“For it is a curious fact that though human beings have such imperfect means of communication, that they can only say 'good to eat' when they mean 'beautiful' and the other way about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep any experience to themselves.”
Thoughtful feeling
Thoughtful Quotes — page 235 of 303
“I do think all good and evil comes from words. I have to tune myself into a good temper with something musical, and I run to a book as a child to its mother.”
“I [who] am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement.”
“Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.”
“Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today -- that they are stored with other meanings, with other memories, and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past.”
“every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound the other. That time hangs heavy on people's hands is the only explanation of the monstrous growth.”
“You cannot cross the narrow bridge of art carrying all its tools in your hands. Some you must leave behind.”
“Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.”
“How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it is liking one felt, or disliking?”
“... pure honesty is a doubtful quality; it means often lack of imagination.”
“Facts must be manipulated; some must be brightened; others shaded; yet, in the process, they must never lose their integrity.”
“In marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in and day out in the same house.”
“My notion's to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves.”
“The book is not completely written until someone else has read it.”
“My character - and for that matter my worst habits - could only be described by someone else. You can't open a box with the crowbar inside it.”
“Questions don't have to make sense, Vincent," said Miss Susan. "But answers do.”
“Sometimes you had to take a look at yourself and then look away.”
“Polly felt questing eyes boring into her. She was embarrassed, of course. But not for the obvious reason. It was for the other one, the little lesson that life sometimes rams home with a stick: you are not the only one watching the world. Other people are people; while you watch them they watch you, and they think about you while you think about them. The world isn’t just about you.”
“It’s quite easy to accidentally overhear people talking downstairs if you hold an upturned glass to the floorboards and accidentally put your ear to it.”
“It's either because of the number of times the scholar puts the boot into Peter Jackson the director of The Lord of the Rings films or is making a point they have never heard of.”