#so

That's a nice song,' said young Sam, and Vimes remembered that he was hearing it for the first time. It's an old soldiers' song,' he said. Really, sarge? But it's about angels.' Yes, thought Vimes, and it's amazing what bits those angels cause to rise up as the song progresses. It's a real soldiers' song: sentimental, with dirty bits. As I recall, they used to sing it after battles,’ he said. 'I've seen old men cry when they sing it,’ he added. Why? It sounds cheerful.' They were remembering who they were not singing it with, thought Vimes. You'll learn. I know you will. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#comrades #death #singing #soldiers #death

I admire Tolkien greatly. His books had enormous influence on me. And the trope that he sort of established—the idea of the Dark Lord and his Evil Minions—in the hands of lesser writers over the years and decades has not served the genre well. It has been beaten to death. The battle of good and evil is a great subject for any book and certainly for a fantasy book, but I think ultimately the battle between good and evil is weighed within the individual human heart and not necessarily between an army of people dressed in white and an army of people dressed in black. When I look at the world, I see that most real living breathing human beings are grey. ↗

— George R.R. Martin

#j-r-r-tolkien #the-lord-of-the-rings #death

It takes bravery to recognize where in your life you are your own poison... it takes courage to do something about it. ↗

— Steve Maraboli

#courage #happiness #inspirational #life #motivational

It was as if my father had given me, by way of temperament, an impossibly wild, dark, and unbroken horse. It was a horse without a name, and a horse with no experience of a bit between its teeth. My mother taught me to gentle it; gave me the discipline and love to break it; and- as Alexander had known so intuitively with Bucephalus- she understood, and taught me, that the beast was best handled by turning it toward the sun. ↗

— Kay Redfield Jamison

#manic-depression #experience

Her happiness floated like waves of ocean along the coast of her life. She found lyrics of her life in his arms but she never sung her song. ↗

— Santosh Kalwar

#life #ocean #poetry #song #waves

When you have a very hot single there is no reason why it can't drive album sales. People fall off and come back on. I'm looking forward to coming back on with a vengeance. ↗

— Justin Guarini

#back #come #coming #drive #fall

Experience has taught me," said Peter (...) "that no situation finds Bunter unprepared. That he should have procured The Times this morning by the simple expedient of asking the milkman to request the postmistress to telephone to Broxford and have it handed to the 'bus-conductor to be dropped at the post-office and brought up by the little girl who delivers the telegrams is a trifling example of his resourceful energy. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#resourcefulness #experience

Jerry-5486: "The most apparent thing that I noticed was how most of the people in this study derive their sense of identity and well-being from their immediate surroundings rather than from within themselves, and that's why they broke down—just couldn't stand the pressure—they had nothing within them to hold up against all of this. ↗

— Philip G. Zimbardo

#prison #self-reliance #stanford-prison-experiment #experience

The opera is like a husband with a foreign title - expensive to support, hard to understand and therefore a supreme social challenge. ↗

— Cleveland Amory

#expensive #foreign #hard #husband #like

Now, I know from experience that the trouble with one lie is that it usually takes more lies to cover it up.  And if you don't watch out, you wind up telling lies to cover up the lies that are covering up the original lie.  ↗

— Wendelin Van Draanen

#experience