“The lives of most people are small tight pallid and sad, more to be mourned than their deaths. We starve at the banquet: We cannot see that there is a banquet because seeing the banquet requires that we see also ourselves sitting there starving-seeing ourselves clearly, even for a moment, is shattering. We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.”
Inspired feeling
Inspired Quotes — page 193 of 313
“I think that the working hours and star pressures pushed a lot of people into drugs in those days. And there seemed to have been a lot of alcoholism.”
“Whatever you are struggling with, is a reminder for you to find your true purpose in this lifetime.”
“Sometimes bad things happen when you try to do something good.”
“Children of the middle years do not do their learning unaffected by attendant feelings of interest, boredom, success, failure, chagrin, joy, humiliation, pleasure, distress and delight. They are whole children responding in a total way, and what they feel is a constant factor that can be constructive or destructive in any learning situation.”
“Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet's climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced - a catastrophe of our own making.”
“Chekhov was as important to me as anybody as a writer.”
“One of the things that made me want to be an actor more than ever was seeing a Chekhov play, "The Sea Gull," when was 14 in the Bronx.”
“Death is not the problem; waiting around for it is.”
“There's music in everything, even defeat”
“the last cigarettes are smoked, the loaves are sliced, and lest this be taken for wry sorrow, drown the spider in wine. you are much more than simply dead: I am a dish for your ashes, I am a fist for your vanished air. the most terrible thing about life is finding it gone.”
“I cannot see ... evidence of design and beneficence ... There seems to me too much misery in the world.”
“You see, when you're excited, your body has trouble telling the difference between pain and pleasure.”
“Even great men are only truly recognized and honored once they are dead. Why? Because those who praise them need to feel themselves somehow superior to the person praised, they need to feel they are making some concession.”
“What is it that's taken hold of me, for me to carry on like this in relentless pursuit of something beyond my powers?”
“If my boy had perished in a Nazi compound, I could never have gone on living. I would have killed myself.”
“I got very famous for a minute and then it just all went away, you know? And for the last 20 years - you've got to pick yourself up and dust yourself off and then go on your merry way and start again, in a sense, and that's what I've been doing.”
“When it comes to how the slaves treat each other: If you've been brutalized all your life - if you have seen your children sold or your mother beaten and raped and you have been tortured yourself - you are not going to be up for your best behaviour. Even in the 21st century, 100 people in the midst of terrible suffering are not going to be their best people.”
“When a song comes to you, you can't run around it.”
“It is not my experience that life’s difficulties make people more charitable.”