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T Quotes

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All T Quotes

“The Northmen had a keen eye for psychological signs of mixed race; a saying often on their lips was: "Who is it you take after?" And we have no grounds for supposing that it was only the one side that counted. Thorolfs opponents, the Sons of Hilderid already mentioned, never got over the disability in their birth, that their mother was of an inferior stock to their father's; it was a fault plainly seen in every word they spoke, when they stole into the hall from behind as soon as Thorolf had strode out of the front, and explained and interpreted the action of their enemy, while Thorolf let his act carry its own interpretation. The sagas also have an argument, to the effect that a man's rascality is due to the mother's blood.”

“The Northwestern Carpathians, in which I was raised, were a hard place, as unforgiving as the people who lived there, but the Alpine landscape into which Zlee and I were sent that early winter seemed a glimpse of what the surface of the earth looked and felt and acted like when there were no maps or borders, no rifles or artillery, no men or wars to claim possession of land, and snow and rock alone parried in a match of millennial slowness so that time meant nothing, and death meant nothing, for what life there was gave in to the forces of nature surrounding and accepted its fate to play what role was handed down in the sidereal march of seasons capable of crushing in an instant what armies might--millennia later--be foolish enough to assemble on it heights. And yet there we were, ordered to march ourselves, for God, not nature, was with us now, and God would deliver us, in this world and next, when the time came for that.”

“The nose is idiosyncratically central not only to our sense of smell but to our sense of who we are , in our most primal appetites. For the idea of appetite pertains to food as well as to all the sensual and spiritual experiences that drive us, give us pleasure, make us feel more alive in the moment. Scent is a portal to these basic human appetites—for the far-off, the familiar, the transcendent, the strange, and the beautiful—that have motivated us since the origins of our species.”

“The not-quite-sort-of lie works here too - often an ad will announce that "Congressman Johnson voted for a bill that gave tax breaks to companies like Enron." True - although the bill allowed all companies to accelerate depreciation of copying machines. Yes, Enron benefited, but Enron also benefited from the revolution of the Earth around the sun. Hardly an argument to freeze the planet in one spot.”

“The not-visibly-insane Democrats all claim they'll get rough with the terrorists, but they can't even face Brit Hume. In case you missed this profile in Democrat machismo, the Democratic presidential candidates are refusing to participate in a debate hosted by Fox News Channel because the hosts are "biased." But they'll face down Mahmoud Ahmadinejad! At this, even Hillary Clinton was thinking, "Come on, guys - let's grow a pair."”

“The note, which had been written on one of the pads I kept around for grocery lists, said, "My lover, I came in too close to dawn to wake you, though I was tempted. Your house is full of strange men. A fairy upstairs and a little child downstairs- but as long as there's not one in my lady's chamber, I can stand it".”

“The Nothing is spreading," groaned the first. "It's growing and growing, there's more of it every day, if it's possible to speak of more nothing. All the others fled from Howling Forest in time, but we didn't want to leave our home. The Nothing caught us in our sleep and this is what it did to us." "Is it very painful?" Atreyu asked. "No," said the second bark troll, the one with the hole in his chest. "You don't feel a thing. There's just something missing. And once it gets hold of you, something more is missing every day. Soon there won't be anything left of us.”

“The notion - and I tell you this one even worries me that it extends into New Urbanism - the notion of the shopping center [as] a valid kind of downtown. That's taken over. It's very hard for architects of this generation even to think in terms of a downtown or a center that is owned by all different people, with different ideas.”

“The notion is that human beings are born, (as my Guru has explained many times,) with equivalent potential for both contraction and expansion. The ingredients of both darkness and light are equally present in all of us, and then it's up to the individual (or the family, or the society) to decide what will be brought forth - the virtues or the malevolence. The madness of this planet is largely a result of human being's difficulty in coming into virtuous balance with himself. Lunacy (both collective and individual) results.”

“The notion of "humanity" as a form of transcendence derives, I think, from the conviction that intellectuality possesses an absolute power, from the demand that our best behavior depends on our ability to think abstractly, in terms of a universal rule, about something called humanity, that we need to understand humanity abstractly so that we can act responsibly towards those who represent it.”