Offbeat Quotes I Like

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phoenix_rising
@phoenix_rising
21 Years5,000+ Posts

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"Thus, the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude, and the evidence-givers too untrustworthy."

"Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while
A great wind is bearing me across the sky."

"We're here. We're weird. Get used to it."

"So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.
Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and
demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify
all things in your life."
--Tecumseh


"In psychology, there is a concept called "idiosyncratic credit," It
means that, over time, within any group, you can build up credit by
being helpful, entertaining, interesting, kind . . . generally behaving
as a person of good sense and good will. Then, if you do something that
annoys people, they will probably just shrug it off and the world will
keep turning. You are, in essence, drawing on the credit you've built
over time. This can't go on forever, of course. If you keep screwing
up, you'll eventually use up your credit."

I really love this one:

"Imagine a Carthage sown with salt and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water -- peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries."
-- Marilynne Robinson, HOUSEKEEPING

"I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat."
--Rebecca West (1913)

"We don't need to escape FROM as much as we need to escape TO. There's nothing TOUGH about Modern American Life. Mostly, it's just plain Boring. And it's boring because it carries with it a kind of unavoidable self-awareness. That self-awareness tells us that we don't need to escape from the harshness of life as much as we need to escape to a time or place in which unselfishness is acceptable behavior."
-- Donald Barnhorst