#die

I play by the rules even when there aren’t any. ↗

— Stacy Kramer

#obedient #rules #obedience

I couldn't get to sleep. The book lay nearby. A thin object on the divan. So strange. Between two cardboard covers were noises, doors, howls, horses, people. All side by side, pressed tightly against one another. Boiled down to little black marks. Hair, eyes, voices, nails, legs, knocks on doors, walls, blood, beards, the sound of horseshoes, shouts. All docile, blindly obedient to the little black marks. The letters run in mad haste, now here, now there. The a's, f's, y's, k's all run. They gather together to create a horse or a hailstorm. They run again. Now they create a dagger, a night, a murder. Then streets, slamming doors, silence. Running and running. Never stopping. ↗

— Ismail Kadaré

#reading #obedience

Obeying orders just to obey is the mark of a person who has ceased to think. Remember, it is better to suffer for doing what is right rather than for doing what is wrong. ↗

— Ilsa J. Bick

#obedience

There is no broader way to apostasy than to reject God’s sovereignty in all things concerning the revelation of himself and our obedience... ↗

— John Owen

#gods-sovereignty #obedience

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible. ↗

— Salman Rushdie

#reality #salman-rushdie #perspective

There has seldom if ever a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots. ↗

— Iain Banks

#soldiers #war #heroism

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. ↗

— Anatole France

#another #before #behind #changes #die

And it is strange that absence can feel like presence. ↗

— Ally Condie

#ally-condie #crossed #dystopia #dystopian-fiction #page-

There must always be a fringe of the experimental in literature--poems bizarre in form and curious in content, stories that overreach for what has not hitherto been put in story form, criticism that mingles a search for new truth with bravado. We should neither scoff at this trial margin nor take it too seriously. Without it, literature becomes inert and complacent. But the everyday person's reading is not, ought not to be, in the margin. He asks for a less experimental diet, and his choice is sound. If authors and publishers would give him more heed they would do wisely. They are afraid of the swarming populace who clamor for vulgar sensation (and will pay only what it is worth), and they are afraid of petulant literati who insist upon sophisticated sensation (and desire complimentary copies). The stout middle class, as in politics and industry, has far less influence than its good sense and its good taste and its ready purse deserve. ↗

— Henry Seidel Canby

#literature #middle-class #middlebrows #diet

Most of [her ashes] fell into the river in a long gray curtain. But some was caught by the wind and blown upward toward the blue spring sky where it swirled a moment in the air, before dissolving into sunlight. ↗

— Kimberly Cutter

#christian-fiction #france #historical-fiction #history #medieval-history