Thrasymachus Might Makes Quotes

#1. World's freakiest bloodsucker, right here," I went on. "And you know what? If it makes some of you uncomfortable, too bad. If it makes some of you so uncomfortable you want to start shit with me about it, step right up and see if I don't eat the hell out of you next!"
I'd meant that last part as a threat, but somewhere in my impassioned declaration of independence from hiding what I was, I'd neglected to think through my phrasing. I saw Bones raise a brow, a muffled snicker broke out from Ian, and then Vlad laughed loud and hearty.
"With that sort of invitation, Reaper, you might want to suggest the line form to your right."
"That's not ... I meant eat them in a bad way," I sputtered. #Quote by Jeaniene Frost

#2. It was Kellanved – all of this. Him and Dancer. They used Tavore Paran from the very start. They used all of us, Hedge.'
'That's what gods do, aye. So you don't like it? Fine, but listen to me. Sometimes, what they want – what they need us to do – sometimes it's all right. I mean, it's the right thing to do. Sometimes, it makes us better people.'
'You really believe that?'
'And when we're better people, we make better gods.'
Fiddler looked away. 'It's hopeless, then. We can stuff a god with every virtue we got, it still won't make us any better, will it? Because we're not good with virtues, Hedge.'
'Most of the time, aye, we're not. But maybe then, at our worst, we might look up, we might see that god we made out of the best in us. Not vicious, not vengeful, not arrogant or spiteful. Not selfish, not greedy. Just clear-eyed, with no time for all our rubbish. The kind of god to give us a slap in the face for being such shits. #Quote by Steven Erikson

#3. Maybe instead of strings it's stories things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant superstory, except it got broken up into a jillion different pieces, that's why no story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into all the other people's we know, until you've got something that to God or whoever might look like a letter, or even a whole word ... #Quote by Paul Murray

#4. In the preface to my first collection of essays, Prepared for the Worst, in 1988, I annexed a thought of Nadine Gordimer's, to the effect that a serious person should try and write posthumously. By that I took her to mean that one should compose as if the usual constraints - of fashion, commerce, self-censorship, public and perhaps especially intellectual opinion - did not operate. Impossible perhaps to live up to, this admonition and aspiration did possess some muscle, as well as some warning of how it can decay. Then, about a year ago, I was informed by a doctor that I might have as little as another year to live. In consequence, some of my recent articles were written with the full consciousness that they may be my very last. Sobering in one way and exhilarating in another, this practice can obviously never become perfected. But it has given me a more vivid idea of what makes life worth living, and defending. #Quote by Christopher Hitchens

#5. ( ... ) It,s hard not to be able. There, look there!/ I cannot get the movement nor the light;/Sometimes it almost makes a man despair/To try and try and never get it right./Oh, if I could -oh, if I only might,/I wouldn,t mind what hells I,d have to pass,/Not if the whole world called me fool and ass.
Dauber (A poem). John Masefield. 1916. London William Heinemann #Quote by John Masefield

#6. Can there be anything more stupendous than the [Hindu] conception that the universe has no beginning and no end, but passes everlastingly from growth to equilibrium, from equilibrium to decline, from decline to dissolution, from dissolution to growth, and so on to all eternity?"
"Which presupposes belief in the transmigration of souls."
"It's a belief held by two thirds of the human race."
"The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth."
"No, but at least it makes it worthy of consideration. Christianity absorbed so much of New-Platonism, it might very easily have absorbed that too, and in point of fact there was an early Christian sect that believed in it, but it was declared heretical. Except for that Christians would believe in it as confidently as they believe in the resurrection of Christ."
"Am I right in thinking that it means that the soul passes from body to body in an endless course of experience occasioned by the merit or demerit of previous works?"
"I think so."
"But you see, I'm not only my spirit but my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevski Dostoyevski without his epilepsy?"
"The Indians wouldn't speak of an accident. They would answer that it's your actions in previous lives that have determined your soul to inhabit an imperfect body. #Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

#7. How can so many (white, male) writers narratively justify restricting the agency of their female characters on the grounds of sexism = authenticity while simultaneously writing male characters with conveniently modern values?

The habit of authors writing Sexism Without Sexists in genre novels is seemingly pathological. Women are stuffed in the fridge under cover of "authenticity" by secondary characters and villains because too many authors flinch from the "authenticity" of sexist male protagonists. Which means the yardstick for "authenticity" in such novels almost always ends up being "how much do the women suffer", instead of - as might also be the case - "how sexist are the heroes".

And this bugs me; because if authors can stretch their imaginations far enough to envisage the presence of modern-minded men in the fake Middle Ages, then why can't they stretch them that little bit further to put in modern-minded women, or modern-minded social values? It strikes me as being extremely convenient that the one universally permitted exception to this species of "authenticity" is one that makes the male heroes look noble while still mandating that the women be downtrodden and in need of rescuing.

-Comment at Staffer's Book Review 4/18/2012 to "Michael J. Sullivan on Character Agency #Quote by Foz Meadows

#8. It makes sense for us to want a symptom, an 'it' to go away. If we begin to sense that we are made up of many selves ... then we might instead say, 'the anxious part of me is really suffering. I wonder how we might help her'.

There is often a palpable softening as we gaze on a person inside who has value apart from the distressing symptom.

We also may sense more clearly that this experience isn't all of us, but belongs to a part who has had encounters that give this anxiety context and meaning.

The change of pronoun, granting personhood, may move us into a more right-centric way of perceiving, which also opens us to a more both/and perspective of broad acceptance, arouses our warm curiosity, expands receptivity to the present moment. It can really be a very profound change. #Quote by Bonnie Badenoch

#9. Being the only stranger at dinner with a group of girls who are already close friends doesn't sound appealing at all. I'll have to pretend to laugh at stories I don't get about people I don't know. I'll probably stuff my face just to have something to do while they all gab about their ninth-grade English teacher or some other inside joke that makes me feel like an outsider. It's hard to know how to behave in those situations. You can jump right in, asking "Who?" and "Where was this?" or you can sit back and let them have their laughs. I almost always opt for the latter, sometimes to my detriment. What I think is letting them have their fun, they might takes as she-thinks-she's-too-cool. #Quote by Rachel Bertsche

#10. Sometimes keeping a secret seems like the right thing to do because telling the truth might hurt someone and makes it seem like you don't love them. But really, telling the truth is the right thing to do. It's the most loving thing to do.
-Kaylee #Quote by Ginny L. Yttrup

#11. They say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and I guess for some, that's true. After all, pain makes you flinch. Your fingers form a fist, and that fist can become tighter and harder with each indignity suffered. Eventually, that fist might even get strong enough to punch down walls. But if you need your hand for something other than violence, if you want to unfurl those fingers to caress a loved one or comfort someone in need, and can't, well then, you're broken. #Quote by Wayne Gladstone

#12. For me, there are two different things that make Sherlock Sherlock. One is, you know, within the books: obviously he's a genius with an attention to detail, his ravenous hunger for all aspects of knowledge that might feed into his work. But the major thing that makes him Sherlock is his relationship with Watson - their friendship. For me, that, I guess, is the biggest side, the more interesting side than the genius. #Quote by Jonny Lee Miller

#13. I feel like they're different creatures, live and in the studio, but that's what makes it so interesting to me. If they didn't have any different shadings or colors, you might as well be a hologram or something. #Quote by Mary Chapin Carpenter

#14. Here sighs and cries and shrieks of lamentation
echoed throughout the starless air of Hell;
at first these sounds resounding made me weep:

tongues confused, a language strained in anguish
with cadences of anger, shrill outcries
and raucous groans that joined with sounds of hands,
raising a whirling storm that turns itself
forever through that air of endless black,
like grains of sand swirling when a whirlwind blows.

And I, in the midst of all this circling horror,
began, "Teacher, what are these sounds I hear?
What souls are these so overwhelmed by grief?"

And he to me: "This wretched state of being
is the fate of those sad souls who lived a life
but lived it with no blame and with no praise.
They are mixed with that repulsive choir of angels
neither faithful nor unfaithful to their God,
who undecided stood but for themselves.

Heaven, to keep its beauty, cast them out,
but even Hell itself would not receive them,
for fear the damned might glory over them."

And I. "Master, what torments do they suffer
that force them to lament so bitterly?"
He answered: "I will tell you in few words:

these wretches have no hope of truly dying,
and this blind life they lead is so abject
it makes them envy every other fate.

The world will not record their having been there;
Heaven's mercy and its justice turn from t #Quote by Dante Alighieri

#15. God accommodates [Moses'] complaints and makes in-course corrections. God does not take a human being so fully into the divine confidence--you might say, God does not depend on a human being so fully--until Mary conceives by the Holy Spirit. (pg. 16) #Quote by Ellen F. Davis

#16. In order to even begin to learn how to play his instrument, it takes the guitarist weeks to build calluses on his fingertips; it takes the saxophonist months to strengthen his lip so that he might play his instrument for only a five-minute stretch; it can take the pianist years to develop dual hand and multiple finger coordination. Why do writers assume they can just "write" with no training whatsoever-and then expect, on their first attempt, to be published internationally? What makes them think they're so much inherently greater, need so much less training than any other artists? #Quote by Noah Lukeman

#17. Similarly with the plongeur. He is a king compared with a rickshaw puller or a gharry pony, but his case is
analogous. He is the slave of a hotel or a restaurant, and his slavery is more or less useless. For, after all, where is
the REAL need of big hotels and smart restaurants?
They are supposed to provide luxury, but in reality they provide only a cheap, shoddy imitation of it. Nearly everyone hates hotels. Some restaurants are better than others, but it is impossible to get as good a meal in a restaurant as one can get, for the same expense, in a private house. No doubt hotels and restaurants must exist, but there is no need that they should enslave hundreds of people. What makes the work in them is not the essentials; it is the shams that are supposed to represent luxury. Smartness, as it is called, means, in effect, merely that the staff work more and the customers pay more; no one benefits except the proprietor, who will presently buy himself a striped villa at Deauville.
Essentially, a 'smart' hotel is a place where a hundred people toil like devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose for things they do not really want. If the nonsense were cut out of hotels and restaurants, and the work done with simple efficiency, plongeurs might work six or eight hours a day instead of ten or fifteen. #Quote by George Orwell

#18. American life is based on a reassurance that we like one another but won't violate one another's privacies. This makes it a land of small talk. Two people greet each other happily, with friendliness, but might know each other for years before venturing basic questions about each other's backgrounds....In the East, I've heard it said, there's intimacy without friendship; in the West, there's friendship without intimacy. #Quote by Karan Mahajan

#19. Entranced. She lifts up a trembling hand and paints what I think might be a flower on Peeta's cheek. "Thank you," he whispers. "That looks beautiful." For a moment, the morphling's face lights up in a grin and she makes a small squeaking sound. Then her blood-dappled hand falls back onto her chest, she gives one last huff of air, and the cannon fires. The grip on my hand releases. #Quote by Suzanne Collins

#20. Good fear protects you from getting hurt. Don't put your hand on a hot stove. Avoid dark alleys. Stay away from high, open places and trees during a lightning storm! Bad fear, though. It makes you think twice about taking the kind of risk that might turn out to be good for you. Applying for a job. Telling someone you love them. Writing the great American novel. Bad fear protects you from life. Keeps you from really living! You listen bad fear, you may as well just disappear. #Quote by Jocelyn Davies

#21. There's something about the writing of a prose poem that seems to promise open land and distance in which you can lose yourself. (Sustained rapture?) Sometimes it's just good to have the illusion of being in a place without fences. Then you head out into it, it starts to change. The distance turns out to have all kinds of invisible obstacles requiring a leap or swerve, negotiation, a radical change in direction–it makes its demands on you, and maybe it turns out, after all, to be a poem, or something you hope might offer one more explanation for the mystery. #Quote by Nancy Eimers

#22. A wiser intelligence might now truthfully say of us at this point: here is a chimera, a new and very odd species come shambling into our universe, a mix of Stone Age emotion, medieval self-image, and godlike technology. The combination makes the species unresponsive to the forces that count most for its own long-term survival. #Quote by Edward O. Wilson

#23. Some might question whether it makes sense to talk about setting up the experiment and running it again with exactly the same conditions--that it is, in fact, impossible. Locally, you might get the conditions exactly the same, but you have to embed the experiment in the universe, and that has moved on. You can't rewind the wave function of the universe and rerun it. The universe is a one-time-only experiment that includes us as part of its wave function, and there's no going back. #Quote by Marcus Du Sautoy

#24. We came to value transparency and to knock down walls - not only online but also in person. We failed to realize that what makes sense for the asynchronous, relatively anonymous interactions of the Internet might not work as well inside the face-to-face, politically charged, acoustically noisy confines of an open-plan office. Instead of distinguishing between online and in-person interaction, we used the lessons of one to inform our thinking about the other. #Quote by Anonymous

#25. What doesn't KILL me makes me stronger ... Except for the extinction of COFFEE ... that might kill me. #Quote by Tanya Masse

#26. It was a good thing, we told ourselves; the eyes grow weary with looking at new things; sleeping late, we said, has its genuine therapeutic value; we would be better for it, would be able to work more effectively. We have little doubt that all this was true, but we wish we could build as good a rationalization every time we are lazy. For in some beastly way this fine laziness has got itself a bad name. It is easy to see how it might have come into disrepute, if the result of laziness were hunger. But it rarely is. Hunger makes laziness impossible. It has even become sinful to be lazy. We wonder why. One could argue, particularly if one had a gift for laziness, that it is relaxation pregnant of activity, a sense of rest from which directed effort may arise, whereas most busy-ness is merely a kind of nervous tic.
...
How can such a process have become a shame and a sin? Only in laziness can one achieve a state of contemplation which is a balancing of values, a weighing of oneself against the world and the world against itself. A busy man cannot find time for such balancing. We do not think a lazy man can commit murders, nor great thefts, nor lead a mob. He would be more likely to think about it and laugh. And a nation of lazy contemplative men would be incapable of fighting a war unless their very laziness were attacked. Wars are the activities of busy-ness. #Quote by John Steinbeck

#27. They might be talking in perfect latin tongue and without warning begin to talk in perfect anglo tongue and keep it up like that, alternating between a thing that believes itself to be perfect and a thing that believes itself to be perfect, morphing back and forth between two beasts until out of carelessness or clear intent they suddenly stop switching tongues and start speaking that other one. In it brims nostalgia for the land they left or never knew when they use the words with which they name objects; while actions are alluded to with an anglo verb conjugated latin-style, pinning on a sonorous tail from back there. Using in one tongue the word for a thing in the other makes the attributes of both resound: if you say Give me fire when they say Give me a light, what is not to be learned about fire, light and the act of giving? It's not another way of saying things: these are new things #Quote by Yuri Herrera

#28. We can't help but wonder how much difference one person makes in the world. We look inside ourselves, questioning if we have the capacity for heroism and greatness. But the truth is, every time we take an action, we make an impact. Every single thing we do has an effect on the people around us. Every choice we make sends ripples out into the world. Our smallest acts of kindness can cause a chain reaction of unforeseen benefits for people we've never met. We might not witness those results, but they happen all the same. #Quote by Jake Bohm

#29. You can say anything with a Post-It.
I'm not entirely sure why that is.
Maybe the friendliness of the squares makes it easier. A square is nicely compact and less intimidating than a full page.
And they come in cheerful colors. Non-white paper is kind of inherently festive.
Or maybe paper that sticks feels more important than paper that can blow away.
(Though you can move them, if you need to put them somewhere else.)
They might not be as lasting as words carved in stone, but Post-It thoughts will stay.
For awhile, at least. #Quote by Erin Morgenstern

#30. I've been absent from you too long. I miss you so badly and yet this being apart makes me realise you're not simply the faithful man who loves me so astonishingly well, but an angel, sent for some unfathomable reason to look out for me. I should have realised this truth years ago because you are so extraordinary, so unlike other men, so unlike me, this weak, vain, faithless creature you have been so intent on saving from himself. I should have realised from the first moment I saw you in that trench, when I fell so badly in love with you and hoped you wouldn't notice. Or perhaps not then, but later, when you saved my life so often just by lending me courage when I was half-mad from fear. How much courage you had to spare – I will never forget. But angels are courageous, aren't they? I should know. I have never understood why I deserved such grace.

I don't have your faith, Patrick, or your love of God. I am uncertain and afraid, I wish you were with me now, not just in spirit, as I know you are and always have been, but here in body. I need to cower behind you, because if God is real He might be kinder knowing you loved me.

If angels need to pray, pray for me. #Quote by Marion Husband

#31. The dream I had was on a certain night. And in the dream the traveler appeared. What night was this? In the life of the traveler when was it that he came to spend the night in that rocky posada? He slept and events took place which I will tell you of, but when was this? You can see the problem. Let us say that the events which took place were a dream of this man whose own reality remains conjectural. How assess the world of that conjectural mind? And what with him is sleep and what is waking? How comes he to own the a world at night at all? Things need a ground to stand upon. As every soul requires a body. A dream within a dream makes other claims than what a man might suppose. #Quote by Cormac McCarthy

#32. Write Makes Might! #Quote by Kevin James Breaux

#33. Then a low voice murmured in my ear. "Clea."
I screamed and shot an immediate hammer punch to the side.
"Whoa!" cried Ben. He reeled back to avoid my fist and tripped over the rug, tumbling to the ground and spilling a fresh mug of coffee over his gray shawl-neck sweater.
"OH!" he gasped. "Hot. Very, very hot. Oh, not good."
"Ben! Oh my God, wait-" I darted into the bathroom and grabbed a hand towel, then raced back to him, knelt down, and sopped the spilled coffee from his chest. "I'm so sorry. I didn't know you were there! You didn't say anything!"
"I yelled from downstairs...I thought you'd heard me."
A strange smell tickled my nose, and I bent closer to Ben, just inches from his face. "What's that smell?" I asked.
"Cardamom clove coffee," he said, gesturing to the now empty mug on the floor beside us. "I thought you might like it."
"I like the smell. Maybe you should wear it as a cologne."
"Could work," he agreed. "You could give a testimonial that it makes women crazy."
"Not crazy-nimble. Ten years of Krav Maga gives you catlike reflexes. If you'd been an intruder... #Quote by Hilary Duff

#34. [Northerners] took over the Southern myth and themselves began to revel in it. This acceptance was to culminate in Gone With the Wind, the enormous success of which novel makes a curious counterbalance to that of Uncle Tom's Cabin. But it began in the Century of the eighties with the stories of Thomas Nelson Page. Though Page had been only twelve at the end of the Civil War, so had had little experience of the old regime, he really invented for the popular mind Old Massa and Mistis and Meh Lady, with their dusky-skinned adoring retainers. The Northerners, after the shedding of so much blood, illogically found it soothing to be told that slavery had not been so bad, that the Negroes were a lovable but simple race, whose business was to work for whites. And Page also struck in his stories a note of reconciliation that everybody wanted to hear: he cooked up romances between young Northern officers, as gentlemanly as any Southerner, and spirited plantation beauties who might turn out to be the young men's cousins and who in any case would marry them after the war. #Quote by Edmund Wilson

#35. Still, I figure we shouldn't' discourage fans of actively managed funds. With all their buying and selling, active investors ensure the market is reasonably efficient. That makes it possible for the rest of us to do the sensible thing, which is to index. Want to join me in this parasitic behavior? To build a well-diversified portfolio, you might stash 70 percent of your stock portfolio into a Wilshire 5000-index fund and the remaining 30 percent in an international-index fund. #Quote by Paul Samuelson

#36. As soon as I started acting in England, I got unusual roles. Although I'm 6 foot six, and agents might standardly cast me in tough guy roles or the big guy in the back, I've been very blessed to do roles that makes them think twice about how they're gonna cast me. #Quote by Nonso Anozie

#37. The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world - impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not - to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life. #Quote by Charles Baudelaire

#38. For to the extent that we act toward others as we feel we might, we open ourselves to their inner reality, and their needs and aspirations seem so important to us as our own. We hope their hopes will be fulfilled and need to see their needs satisfied. Their happiness makes us happy, and we are pained to see them hurt. We resonate with them and delight in their prosperity. #Quote by C. Terry Warner

#39. To find everything profound - that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished. #Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche

#40. Now, it's been a while since I had to tell this, so a few of the finer points may not connect as well as they should, but the story will bear the weight. That's the beauty of the truth: put all together, it makes sense even if the parts might not. #Quote by Thomm Quackenbush

#41. If you don't drink coffee, you should think about two to four cups a day. It can make you more alert, happier, and more productive. It might even make you live longer. Coffee can also make you more likely to exercise, and it contains beneficial antioxidants and other substances associated with decreased risk of stroke (especially in women), Parkinson's disease, and dementia. Coffee is also associated with decreased risk of abnormal heart rhythms, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers.12, 13 Any one of those benefits of coffee would be persuasive, but cumulatively they're a no-brainer. An hour ago I considered doing some writing for this book, but I didn't have the necessary energy or focus to sit down and start working. I did, however, have enough energy to fix myself a cup of coffee. A few sips into it, I was happier to be working than I would have been doing whatever lazy thing was my alternative. Coffee literally makes me enjoy work. No willpower needed. Coffee also allows you to manage your energy levels so you have the most when you need it. My experience is that coffee drinkers have higher highs and lower lows, energywise, than non–coffee drinkers, but that trade-off works. I can guarantee that my best thinking goes into my job, while saving my dull-brain hours for household chores and other simple tasks. The biggest downside of coffee is that once you get addicted to caffeine, you can get a "coffee headache" if you go too long without a cup. Luckily, coffee is one of th #Quote by Scott Adams

#42. I speak about the power of the psychedelic experience because I think people should be informed of their birthright, and I feel very antsy around the notion that someone might go from birth to the grave without ever having a psychedelic experience. It makes me as antsy as the notion that someone might go from birth to the grave without having a sexual experience. It's a strange kind of protective denial. #Quote by Terence McKenna

#43. I'd rather give her new ones, for I think she is a little bit proud and might not like old things. If she was my sister it would do, because sisters don't mind, but she isn't, and that makes it bad, you see. I know how I can manage beautifully; I'll adopt her! and Rose looked quite radiant with #Quote by Louisa May Alcott

#44. The study of silence has long engrossed me. The matrix of a poet's work consists not only of what is there to be absorbed and worked on, but also of what is missing, desaparecido, rendered unspeakable, thus unthinkable. It is through these invisible holes in reality that poetry makes its way - certainly for women and other marginalized subjects and for disempowered and colonized peoples generally, but ultimately for all who practice any art at its deeper levels. The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken? #Quote by Adrienne Rich