Wake Quotes - page 26
All these trod the road to Hell, removing from this house of clay to the pit of perdition. The enemy's country was full, as Hell is full, of wounded who had died on the road. The lowest pit was gorged with miscreants who had surrendered their souls to the lord of Hell. In whatever direction one from the army of Islam hastened, he found everywhere a self-willed one dead; whatever march the illustrious camp made in the wake of the fugitives, it found no foot-space without its prostrate foe. All the Hindus slain, abject and mean, By matchlock-stones, like the Elephants' lords, Many hills of their bodies were seen, And from each hill a fount of running blood.
Babur
Behind the shower curtain, Zooey closed his eyes for a few seconds, as though his own small craft were listing precariously in the wake. Then he pulled back the shower curtain and stared over at the closed door. It was a weighty stare, and relief was not really a great part of it. As much as anything else, it was the stare, not so paradoxically, of a privacy-lover who, once his privacy has been invaded, doesn't quite approve when the invader just gets up and leaves, one-two-three, like that.
J. D. Salinger
I have been told that at school I was the sort of simpleton who suffered from dux-disease. It is reckoned in Iceland that those who are afflicted by this disease can never become anything other than drunkards, journalists, or junior clerks . . . I was spiritually as well as physically in a state of suspended adolescence. Lessons came welling up out of me as if I were talking in my sleep. I could reel off the bones in a dog at the drop of a hat, any time at all, just as if I had them in my pockets; if I had been woken up at three o'clock in the morning, I would have detailed each and every one of them, just as if I had been lying on them.
Halldór Laxness
They call it freebasing. It's not free, it costs you your house! It should be called home basing! Three signs you're addicted to cocaine: First of all, if you come home to your house and you have no furniture and your cat's going "I'm outta here, prick!," Warning! Number two: If you have this dream where you're doing cocaine in your sleep and you can't fall asleep, and you wake up and you're doing cocaine, BINGO! Number three: if on your tax form it says, "$50,000 for snacks," MAYDAY!
Robin Williams
I was raised in a fairly strict religious family and attended 16 years of Catholic schools. I feel now that my sense of the spiritual is directly connected to my sense of wonder, my ability to be amazed by the fact of my existence in all its vital impermanence AND by the spectacular environment I wake up to every morning. I am guessing that this sense of wonder is what the creator, if there is one, is still feeling.
Billy Collins
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.
J. R. R. Tolkien
Ten per cent of our neighbours survive on charity. 10 per cent of Canadians eat through charity. 10 per cent. Surely if you were prime minister or minister of trade or of industry, you would wake up each day thinking that, for reasons that escape you, the central policy chosen to drive the economy is not working. It is not working because it is not meeting the needs of a democracy in which legitimacy lies with the citizenry.
John Ralston Saul
