#age

Then there was the gray of human habitation. The blue places were turning brown, the yellow places to dust, the green places to smoke and ashes. Each time one of the animals disappeared--they went by species or sometimes by organizations of species, interconnected--it was as though all mountains were gone, or all lakes. A certain form of the world. But in the gray that metastasized over continents and hemispheres few appeared to be deterred by this extinguishing or even to speak of it, no one outside fringe elements and elite groups, professors and hippies, small populations of little general importance. The quiet mass disappearance, the inversion of the Ark, was passing unnoticed. ↗

— Lydia Millet

#dreams

I was either still dreaming or I had entered an alternate reality where I was a flippin' insane person. I doubted I had entered an alternate reality and a quick slap to my own face proved I wasn't still dreaming. -Sage Hannigan, Contingency ↗

— P.S. Martinez

#p-s-martinez #paranormal-romance #peggy-martinez #sage-hannigan #teen

What place would that be, a whole world without roads? It was a panicking thought. A world without roads! He would go nowhere in such a place. He would be trapped where he was, he would have lived out his life only where he was born. ↗

— Lydia Millet

#dreams

...his monstrous dreams, peopled by ape-like creatures and by harlots with gleaming jewel eyes.. ↗

— James Joyce

#wonderful-imagery #dreams

...and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I'll take A Midsummer Night's Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh. ↗

— Stephen King

#dreams

I refuse to accept that I have limitations beyond my own belief of boundaries. Perception is all that limits the mind. ↗

— Shannon L. Alder

#dreams #goals #limitations #limits #perception

Ancient politicians talked incessantly about morality and virtue; our politicians talk only about business and money. One will tell you that in a particular country a man is worth the sum he could be sold for in Algiers; another, by following this calculation, will find countries where a man is worth nothing, and others where he is worth less than nothing. They assess men like herds of livestock. According to them, a man has no value to the State apart from what he consumes in it. Thus one Sybarite would have been worth at least thirty Lacedaemonians. Would someone therefore hazard a guess which of these two republics, Sparta or Sybaris, was overthrown by a handful of peasants and which one made Asia tremble? ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#money #politicians #sparta #valor #virtue

Men don't settle down because of the right woman. They settle down because they are finally ready for it. Whatever woman they're dating when they get ready is the one they settle down with, not necessarily the best one or the prettiest, just the one who happened to be on hand when the time got to be right. Unromantic, but still true. ↗

— Laurell K. Hamilton

#men #dating

There was a time he’d heard tales of Dab Sweet and he’d stuck thumbs in his belt and chin to the sky and tricked himself that was how his life had been. But the years scraped by hard as ever and he got less and the stories more ’til they were tales of a man he’d never met succeeding at what he’d never have dreamed of attempting. ↗

— Joe Abercrombie

#self-image #dreams

Do you wish to speak in Provençal, French, or Latin? They are all I can manage, I'm afraid." "Any will do," the rabbi replied in Provençal. "Splendid. Latin it is," said Pope Clement. ↗

— Iain Pears

#communication #conceit #languages #mockery #papal-authority