Quotessence
Home / Quotes / A Quotes

A Quotes

Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.

All A Quotes

“Almost worse than the sorrow of missing her was the fact that Mom's death had revealed everything to be meaningless. So much of what I'd thought was true had turned out to be an illusion. I saw people around me living by these illusions— that love and safety could be counted on, that life had meaning and the future could be controlled— and I did not feel that I could ever again share their suspended disbelief. I was swimming against a strong, cold current: I could see them there, playing on a sunny beach, but I couldn't rejoin them. Continuing the struggle seemed not only incredibly painful but, even worse, pointless.”

“Almsgiving tends to perpetuate poverty; aid does away with it once and for all. Almsgiving leaves a man just where he was before. Aid restores him to society as an individual worthy of all respect and not as a man with a grievance. Almsgiving is the generosity of the rich; social aid levels up social inequalities. Charity separates the rich from the poor; aid raises the needy and sets him on the same level with the rich.”

“Almsgiving, according to the Gospel, is not mere philanthropy; rather it is a concrete expression of charity, a theological virtue that demands interior conversion to love of God and neighbor, in imitation of Jesus Christ, who, dying on the cross, gave his entire self for us.”

“Aloha Oukou. It looked like your soul was escaping so I put you in a tree.”

“Alone, all alone in the world, sad and small like a nightingale serenading the infinite. How could a love so tender and sweet become the cross of my pain? No, no, I can't conceive I won't receive your precious lips again. My eyes are tired of weeping, my heart of beating. If perhaps some crystal moment before dawn or twilight you remember me, bring only a bouquet of tears to lay upon my thirsty grave.”

“Alone among unsympathetic companions, I hold certain views and standards timidly, half ashamed to avow them and half doubtful if they can after all be right. Put me back among my Friends and in half an hour - in ten minutes - these same views and standards become once more indisputable. The opinion of this little circle, while I am in it, outweighs that of a thousand outsiders: as Friendship strengthens, it will do this even when my Friends are far away. For we all wish to be judged by our peers, by the men "after our own heart." Only they really know our mind and only they judge it by standards we fully acknowledge. Theirs is the praise we really covet and the blame we really dread.”

“Alone and night-neoned, I write read drink drug grieve and all America keeps teaching me is that there are so many ways to die in America which, frankly, is qwhite confusing because this country killed you a decade ago and I’m still writing reading drinking drugging grieving binging binging blacking out in the cozy, claustrophobic home I’ve made out of how very, very much I miss you and the sky keeps throwing down consequences and corrections and histories and nations, I mean, come on, who can blame me for not wanting to go back outside?”

“Alone, [Chamcha] all at once remembered that he and Pamela had once disagreed, as they disagreed on everything, on a short-story they’d both read, whose theme was precisely the nature of the unforgivable. Title and author eluded him, but the story came back vividly. A man and a woman had been intimate friends (never lovers) for all their adult lives. On his twenty-first birthday (they were both poor at the time) she had given him, as a joke, the most horrible, cheap glass vase she could find, in colours a garish parody of Venetian gaiety. Twenty years later, when they were both successful and greying, she visited his home and quarrelled with him over his treatment of a mutual friend. In the course of the quarrel her eye fell upon the old vase, which he still kept in pride of place on his sitting-room mantelpiece, and, without pausing in her tirade, she swept it to the floor, crushing it beyond hope of repair. He never spoke to her again; when she died, half a century later, he refused to visit her deathbed or attend her funeral, even though messengers were sent to tell him that these were her dearest wishes. ‘Tell her,’ he said to the emissaries, 'that she never knew how much I valued what she broke.’ The emissaries argued, pleaded, raged. If she had not known how much meaning he had invested in the trifle, how could she in all fairness be blamed? And had she not made countless attempts, over the years, to apologize and atone? And she was dying, for heaven’s sake; could not this ancient, childish rift be healed at last? They had lost a lifetime’s friendship; could they not even say goodbye? 'No,’ said the unforgiving man. – 'Really because of the vase? Or are you concealing some other, darker matter?’ – 'It was the vase,’ he answered, 'the vase, and nothing but.’ Pamela thought the man petty and cruel, but Chamcha had even then appreciated the curious privacy, the inexplicable inwardness of the issue. 'Nobody can judge an internal injury,’ he had said, 'by the size of the superficial wound, of the hole.”