Cutting quotes
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"We proceeded systematically, village by village and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation."
"Gertrude Stein's prose-song is a cold, black suet-pudding.... Cut it at any point, it is the same thing ... all fat, without nerve."
"When it comes to wheat, my main goal is to inform people, including farmers, that the prevailing notion that cutting fat and eating whole grains will make you healthy is not only wrong, it's destructive."
"[Jazz musicians] couldn't cut rock. I had to be more limited and specific about what I was doing."
"There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus."
"Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called, "the love of nature" seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus. It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it, it of her."
"We do live in a time where there are fake web sites peddling mistruths out or sites that use hyperbole and don't put things in context. There's a range of ways that real journalism has been mashed up with things that aren't journalism... like opinion or that's sensationalistic in some ways. It is really noisy out there. You have to think of ways to cut though the noise."
"That dot covers all the places we've ever been. You could cut that piece of land out of the ground and sing it into this ocean and no one would even notice. I feel that fear again, the fear of my own size. 'Right. So?' 'So? So everything I've ever worried about or said or done, how can it possibly matter?' He shakes his head. 'It doesn't.' 'Of course it does,' I say, 'All that land is filled with people, every one of them different, and the things they do to each other matter."
"Then Drew shuffles into the dining hall. I drop my toast, and my mouth drifts open. Calling him “bruised” would be an understatement. His face is swollen and purple. He has a split lip and a cut running through his eyebrow. He keeps his eyes down on the way to his table, not even lifting them to look at me. I glance across the room at Four. He wears the satisfied smile I wish I had on."
"loneliness can fly a helicopter through a cut-out shape of a helicopter the same size as the helicopter and that's it's only skill and it isn't good enough but it's still amazing."
"So it's back once more, back up the slope. Why do they always ruin my rope with their cuts? I felt so ready the other day, Had a real foretaste of eternity In my guts. Spoonfeeding me yet another sip from life's cup. I don't want it, won't take any more of it. Let me throw up. Life is medium rare and good, I see, And the world full of soup and bread, But it won't pass into the blood for me, Just goes to my head. It makes me ill, though others it feeds; Do see that I must deny it! For a thousand years from now at least I'm keeping a diet."
"Romeo, of dead, should be cut up into little stars to make the heavens fine. Life, with this pair, has no other aim, asks no more,than Juliet,--than Romeo."
"Now I rewrite more and more severely, and I take great pleasure in cutting thousands of words out of first drafts; I think that's a pleasure worth learning as early as possible in one's career, not least because realizing that one can do it helps one relax into writing the first draft in which it's better to have too much material for later shaping than not enough."
"The mental disease of the present generation is impatience of study, contempt of the great masters of ancient wisdom, and a disposition to rely wholly upon unassisted genius and natural sagacity. The wits of these happy days have discovered a way to fame, which the dull caution of our laborious ancestors durst never attempt; they cut the knots of sophistry, which it was formerly the business of years to untie, solve difficulties by sudden irradiations of intelligence, and comprehend long processes of argument by immediate intuition."
"Cut defense spending as part of cutting all federal spending."
"We all either work for rich people or we sell stuff to rich people, so just punishing rich people is as bad for the economy as punishing anyone. Let's not punish anyone."
"Republicans traditionally say, 'oh, we'll cut domestic spending, but we won't touch the military.' The liberals - the ones who are good - will say, 'oh, we'll cut the military, but we won't cut domestic spending.'"
"I would set aside all these budget cuts that are going to devastate the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and the N.S.A. Sequestration, cuts, are not only gutting the military, they're gutting the F.B.I. So if I were president, I would set these cuts aside. I would reinstate the N.S.A. program as robust as possible within the constitutional limits."
"I think I'm comfortable making myself, or my speaker, larger than life if I can then cut myself off at the ankles. The way, in "My Major Prize," the speaker does this drippy performance of sadness and poetry for some unnamed prize committee, only he lets us know that it's all a wry game."
"Walden - all his books, indeed - are packed with subtle, conflicting, and very fruitful discoveries. They are not written to prove something in the end. They are written as the Indians turn down twigs to mark their path through the forest. He cuts his way through life as if no one had ever taken that road before, leaving these signs for those who come after, should they care to see which way he went."
