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R Quotes

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All R Quotes

“Rotstein was particularly affected. He stretched himself out across his mattress, just where he had fallen. Morel longed to bend over him and turn him over on his legs again, like a fallen and abandoned insect. To help him to fly away. But there was no need to help him. He flew by himself every evening. 'Hey, Rotstein, Rotstein.' 'Yes.' 'Are you still alive?' 'Yes. Don’t interrupt. I’m giving a concert.' 'What are you playing?' 'Johann Sebastian Bach.' 'Are you mad? A German?' 'Precisely. That’s just the point. To restore the balance. You can’t leave Germany on its back forever. You’ve got to help it to its feet again.”

“rotted down from manhood by their hopeless misery on the isle; wonted to cringe in all things to their lord, himself the worst of slaves; these wretches were now become wholly corrupted to his hands. He used them as creatures of an interior race; in short, he gaffles his four animals, and makes murderers of them; out of cowards fitly manufacturing bravoes.”

“Rough as life can be, I know in my bones we are supposed to stick around and play our part. Even if that part is coughing to death from cigarettes, or being blown up young in a house with your mother watching. And even if it's to be that mother. Someone down the line might need to know you got through it. Or maybe someone you won't see coming will need you. Like a kid who asks you to help him clean motel rooms. Or some ghost who drifts your way, hungry. And good people might even ask you to marry them. And it might be you never know the part you played, what it meant to someone to watch you make your way each day. Maybe someone or something is watching us all make our way. I don't think we get to know why. It is, as Ben would say about most of what I used to worry about, none of my business.”

“Rough going had been encountered by the Masses in its efforts to remain a medium for free interpretation in a time of hysteria. Because of its pitiless reporting in trying to reveal true causes, its lack of respect for commercialized religion, and its attacks on sex taboos in art and literature, the magazine had earlier been barred from the reading rooms of many libraries, ousted from the subway and elevated news stands in New York, and refused by distributing companies of Boston and Philadelphia; and our right to use the mails in Canada had been revoked by the Dominion government”

“Rough palms cradled my face while my fingers gripped the pillow on either side of his. Lips, teeth, tongue, mingled together. I ate him up and didn’t let go until I had to come up for air.”

“Roughly halfway across the frozen river, the column of prisoners was halted by a massive snowdrift blocking their path. It proved too dense to break through in a single charge. “Why are you standing there staring? Move! Help the men in front!” a guard barked. The prisoners crowded forward and began clearing the obstacle together, clawing and kicking at the packed snow with desperate urgency. In their haste, they failed to consider that the ice had not yet thickened sufficiently after the previous night’s freeze. Under the concentrated weight of so many bodies in one place, the thin crust of ice suddenly gave way. The entire vanguard plunged into the freezing water. Those following behind recoiled in terror and collided with the prisoners at the rear. As they fell, the ice shattered beneath them as well, and they too were swallowed by the treacherous water. The more fortunate inmates, farther from the gaping hole in the ice, scattered in panic. Frightened guards fired warning shots into the air, shouting frantically to restore order. An instant later, the icy slurry struck Peter’s body like a thousand knives. Screams, splashing water, cracking ice, and frantic bodies thrashing in the racing current merged into a single nightmare of chaos. Several of the men who had fallen into the river could not swim. One was quickly seized by the current and dragged beneath the ice. Others, stricken by panic, clutched at whoever was near them. Peter found himself locked in the iron grip of a terrified Turkmen prisoner who had never in his life seen a body of water large enough to swim in. Together, they began to sink beneath the ice. — Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book Three Context note: Set in 1941 during the chaotic early months of World War II, this scene depicts the forced transfer of prisoners within the Soviet Gulag system. As Nazi Germany invaded the USSR, thousands of inmates were marched or transported across vast distances under brutal conditions. Many perished not in battle, but during these desperate evacuations—victims of cold, exhaustion, panic, and the indifference of a repressive state.”

“Roughly speaking, the period when bevies of bobwhites were found in great abundance over a goodly portion of the American landscape embraced a period from early in the 20th century into the late 1950s or early 1960s. In retrospect, we can readily perceive the circumstances that produced an incredible bounty of the saucy little patrician of peafield cormers and briar-infested fencerows. All were, in one way or another, habitat related, and all have vanished like milkweed spores caught in September thermals. It was a time of sharecroppers and small farmers, folks who worked the land by hand and with teams of horses or mules. The concept of “clean farming” was both impractical and unknown, and these staunch sons of the soil were also practical conservationists who routinely left field edges and ditch banks in an overgrown state. They allowed worn-out land to revert to broomsedge and pines, and the practice of leaving peafield corners unharvested was commonplace. Raptors were shot on sight, with every hawk being deemed a “chicken” hawk. Furbearing nest predators—'’possums, ’coons, skunks, and foxes—were trapped and hunted for food or fur. Serpents, except for black snakes, which were prized because they kept rodent populations under control around corncribs, were not only killed; they were displayed on fences as a sort of message. Coyotes were at that point unknown over most of the South, the heartland of the noble quail and home of the strongest traditions associated with the bird, Foxes weren't just hunted; they were exterminated. In other words, an area encompassing tens of millions of acres was overseen by an army of unofficial, unpaid, unheralded, yet highly effective gamekeepers.”

“Roughly speaking, any man with energy and enthusiasm ought to be able to bring at least a dozen others round to his opinion in the course of a year no matter how absurd that opinion might be. We see every day in politics, in business, in social life, large masses of people brought to embrace the most revolutionary ideas, sometimes within a few days. It is all a question of getting hold of them in the right way and working on their weak points.”

“Roughly two billion people participate in the money economy, with less than half of those living in the wealthy countries of the developed world. These affluent 800 million, however, account for more than 75 percent of the world's energy and resource consumption, and also create the bulk of its industrial, toxic, and consumer waste.”

“Rouleaux blood cells do not carry oxygen as effectively as normal free flowing blood cells. The micro clots that form within the body restrict blood flow and cause localized hypoxia to occur within the body through reduced blood flow to that area. The adverse effects from Hypoxia are not instantaneous, but can take hours before the person is aware of feeling sickly.”

“Round a turn of the Qin Fortress winds the Wei River, And Yellow Mountain foot-hills enclose the Court of China; Past the South Gate willows comes the Car of Many Bells On the upper Palace-Garden Road-a solid length of blossom; A Forbidden City roof holds two phoenixes in cloud; The foliage of spring shelters multitudes from rain; And now, when the heavens are propitious for action, Here is our Emperor ready-no wasteful wanderer.”

“Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.”

“Round and round the blade went, producing petals that opened one on top of the other, white against the red. Ribbons fell from the knife's edge, curling around her crossed legs. And so it went until all twenty were done, the radishes cleared of their perky heads, their bodies floating in a bowl of chilled water like a delicate bouquet. No longer ordinary root vegetables, they were now brilliant roses carved to blooming age. The radish roses made pretty garnishes on the many cheese and herb plates that went out during the hungry hours of afternoon. They were also tangible, not to mention edible, proof of one of Bahar's greatest talents to date: hands that were extraordinarily agile, and arms of immense strength.”

“Round and round the questions flew, until finally I found myself standing at the open door of a bookshop. It’s natural in times of great perplexity, I think, to seek out the familiar, and the high shelves and long rows of neatly lined-up spines were immensely reassuring. Amid the smell of ink and binding, the dusty motes in beams of strained sunlight, the embrace of warm, tranquil air, I felt that I could breathe more easily.”