
- Hemingway
"Give me, my God, what you still have; give me what no one asks for.
I do not ask for wealth, nor success, nor even health.
People ask you so often, God, for all that, that you cannot have any left.
Give me, my God, what you still have.
Give me what people refuse to accept from you.
I want insecurity and disquietude;
I want turmoil and brawl.
And if you should give them to me,
my God, once and for all,
let me be sure to have them always,
for I will not always have the courage to ask for them."
- Corporal Zirnheld, Special Air Service 1942
"Up to a point a man's life is shaped by environment, heredity, and movements and changes in the world about him. Then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate. Everyone has it within his power to say, "This I am today; that I will be tomorrow."
-Louis L'Amour
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of is scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."
- Dwight Eisenhower, April 16, 1953
"Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running around shouting that he's been robbed. The fact is that most putts dont drop; most beef is tough; most children grow up to be just people. Most successful marriages require a high degree of mutual tolerance; most jobs are more often dull than otherwise. Life is like an old time rail journey...delays...sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders, and jolts interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride."
- Gordon B Hinkley
I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording not thinking… Some day, all of this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.
— Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (1945)
