Fervent Christians are always remembering themselves as - and thus, by extension, judging everyone else outside their sect to be - lost and hopeless and just barely clinging to any kind of interior sense of value or reason or even to go on living, be...
Children would struggle desperately to feel love for their parents. Rather than hate a parent, in fact, they'd choose to hate themselves. Love and violence became so intertwined for them that when they grew up and got into relationships, only hysteri...
You listen to people so that you can imagine them, and your hear all the terrible and woderful things people do to themselves and to one another, but in the end the listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you're trying to listen to...
You listen to people so that you can imagine them, and you hear all the terrible and wonderful things people do to themselves and to one another, but in the end the listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you’re trying to listen ...
Historians of the sentimental school have sometimes regretted that royalty became absolute, while at the same time rejoicing that it installed plebeians in office. They deceive themselves. Royalty exalted plebeians just because it aimed at becoming a...
Gansey had once told Adam that he was afraid most people didn't know how to handle Ronan. What he meant by this was that he was worried that one day someone would fall on Ronan and cut themselves.
I won't fatten them in cages, though. I won't ply them with poisoned fruit items. I won't change them into clockwork images or talking shadows. I won't drain out their life's blood. They can do all those things for themselves.
In school, it got so that Elijah learned to talk his way out of anything, gave great long speeches so that his words snaked themselves like vines around the nuns until they could no longer move, [...].
Her golden hair moved like a hundred moths, all trying to saturate themselves in sunlight, while his hair was spiked like cleats, and he wore a shoe for a hat. He said it helped him to headstands while looking up her dress.
I just ate at a new McDonald’s franchise, and it was great. Everything looked new, including the food. Apparently fast food will look new for years, sort of like plastic. I wonder if the toys in Happy Meals are more edible than the meals themselves...
I'd used people's stories and their lives to bolster my political arguments for changing welfare. Now, however, I was running into the people themselves, and I realized that using anyone's tragedy for political gain was cowardly.
Everywhere I go I'm too focused on everyone else to realize that they are too focused on themselves. And by everyone else I basically mean myself. It's hard to think about someone else when that someone else reminds you of you.
You can’t save others from themselves because those who make a perpetual muddle of their lives don’t appreciate your interfering with the drama they’ve created. They want your poor-sweet-baby sympathy, but they don’t want to change.
As a thinker, and most writers would consider themselves thinkers, your competition is not only the whole world, but it’s also the people of the past, and the people of the future. And the people of the future are the dangerous ones, because you’...
Some had come to look upon death as a mercy. Death meant warmth. Death was light. Life was cruel, cold, heavy and dark. Life was pain. Death was deliverance, and many would welcome it. Others doggedly clung to life and willed themselves to walk on.
Their sudden intimacy was like the explosive combustion that engulfs and consumes a moth that has fluttered too close to a candle flame; a completely unexpected turn of events that took both of them unawares and swept them irresistibly up and out of ...
In the first place, most princes apply themselves to the arts of war, in which I have neither ability nor interest, instead of to the good arts of peace. They are generally more set on acquiring new kingdoms by hook or by crook than on governing well...
The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good? If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselv...
There seems to be no way to save wildness from human intrusion without establishing and enforcing rules and regulations that are themselves intrusions on what, by definition, are meant to be areas outside humanity's control.
The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.
I think one of the problems in this country is that too many people are screwing things up, committing crimes and then getting on with their lives. What is really needed for public officials who shame themselves is ritual suicide.
