To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.
Soren KierkegaardRead
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To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.
Armed Soldier, terrible as Death, relentless as Doom; doing God's judgement on the Enemies of God. It is a phenomenon not of joyful nature; no, but of awful, to be looked at with pious terror and awe.
It is a terrible thing for an author to have a lot of people running about his book without any invitation from him at all.
I would have been a terrible mother because I'm basically a very selfish human being. Not that that has stopped most people going off and having children.
You see, in this world there is one awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons.
It's terrible to realize you don't learn how to live until you're ready to die, and then it's too late.
People who have no weaknesses are terrible; there is no way of taking advantage of them.
It's amazing what storms your face can hide, what terrible wrecks can writhe and heave beneath, without one ripple on the surface.
Violence can succeed, as Americans know well from the conquest of the national territory. But at terrible cost. It can also provoke violence in response, and often does.
They are deceived who flatter themselves that the ignorant and debased slave has no conception of the magnitude of his wrongs. They are deceived who imagine that he arises from his knees with back lacerated and bleeding, cherishing only a spirit of meekness and forgiveness. A day may come - it will, if his prayer is heard. A terrible day of vengeance when the master in his turn will cry in vain for mercy.
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me . . . and asked me in a whisper . . . "Can you describe this?" And I said: "I can."
Accept the terrible responsibility of life with eyes wide open.
I'd write of people and places like I knew, and I'd make my characters talk everyday English; and I'd let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss over the fact. If I had to have villains at all, I'd give them a chance, Anne--I'd give them a chance. There are some terrible bad men the world, I suppose, but you'd have to go a long piece to find them...But most of us have got a little decency somewhere in us. Keep on writing, Anne.
Part of the oncoming demise (of New York during its terrible fiscal crisis) is that none of us can simply believe it. We were always the best and the strongest of cities, and our people were vital to the teeth. Knock them down eight times and they would get up with that look in the eye which suggests the fight has barely begun.
[Buddhism and Christianity] are in one sense parallel and equal; as a mound and a hollow, as a valley and a hill. There is a sense in which that sublime despair is the only alternative to that divine audacity. It is even true that the truly spiritual and intellectual man sees it as sort of dilemma; a very hard and terrible choice. There is little else on earth that can compare with these for completeness. And he who does not climb the mountain of Christ does indeed fall into the abyss of Buddha.
An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.
The living can't quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can't because they don't. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.
For John was running, and this was terrible. Because if you ran, time ran. You yelled and screamed and raced and rolled and tumbled and all of a sudden the sun was gone and the whistle was blowing and you were on your long way home to supper. When you weren't looking, the sun got around behind you! The only way to keep things slow was to watch everything and do nothing! You could stretch a day to three days, sure, just by watching!
Forgetting your mistakes is a terrible error if you are trying to improve your cognition.
Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.
Then there were things-- epic, terrible things-- that he didn't tell her but skirted around, like caressing the edges of a wound, hesitant, testing for pain.
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