Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Polly Barton

Quote by Polly Barton

“What position do I occupy inside her consciousness, Rika wondered, as the woman she hurt so thoroughly-- the woman she let in, and then succeeded in ruining? But then, she asked herself, was I ruined? In the end, it was probably correct to say that Kajii hadn't even succeeded in doing that. 'You can't even be properly ruined!' Kajii had once bellowed at her, maliciously. The people who had wished not only for Kajii's ruin but Rika's as well must have been trembling in dissatisfaction and despair. And yet, however much scorn Kajii might pour on her way of life, which consisted in proceeding clumsily forward, stopping and starting, changing course as she went, Rika no longer had any intention of altering it. Now that she was able to produce with her own two hands what she felt to be lacking, she sensed that tomorrow and the day after would, if anything, be better than today.”

Quote by Polly Barton

Book:Butter

Work

Butter

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Polly Barton

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Polly Barton. more

You May Also Like

“THREE BASIC TRUTHS Three things have a limited threshold: Time, pain, and death. While truth, love, and knowledge – Are boundless. Three things are needed For humanity to co-exist: Truth, peace and basic needs. Everything else - Is irrelevant.”

“Philosophiren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren vivificiren. The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it into sharp and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us,—for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of thought." The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.”

“Life is an experimental journey that we make involuntarily. It is a journey of the mind through matter, and since it is the mind that journeys, that is where we live. And so there are contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely and more turbulently than those who live externally. The end result is what counts. What was felt is what was lived. A dream can tire us out as much as physical labour. We never live as hard as when we've thought a great deal.”