Curtain Quotes - page 8
History has often showed us the strength of the forces that are unleashed by the yearning for freedom. It moved people to overcome their fears and openly confront dictators such as in East Germany and Eastern Europe about 22 years ago. [...] The yearning for freedom cannot be contained by walls for long. It was this yearning that brought down the Iron Curtain that divided Germany and Europe, and indeed the world, into two blocs.
Angela Merkel
Girls love their showers, they spend like twelve hours in there. I know why too, I read in Cosmo. It said that, "Eighty three percent of all women masturbate in the shower." That's wonderful. I can't masturbate in the shower cause my legs give out and then I rip down the shower curtain. And then my Mom gets mad. And I have to go to bed without dinner. I masturbated in the car once. That's a cry for help. I wouldn't do it again, though, 'cause the cab driver got really pissed off. I was like, "I'm sorry sir, all I saw was the non-smoking sign."
Mitch Fatel
I remember a picture I saw in a paper not long before the wall came down. There was a man standing holding a very young daughter, my guess was that she was only about one or two years old. She had on a rather plain dress, he had on a coat and a tie and he was carrying probably a cardboard suitcase. And my guess is that everything he owned in the world was in that suitcase. And he was weeping. He wasn't weeping because he left his car and the rest of his family back on the other side of that Iron Curtain; he was weeping because he was free. He was weeping because now he had opportunity, he had the chance to choose for the first time in his life, and his daughter whom he was holding in his hands had a future, whereas before she would not have had one. That struck me as a very, very vivid picture of what this all meant.
Leighton W. Smith, Jr.
How do you stand this? I don't care who you are; man, woman, gay, straight, black, white, Jew, gentile, it doesn't make any difference - how do you stand this? I can't. I can not...I can't handle this- You wanna know how I deal with this? When I finish these topics, or these letters, or these diaries, or these reports, and the show's over, I have to blank my mind - literally. Can you do that? I can, I have learned how to do that. I blank it out. I don't know where Israel is, I don't know what Palestinian means, I don't know what burned and mutilated children have to do with anything - it means nothing, it goes away. I must draw a dark black curtain in my consciousness. I can not deal with this, how do you? I have children, I've had children, I have grand-children, I have a four-and-a-half year-old... This is not right! This is not right...
Mike Malloy
At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.
Robert Jastrow
You were born as freedom forced its way through a wall in Berlin, and tore down an Iron Curtain across Europe. You were educated in an era of instant information that put the world's accumulated knowledge at your fingertips. And you came of age as terror touched our shores; an historic recession spread across the nation; and a new generation signed up to go to war.
You have been tested and tempered by events that your parents and I never imagined we'd see when we sat where you sit.
Barack Obama
As soon as it becomes possible, by dint of a strong will, to overthrow the entire past of the world, then, in a single moment, we will join the ranks of independent gods. World history for us will then be nothing but a dreamlike otherworldly being. The curtain falls, and man once more finds himself a child playing with whole worlds-a child, awoken by the first glow of morning, who laughingly wipes the frightful dreams from his brow.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A small woman in white, wearing a delicate knitted cap, looks at herself in a small hand-held mirror; she is sitting on a sofa, also white, silhouetted against a white muslin curtain through which the light passes, playing deliciously over the whole symphony of white, and the effect of the back-lighting creates astonishing shades of gray. Such difficulty overcome with such charm [in the painting 'Jeune Femme au miroir / Young Woman at Her Looking Glass', Berthe Morisot painted in 1876].
Berthe Morisot
He would be, of course, announcing his candidacy for the Presidency. And that is an event that would send shivers of joy, dread, anger and ecstasy throughout the country like nothing since, well ... like nothing since Robert Kennedy's declaration on March 16, 1968. Except that this time feelings would run higher still. Even the Kennedy haters, and those who long ago dismissed this youngest of the Kennedy brothers as a talentless trader on family reputation, and those, too, who crossed him off after Chappaquiddick, could not help but be stirred by the realization that the curtain was being raised on the final act of an incredible American epic.
Ted Kennedy
In the summer of 1989, neither Helmut Kohl nor I anticipated ... that everything would happen so fast. We didn't expect the wall to come down in November. And by the way, we both admitted that later. I don't claim to be a prophet. This happens in history: it accelerates its progress. It punishes those who are late. But it has an even harsher punishment for those who try to stand in its way. It would have been a big mistake to hold onto the Iron Curtain. That is why we didn't put any pressure on the government of the GDR. When events started to develop at a speed that no one expected, the Soviet leadership unanimously – and I want to stress "unanimously” – decided not to interfere in the internal processes that were under way in the GDR, not to let our troops leave their garrisons under any circumstances. I am confident to this day that it was the right decision.
Mikhail Gorbachev
I made a discovery, perhaps known to others but new to me: I need not put myself center stage but can rather place myself at the side, like a Greek chorus. As the curtain rises, I can walk to the center and can speak as follows: I wish to tell you of happenings in the twentieth century, as I witnessed them and reflected upon them. You will see me return to center stage, but only occasionally. Once that imagery had gotten hold of me, I went back to Ida and said yes, I shall try.
Abraham Pais
Once the curtain is raised, the actor ceases to belong to himself. He belongs to his character, to his author, to his public. He must do the impossible to identify himself with the first, not to betray the second, and not to disappoint the third. And to this end the actor must forget his personality and throw aside his joys and sorrows. He must present the public with the reality of a being who for him is only a fiction. With his own eyes, he must shed the tears of the other. With his own voice, he must groan the anguish of the other. His own heart beats as if it would burst, for it is the other's heart that beats in his heart. And when he retires from a tragic or dramatic scene, if he has properly rendered his character, he must be panting and exhausted.
Sarah Bernhardt
We have such exorbitant eyes, that on seeing the smallest arc, we complete the curve, and when the curtain is lifted from the diagram which it seemed to veil, we are vexed to find that no more was drawn, than just that fragment of an arc which we first beheld. We are greatly too liberal in our construction of each other's faculty and promise. Exactly what the parties have already done, they shall do again; but that which we inferred from their nature and inception, they will not do. That is in nature, but not in them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
They dare'd not invade the palace while the globe shone, for the light-rays would have killed them. ... This island-continent would have gone down beneath the sea long ago if I hadn't pitted my magic and my science against that of the children of Dagon. They are masters of the earthquake, and Atlantis rests on none too solid a foundation. Their power is sufficient to sink Atlantis forever beneath the sea. But within that room" - Zend nodded toward the curtain that hid the sea-bred horrors - "in that room there is power far stronger than theirs. I have drawn strength from the stars, and the cosmic sources beyond the universe. You know nothing of my power. It is enough - more than enough - to keep Atlantis steady on its foundation, impregnable against the attacks of Dagon's breed. They have destroyed other lands before Atlantis.
Henry Kuttner
