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H Quotes

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

All H Quotes

“How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away. Nets and fences can be mirrors. And between the nets and fences, opponents are also mirrors. This is why the whole thing is scary. This why all opponents are scary and weaker opponents are especially scary. See yourself in your opponents. They will bring you to understand the Game. To accept the fact that the Game is about managed fear. That its object is to send from yourself what you hope will not return.”

“How prone all human institutions have been to decay; how subject the best-formed and most wisely organized governments have been to lose their check and totally dissolve; how difficult it has been for mankind, in all ages and countries, to preserve their dearest rights and best privileges, impelled as it were by an irresistible fate of despotism.”

“How prone we are to come to the consideration of every question with heads and hearts pre-occupied! How prone to shrink from any opinion, however reasonable, if it be opposed to any, however unreasonable, of our own! How disposed are we to judge, in anger, those who call upon us to think, and encourage us to enquire! To question our prejudices seems nothing less than sacrilege; to break the chains of our ignorance, nothing short of impiety!”

“How quickly do we grow accustomed to wonders. I am reminded of the Isaac Asimov story Nightfall, about the planet where the stars were visible only once in a thousand years. So awesome was the sight that it drove men mad. We who can see the stars every night glance up casually at the cosmos and then quickly down again, searching for a Dairy Queen.”

“How quickly self rises to the surface, and the instrument is ready to believe he is something more than an instrument! How sadly easy it is to make of the very service God entrusts us with a pedestal on which to display ourselves. But God will not share His glory with another, and therefore does He "hide" those who may be tempted to take some of it unto themselves. It is only by retiring from public view and getting alone with God that we can learn our own nothingness.”

“How quickly the dragon of addiction began to roar through Rayya’s blood—demanding what it always demands: more, more, more. Soon Rayya went from needing one morphine pill a day to two pills a day to three a day, to one pill every hour, to two pills every hour, to clusters of pills at a time—until, within a matter of a few weeks, she was yelling into the phone to her doctors, “This shit doesn’t fucking work on me! You gotta give me something stronger, or I swear to fucking God I will go out there on Fourteenth Street and find something stronger and shoot it right into my fucking veins—and don’t think I don’t know how!” So then they gave her methadone. And then they gave her fentanyl patches (“something stronger,” to be sure), which worked beautifully until they didn’t—until her addict’s brain became resistant to the powers of even this most formidable and dangerous of drugs. That’s when Rayya had the inspired idea to add a bit of cocaine to the mix, “to give me a little bump and help me stay awake”—and she bought her first gram of coke in nearly twenty years and put it right up her nose, to tremendous and obvious relief. Was that when she officially lost her sobriety and sanity? Or was it the next night—when she shot the remainder of the cocaine into her arm (“better than the nose, as always,” she said) and then chased it with a few morphine pills, then downed a handful of muscle relaxants just for good measure, and then informed me as she was nodding off into oblivion that “a hole just opened up through our bedroom ceiling and my ancestors are rolling in, four layers deep”? Was that the moment of relapse? Or had it started long before the cancer even appeared? Had she fallen off the wagon many years earlier, when she decided to start drinking and hide it from everyone? Or had she begun sliding back into addiction when she had stopped going to twelve-step meetings because she got annoyed with all those “rigid bitches” in the rooms, and because she didn’t want to work a program anymore? Or had her decline begun even before then, when she stopped letting people know how much emotional pain she was in, and decided to keep her suffering a secret from those who loved her? Or was it all of that combined? Does an avalanche happen suddenly, or does it begin with the first flake of snow that sticks to the edge of the mountain?”

“How quiet it is,' Danny said, digging in his knapsack for the canteen full of water he had brought. 'You don’t realize how scary it is, having a whole mountain on top of you, until you’re in the dark as I was in that tunnel, or when you begin hearing the silence.' 'I didn’t know you could hear silence,' said Irene. 'Then just listen.' They sat still, and Danny added, 'Put out the flashlights for a minute.' In the dark, they understood what he meant. All the familiar noises of the upper world were gone: the wind, the rustle of branches or leaves, the chirping of birds, the sounds of automobiles and doors slamming, and people laughing. There was nothing but the faint tinkle of droplets of water, each drop like a distant musical chime, and each one pursued by tiny echoes. Then, after such a note had sounded there would be a long and empty quiet in which they could hear their own breathing and the steady beating of their hearts. They found themselves straining their eyes to see something, anything — the slightest sign of light, but they could not even tell the difference between opening their eyes and shutting them. Irene burst out suddenly, 'Put on the lights!' Danny let out his breath with a whoosh. They all snapped on their lamps, and as the welcome light flooded the chamber, he said, 'It’s — it’s like being buried alive.' 'Don’t let’s try that experiment again,' Irene said, with a shiver. 'I just hope we get out of here before our flashlights give out.”