And for a moment―for a split second―everything else falls away, the whole pattern and order of my life, and a huge joy crests in my chest. I am no one, and I owe nothing to anybody, and my life is my own.
Gilderoy Lockhart, Order of Merlin, Third Class, Honorary Member of the Dark Force Defense League, and five times winner of Witch Weekly's Most Charming Smile Award. But I don't talk about that; I didn't get rid of the Banden Banshee by smiling at hi...
New Englanders began the Revolution not to institute reforms and changes in the order of things, but to save the institutions and customs that already had become old and venerable with them; and were new only to a few stupid Englishmen a hundred and ...
I suppose at heart it was the haircut that did it; that exploded the ordinary order of things and showed me the possibilities that had been there all along, hidden among the patterns in the wallpaper. In a different age, we used to take acid for more...
It is all about numbers. It is all about sequence. It's the mathematical logic of being alive. If everything kept to its normal progression, we would live with the sadness--cry and then walk--but what really breaks us cleanest are the losses that hap...
You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. … You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake, isn't it?—your captivity and th...
I am also open minded to embrace strange notions and respect its bearers without harsh judgement. Exposure has made me feel confident and wiser to choose what feels right for me, in order to be the best human being for myself and others.
The barrier during self-improvement is not so much that we hate learning, rather we hate being taught. To learn entails that the knowledge was achieved on one's own accord - it feels great - but to be taught often leaves a feeling of inferiority. Thu...
Art in order to move you has to be political or sexual - whether it is on canvas, in the drum of the cello, in the words of the poet. If it doesn't move you, what is the point? And if it does move you, what is the point? The point is to touch your se...
Oh, how crafty of religion, I cried out indignantly, to transplant rewards and punishments into a future life in order to comfort cowards and the enslaved and aggrieved, enabling them to bow their necks patiently before their masters, and to endure t...
Yet for quixotic reasons--namely, that I enjoyed writing obits--I had decided to scale back on articles about city life in order to write exclusively about the city's dead. For even less money. It was a strange and inexplicable career move.
I am chaos in this ordered society, the flaw in a carefully wrought plan. I am turbulence in the queen's eternal river.
Then what’s this?” She raised her glass of expensive wine, used it to indicate their plush surroundings. His gaze followed her indication around the dim-lit, upmarket Italian restaurant. “Dinner in comfort.” “With a side order of persuasion...
I often find myself grateful for the comfort of strangers; a man who gave up his seat for me on the bus, a woman who helped me out with a heavy shopping bag. Remembering small acts of kindness puts the world in a finer, sweeter order.
p5-what they need..is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves. It this this quality..what may ...
You are not a man anymore. You are a soldier. Your comfort is of no importance and your life isn’t of much importance. Most of your orders will be unpleasant, but that’s not your business.They should’ve trained you for this, and not for flower-...
This explained to me--and I suppose, forgave me--my inability to see the face of this man, because whoever must deceive us in order to live will by necessity far exceed the skill of ordinary men, who are as much tempted by the desire to be honest as ...
For a human to win, it is not necessary for a horse to lose. You should not have to take things away from a horse or break him in fragments in order to train him; rather you should add to the horse. The goal should be making, not breaking.
Pushing magic toward the candle, I willed it to light. Nothing happened. Irys made a strangled sound and the candle burned. “Are you directing your magic to the candle?” “Yes. Why?” “You just ordered me to light the candle for you,” Irys ...
I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretence invented b...
What's the point of changing who you are in order to impress a woman, when your intention is to return to who you were, a person she was never attracted to in the first place?
