#conquest

This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot close off the loves and hates of all that back there in the real world the memories will overtake you and swamp you and wilt your tenacity. Tenacity stamina... close off to everything and everyone but your writing. That s the bloody price. I don t know maybe it's some kind of ultimate selfishness. Maybe it's part of the killer instinct. Unless you can stash away and bury thoughts of your greatest love you cannot sustain the kind of concentration that breaks most men trying to write a book over a three or four year period. ↗

— Leon Uris

#conquest #loneliness #mitla-pass #novelist #writing

They (Romans) were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force - nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind - as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea - something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to... ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#men

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#complexion #conquest #different #earth #flatter

If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest. ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#conquest #deeply #every #mind #more

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-strewn streets. They should have built your soul with truth, not led along with lies. ↗

— John Steinbeck

#military #war #business

I never met your likeness. Jane: you please me, and you master me - you seem to submit, and I like the sense of pliancy you impart; and while I am twining the soft, silken skein round my finger, it sends a thrill up my arm to my heart. I am influenced - conquered; and the influence is sweeter than I can express; and the conquest I undergo has a witchery beyond any triumph _I_ can win. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#influence #love #love

There’s just one thing I want to know.” Julian nodded. “Anything.” “When you peed and had sex outside, it wasn’t at the same time, was it? Because that’d be really nasty. ↗

— S.J. Frost

#keys-to-love #love

Men lose more conquests by their own awkwardness than by any virtue in the woman. ↗

— Ninon de L'Enclos

#awkwardness #conquests #lose #men #more

Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. ↗

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#contains #future #human #human mind #language

For my father, being kind was natural... I have to really work at it. I love competing and winning, conquest - not words you usually associate with kindness. ↗

— David Copperfield

#being #competing #conquest #father #i