#occupation

The idea that you might end up in a job that doesn't allow you to be who you are, over the course of a lifetime, is still one of the most chilling nightmares to me. It's a good metaphor for fears I have about losing my soul in some accidental, mundane way. So, to me, these jobs that my characters have are very loaded. They immediately suggest a complex character to me, a woman who is, say, a secretary, but also a vigilante on behalf of her own soul. ↗

— Miranda July

#writing-craft #metaphor

If you will look about you (which most people won't do)," says Sergeant Cuff, "you will see that the nature of a man's tastes is, most times, as opposite as possible to the nature of a man's business. ↗

— Wilkie Collins

#occupation #opposites #taste #business

The mercy caravans are through there the medicine refugees flowing out. It makes the United States look very bad here. And much more like an occupation force than it did before. ↗

— Jon Lee Anderson

#before #did #flowing #force #here

I, talking about my children, of course I wanted them to succeed in life, they have to choose whatever job or occupation that they want, I will not try to influence. ↗

— Abdullah Ahmad Badawi

#children #choose #course #i #influence

War on terrorism defines the central preoccupation of the United States in the world today, and it does reflect in my view a rather narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy of the world's first superpower, of a great democracy, with genuinely idealistic traditions. ↗

— Zbigniew Brzezinski

#defines #democracy #does #extremist #first

Today's preoccupation with physical theories of everything takes a wrong turn from the purpose of science - to question all things relentlessly. Modern physics has become like Swift's kingdom of Laputa, flying absurdly on an island above the earth and indifferent to what is beneath. ↗

— Robert Lanza

#absurdly #all things #become #beneath #earth

The fact is, every thinker, every philosopher, the moment he is forced to abandon his one-sided intellectual occupation by practical necessity, immediately returns to the general point of view of mankind. ↗

— Ernst Mach

#every #fact #forced #general #his

The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced. ↗

— Michel de Montaigne

#life #occupation #soul #wisdom #work

In the midst of the heavy, hot fragrance of summer, and of the clean salty smell of the sea, there was the odor of wounded men, a sickly odor of blood and antiseptics which marked the zone of every military hospital. All Athens quickly took on that odor, as the wounded Greek soldiers were moved out of hospitals and piled into empty warehouses to make way for German wounded. Now every church, every empty lot, every school building in Athens is full of wounded, and on the pathways of Zappion, the park in the heart of Athens, bandaged men in makeshift wheel chairs are to be seen wherever one walks. Zappion is a profusion of flowers, heavy-scented luxurious flowers; but even the flower fragrance is not as strong as that of blood. ↗

— Betty Wason

#blood #flowers #fragrance #military-occupation #odor

All music is what awakens from you when you are reminded by the instruments, It is not the violins and the cornets....it is not the oboe nor the beating drums--nor the notes of the baritone singing his sweet romanza....nor those of the men's chorus, It is nearer and farther than they. ↗

— Walt Whitman

#men