Top 100 The Passage Quotes
#1. But I can't help thinking of the shock I felt when I finally realised it was winter, on exiting Mizuko's apartment. The summer was long gone, but I hadn't noticed until then.
Olivia Sudjic
#2. And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.
Peter Matthiessen
#3. There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet.
James Baldwin
#4. I really want Americans, and all of us, to be less afraid of death, and know that it's a passage, but that - don't go to the funeral before the day of the funeral.
Valerie Harper
#5. Nothing enlarges the gulf of atheism more than the wide passage that lies between the faith and lives of men pretending to teach Christianity.
Benjamin Stillingfleet
#6. As if sustained and too-direct contact with time's raw passage could scar the nerves permanently, like staring at the sun.
Jonathan Franzen
#7. I account the office of benefactor, or almoner, to which God appoints all those whom he has favored with wealth, one of the most honorable and delightful in the world. He never institutes a channel for the passage of His bounties that those bounties do not enrich and beautify.
J.G. Holland
#8. The Samuel Josephs were not a family. They were a swarm. The moment you entered the house they cropped up and jumped out at you from under the tables, through the stair rails, behind the doors, behind the coats in the passage. Impossible to count them: impossible to distinguish between them.
Katherine Mansfield
#9. I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
Henry David Thoreau
#10. All the tragedies which we can imagine return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time.
Simone Weil
#11. I cannot in good conscience vote for final passage of legislation that would pave the way to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.
Jim Ramstad
#12. I choose to surround myself with happy human beings. I went through the angsty period. I think every single person does. I think it's a rite of passage to hate the world and feel like the victim.
Shailene Woodley
#13. In the sheltered heart of the clumps last year's foliage still clings to the lower branches, tatters of orange that mutter with the passage of the wind, the talk of old women warning the green generation of what they, too, must come to when the sap runs back.
Jacquetta Hawkes
#14. When you are completely absorbed or caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.
Rollo May
#15. I have heard articulate speech produced by sunlight I have heard a ray of the sun laugh and cough and sing! ... I have been able to hear a shadow, and I have even perceived by ear the passage of a cloud across the sun's disk.
Alexander Graham Bell
#16. There was no light in their rooms save that of the silver moon through the bars, and the occasional passage of a lamp by the attendant walking the halls. She could not see the color of his eyes, only the wet gleam of them.
Christina Henry
#17. So it was a crossroads summer, when the universe seemed to stand perilously still like an egg wobbling on a precipice, a regular rite of passage summer that saw us traverse the hazardous divide between the illusions of boyhood and the far more pernicious deceptions of maturity, et cetera.
Sol Luckman
#18. Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.
Abraham Verghese
#19. Just touching that old tree was truly moving to me because when you touch these trees, you have such a sense of the passage of time, of history. It's like you're touching the essence, the very substance of life.
Kim Novak
#20. Women's sports is still in its infancy. The beginning of women's sports in the United States started in 1972, with the passage of Title 9 for girls to finally get athletic scholarships.
Billie Jean King
#21. The passage of time is likely to make high-speed rail more and more desirable, making it critical that politicians of today think ahead to tomorrow.
Anthony Albanese
#22. Flame within them gets dim with the passage of time. So, if you have the fire, run, since you never know when it may be doused, leaving you stranded in darkness. - John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent (Step
Neal Stephenson
#23. Obama has seen to the passage of the most radical legislation in recent American history and so-called 'progressives' should be thanking him for it - even as many of the rest of us rear in horror from its implications.
John Podhoretz
#24. Like an unfinished symphony, her story played on my mind for most of my life. It would rock to the tune of the passage of time, an adagio of high notes, low notes an illusive movements. Then when I least expected it, I happened upon the missing notes in the life of Charlotte Howe Taylor.
Sally Armstrong
#25. So, my brother and I, over the last two years, went back through Scripture and pulled every (passage) we could in relation to parenting children, guarding their hearts, teaching them, loving them, being patient. And then we worked through 40 principles and wrote The Love Dare for Parents.
Alex Kendrick
#26. I've changed my ways a little, I cannot now
Run with you in the evenings along the shore,
Except in a kind of dream, and you, if you dream a moment,
You see me there.
Robinson Jeffers
#27. A good plan will therefore include alternative actions, the choice between them being left open until the passage of time indicates which is feasible and which is not.
Carl Eckart
#28. As we tune our ears to the kind of preaching that makes the primary point of the sermon the primary point of a particular passage of Scripture, we grow accustomed to listening to God.
Thabiti M. Anyabwile
#29. Four days will quickly steep themselves in nights;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time.
William Shakespeare
#30. Man and the animals are merely a passage and channel for food, a tomb for other animals, a haven for the dead, giving life by the death of others, a coffer full of corruption.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#31. Living most of the time in a world created mostly in one's head, does not make for an easy passage in the real world.
Sydney Brenner
#32. Must we to bed indeed? Well then,
Let us arise and go like men,
And face with an undaunted tread
The long black passage up to bed.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#33. They said their sufferings were great on the passage, and several of their number had died.
Lewis Tappan
#34. Decisive action has been taken on the home front with passage of the USA Patriot Act, which has strengthened the hand of law enforcement agencies to stop terrorists before they can act.
Roger Wicker
#35. Our Keystone legislation received strong bipartisan support in the Senate. Although it didn't receive the 60 votes necessary for passage, 56 senators - a majority - voted in favor of the bill. Despite President Obama's actively lobbying against the bill, we still won the support of 11 Democrats.
John Hoeven
#36. He who is well acquainted with the text of scripture, is a distinguished theologian. For a Bible passage or text is of more value than the comments of four authors.
Martin Luther
#37. The exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to contruct an absolute book, a book of books that includes the otherslike a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time.
Jorge Luis Borges
#39. That is much of what I think the writer's job is - to slow people down. To give them the chance to notice the passage of time as experienced by others as a reminder of what it is like to be alive. Because we are most often distracted from that. Massively distracted.
Adam Haslett
#40. If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you don't already possess
Mortimer J. Adler
#41. if a book has one passage, one idea with the power to change a person's life, that alone justifies reading it, rereading it, and finding room for it on one's shelves.
Viktor E. Frankl
#42. Death is acceptable only if it represents the physically necessary passage toward a union, the condition of a metamorphosis.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#43. I have never been prouder to be a lifelong New Yorker than I am today with the passage of marriage equality.
Cyndi Lauper
#44. The knowledge that he had left me with no intent ever to return had come over me in tiny droplets of realization spread over the years. And each droplet of comprehension brought its own small measure of hurt.
Robin Hobb
#45. It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.
E.B. White
#46. Unquestionably, New York enjoyed enormous strategic significance. As Adams had already apprised Washington, it was the nexus of the Northern and Southern colonies ... the key to the whole Continent, as it is a Passage to Canada, to the Great Lakes, and to all the Indian Nations.
Joseph J. Ellis
#47. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened. - T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton
Blake Crouch
#48. I think everyone starts in the mailroom at some point! It's a right of passage. Your boss has to throw something at you and order you around for at least two years.
Michael B. Jordan
#49. The inspired and expired air may be sometimes very useful, by condensing and cooling the blood that passeth through the lungs; I hold that the depuration of the blood in that passage, is not only one of the ordinary, but one of the principal uses of respiration.
Robert Boyle
#50. While there are many influences on gas prices in America, I believe the passage of a national energy bill will help relieve this burden on our country.
Paul Gillmor
#51. The army of the sea shall stand before the city, then shall go away for a passage that shall not be very long, as a great prey of citizens shall be holding the ground. The fleet returns. The great emblem recovered.
Nostradamus
#53. Happiness as un-pin-downable as a louse: you feel the tickle of its passage but your fingers close on nothing.
Emma Donoghue
#54. We're building on an international network with many others for the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. There are so many things we can do to carry forward policies.
Janet Reno
#55. Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
[Ten rules for writing fiction (The Guardian, 20 February 2010)]
Helen Dunmore
#56. Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra.
John Steinbeck
#57. Seneca describes this in an extraordinary passage, in which he astutely observes that most human suffering relates to rumination about the past or worry about the future, and that nobody confines his concern to the present moment.
Anonymous
#58. All things pass ... Perhaps the passage of time is a kind of healing, or a kind of salvation granted equally to all people.
Mizuki Nomura
#59. It is our ability to forget our problems, through the process of thought, rather than the passage of time, that frees us from the circumstances of our past.
Richard Carlson
#60. But time soon passes. Even the deepest pain eventually loses its edge in the more vivid reality of the present; then, what once was unbearable becomes strangely familiar. And after much familiarity, it assumes the insignificance of just another milestone, ever marking the journey to higher ground.
N. Maria Kwami
#61. It is so unsatisfactory to read a noble passage and have no one you love at hand to share the happiness with you. And it is unsatisfactory to read to one's self anyhow - for the uttered voice so heightens the expression.
Mark Twain
#62. The allure is a passage behind the parapet of a castle wall. Great for defense when the enemy is approaching. You know you're safe on the allure." She tucks her head beneath my chin, twining her hand with mine. "Like we're safe with each other.
Nina Lane
#63. If a single act of folly was more responsible for this explosion than any other it was the arbitrary and dangerous announced decision that the Straits of Tiran would be closed. The right of innocent, maritime passage must be preserved for all nations
Lyndon B. Johnson
#64. A civilization is complicated, in the first place, because it is dynamic; that is, it is constantly changing in the passage of time, until it has perished.
Carroll Quigley
#65. To me, the lasting impression of any good wine is the thought of its maker. Those whose efforts transformed the fruits of the soil into a finished work of art. Those who pulled from the hectic passage of time an ordered memory. They are immortalized by their wine in my glass.
Dave Chambers
#66. However, often when fatal things are happening, you don't know at the time that they're fatal. You get an inkling that they're Not Good, that they Haven't Helped, but only the passage of time will reveal just how bad they are.
Marian Keyes
#67. When I was growing up in Nigeria - and I shouldn't say Nigeria, because that's too general, but in Afikpo, the Igbo part of the country where I'm from - there were always rites of passage for young men. Men were taught to be men in the ways in which we are not women; that's essentially what it is.
Chris Abani
#68. I started studying what the nature of a monument is and what a monument should be. And for the World War III memorial I designed a futile, almost terrifying passage that ends nowhere.
Maya Lin
#70. He hurried back. Walls seemed to shift and advance. Right here, it must be. Wasn't this passage too short? No, it wasn't a wall that blocked his way, only fog. The fog retreated before him - then at once yielded up a wall. Staggering crimson letters caught in the web of graffiti spelled KILLER.
Ramsey Campbell
#71. There is as much ingenuity in making an felicitous application of an passage as in being the author of it.
Charles De Saint-Evremond
#72. I will outlaw bullshit. After the passage of this law the patriarchy will inevitably start to crumble as will the concept of war itself which is largely a large load of bullshit.
Roseanne Barr
#73. Foreseeing the needs of His children, a loving Heavenly Father placed directions and rescuers along their way. He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to make safe passage possible and visible.
Henry B. Eyring
#74. The more I read, the more I see. Connections get made. Lights go on. God speaks. Often, when I am facing some difficult or puzzling situation, God reminds me of a Scripture passage I have read. And it makes all the difference.
Ann Spangler
#75. Time is indifferent of the events and triumphs and tragedies of mankind, and really even, for the most part, of its own inexorable passage.
Ross Turner
#76. I don't think life offers any greater experience than the joyful sense of recognition when one finds in a new acquaintance a real friend, or when an old relationship deepens into friendship, or when one finds an old friendship intact despite the passage of years and many absences.
Abigail McCarthy
#77. Perhaps what I do not manage to operate rapidly enough is the passage between the outside and the inside.
Helene Cixous
#78. Invisible Man. A Passage to India. The Magnificent Ambersons.
E. Lockhart
#79. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet.
Annie Dillard
#80. The laws of Pluto's kingdom know small difference between king and cobbler, manager and call-boy; and, if haply your dates of life were conterminant, you are quietly taking your passage, cheek by cheek (O ignoble levelling of Death) with the shade of some recently departed candle-snuffer.
Charles Lamb
#81. Behind every preventable threat to the future of the human race lurks a boy in a man's body with both hands buried deep in the cookie jar set aside for future generations.
Daniel Prokop
#82. It's weird how I am constantly surprised by the passage of time when it's literally the most predictable thing in the Universe.
Randall Munroe
#83. [I]t is more convenient to prevent the passage of a law, than to declare it void after it has passed.
James Madison
#84. Afford every soul you encounter the wide and free passage they need to give birth to the dear expressions they feel are important.
Bryant McGill
#85. But I had seen, the night I met her, that her beauty was going to leave her like it does all women. For the face, time relays some essential message, and time is the message. It takes things away. But its passage, its damages, are all we have. Without it, there's nothing.
Rachel Kushner
#86. When you are bored of the plains, the secret passages to the mountains suddenly appear out of nowhere before you!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#87. I notice the silvery hair at his temples with a tinge of sadness. Why do parents grow old? Life is a castle of lies slowly dismantled by the passage of time. I regret not spending more time looking at the people I love.
Shan Sa
#88. White means the strength of fragility and the fragility of the passage of time.
Martin Margiela
#89. What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
John Irving
#90. They could have fought against it, begged for another way or gone off the path in hopes of finding an easier passage. Instead, they looked upon the trail ahead, the rough ridge, now bound by thick snow, and they accepted the path they had chosen.
Sage Steadman
#91. It's been said that time heals all wounds, but the passage of time has little to do with healing and more to do with acceptance.
Kenn Bivins
#92. The common man is not concerned about the passage of time, the man of talent is driven by it.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#93. I'm reticent to say much more, but we would like to begin in the coming year. We'd like to shoot through the seasons because of the passage of time. This project is the great love of my life.
Madeleine Stowe
#94. For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.
Haruki Murakami
#95. I think the impacts of 9/11 on academic freedom vary greatly depending on locale and time (softening with the passage of time), and even within the same community, and likely within the same schools. This variability makes it difficult to offer generalized responses without accompanying caveats.
Richard A. Falk
#96. As many as two out of every three Europeans who came to the colonies were debtors on arrival: they paid for their passage by becoming indentured servants.
Jill Lepore
#97. Every true gospel vocation is a resurrection vocation that arrives after a passage through the belly of the fish. All "word of God" vocations are thus formed. There can be no authentic vocation that is not shaped by passage through some such interior.
Eugene H. Peterson
#98. [There is less precision in the Chinese than I have thought it well to introduce into my translation, and the commentaries on the passage are by no means explicit. But, having regard to the context, we can hardly doubt that Sun Tzu is holding up I Chih and Lu Ya as illustrious
Sun Tzu
#99. Star canto: star speaks light, and world to world
Repeats the passage of the universe
To God; the name of Christ
the one great word
Well worth all languages in earth or heaven.
Philip James Bailey
#100. The private reader of listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or the musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force.
George Steiner
