Ben Orr Quotes

#1. We the Living is not a novel 'about Soviet Russia.' It is a novel about Man against the State. Its basic theme is the sanctity of human life - using the word 'sanctity' not in a mystical sense, but in the sense of 'supreme value.'

Ayn Rand

#2. We fall into the old stuff of textuality, and almost everything becomes safe because nobody wants to talk about what is not safe in poetry. We fall back on the psychologic, the ethnic, the quota, and serve the perpetuation of the machine.

Fady Joudah

#3. when one has searched for these as realities, who desires and what is desired?

Santideva

#4. I hope you don't mind my joining you, said Leanne. I minded. After all, she'd tried to kill me. A girl in a novel would say it was hard to believe, but it wasn't.

Franny Billingsley

#5. The perfectly ordinary girl and the great philosopher are alike: for both, the smallest triviality can become the vision that wipes out the world.

Yukio Mishima

#6. To be moved confuses the soul. One cannot convey these kinds of memories any more than the events of a dream ...
... if I have complained too long, it is because my memory, no longer having any fixed abode, has to carry its luggage with it.

Jean Cocteau

#7. It is frequently a misfortune to have very brilliant men in charge of affairs. They expect too much of ordinary men.

Thucydides

#8. Come back again, old heart! Ah me! Methinks in those thy coward fears There might, perchance, a courage be, That fails in these the manlier years; Courage to let the courage sink, Itself a coward base to think, Rather than not for heavenly light Wait on to show the truly right.

Arthur Hugh Clough

#9. I was twenty then. What the hell, I used to say, take your time, Bandini. You got ten years to write a book, so take it easy, get out and learn about life, walk the streets. That's your trouble: your ignorance of life.

John Fante

#10. Think not silence the wisdom of fools; but, if rightly timed, the honor of wise men, who have not the infirmity, but the virtue of taciturnity.

Thomas Browne