Interval Quotes

1. "He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet."
Author: Anne Carson

2. "When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. It is the same as the pupil, in learning to write, following with his pen the lines that have been pencilled by the teacher. Accordingly, in reading, the work of thinking is, for the greater part, done for us. This is why we are consciously relieved when we turn to reading after being occupied with our own thoughts. But, in reading, our head is, however, really only the arena of some one else's thoughts. And so it happens that the person who reads a great deal—that is to say, almost the whole day, and recreates himself by spending the intervals in thoughtless diversion, gradually loses the ability to think for himself; just as a man who is always riding at last forgets how to walk. Such, however, is the case with many men of learning: they have read themselves stupid. For to read in every spare moment, and to read constantly, is more paralysing to the mind than constant manual work..."
Author: Arthur Schopenhauer

3. "How can we who are so weak in ourselves, so inferior in power to the enemies confronting us, bear up under our trials which are so numerous, so protracted, so crushing? We could not, and therefore Divine grace has provided for us an all-sufficient Helper. Without His aid we had long since succumbed, mastered by our trials. Hope looks forward to the Glory to come; in the weary interval of waiting, the Spirit supports our poor hearts and keeps grace alive within us."
Author: Arthur W. Pink

4. "And as for the vague something --- was it a sinister or a sorrowful, a designing or a desponding expression? --- that opened upon a careful observer, now and then, in his eye, and closed again before one could fathom the strange depth partially disclosed; that something which used to make me fear and shrink, as if I had been wandering amongst volcanic-looking hills, and had suddenly felt the ground quiver, and seen it gape: that something, I, at intervals, beheld still; and with throbbing heart, but not with palsied nerves. Instead of wishing to shun, I longed only to dare --- to divine it; and I thought Miss Ingram happy, because one day she might look into the abyss at her leisure, explore its secrets and analyse their nature."
Author: Charlotte Brontë

5. "I have to live, perhaps, till seventy years. As far as I know, I have good health. Half a century of existence may lie before me. How am I to occupy it? What am I to do to fill the interval of time which spreads between me and the grave?"
Author: Charlotte Brontë

6. "When you permit an outside agency to control your feelings and emotions at frequent intervals for a prolonged period, your system will soon get into the habit of submitting to the control of this outside agency, and will not respond any longer to any effort that the will may make to regain its original power of control."
Author: Christian D. Larson

7. "It must be murder to be an aging beauty, a former Tadzio, to see your future as an ignored spectator rushing up to meet you like the hard pavement. What a small sip of gall to be able to time with each passing year the ever-shorter interval in which someone's eyes focus upon you. And then shift away."
Author: David Rakoff

8. "Men achieve cheerfulness by moderation in pleasure and by proportion in their life excess and deficiency are apt to fluctuate and cause great changes in the soul. And souls which change over great intervals are neither stable nor cheerful. So one should set one's mind on what is possible and be content with what one has taking little account of those who are admired and envied and not dwelling on them in thought but one should consider the lives of those who are in distress thinking of their grievous sufferings so that what one has and possesses will seem great and enviable and one will cease to suffer in one's soul through the desire for more."
Author: Democritus

9. "One of the regular intervals of meditation in my life, believe it or not, is in my car."
Author: Ed Begley Jr.

10. "I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."
Author: Edgar Allan Poe

11. "What a night it was! The jagged masses of heavy dark cloud were rolling at intervals from horizon to horizon, and thin white wreaths covered the stars. Through all the rush of the cloud river the moon swam, breasting the waves and disappearing again in the darkness.I walked up and down, drinking in the beauty of the quiet earth and the changing sky. The night was absolutely silent. Nothing seemed to be abroad. There was no scurrying of rabbits, or twitter of the half-asleep birds. And though the clouds went sailing across the sky, the wind that drove them never came low enough to rustle the dead leaves in the woodland paths. Across the meadows I could see the church tower standing out black and grey against the sky. ("Man Size In Marble")"
Author: Edith Nesbit

12. "The shortest interval between two points is the awareness that they are not two."
Author: Eric Micha'el Leventhal

13. "That is the remarkable thing about drinking: it brings people together so quickly, but between night and morning it sets an interval again of years."
Author: Erich Maria Remarque

14. "Entre eu e o resto da realidade não há intervalos: leia as minhas vértebras."
Author: Filipe Russo

15. "Intervals and other types of speed work are essential to improve running speed."
Author: Frank Shorter

16. "There are two contrary impulses which govern this man's brain-the one sane, and the other eccentric. They alternate at regular intervals."
Author: Franz Schubert

17. "Das Leben besteht aus seltenen einzelnen Momenten von höchster Bedeutsamkeit und unzählig vielen Intervallen, in denen uns besten Falls die Schattenbilder jener Momente umschweben. Die Liebe, der Frühling, jede schöne Melodie, das Gebirge, der Mond, das Meer - Alles redet nur einmal ganz zum Herzen: wenn es überhaupt je ganz zu Worte kommt. Denn viele Menschen haben jene Momente gar nicht und sind selber Intervalle und Pausen in der Symphonie des wirklichen Lebens."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

18. "Color is a plastic means of creating intervals... color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now between formal tensions and color tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony."
Author: Hans Hofmann

19. "He appeared before me and departed. We were not able to speak to or touch each other. But in that short interval, he transformed many things inside me. He literally stirred my mind and body the way a spoon stirs a cup of cocoa, down to the depths of my internal organs and my womb."
Author: Haruki Murakami

20. "Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

21. "When a daughter loses a mother, the intervals between grief responses lengthen over time, but her longing never disappears. It always hovers at the edge of her awareness, prepared to surface at any time, in any place, in the least expected ways."
Author: Hope Edelman

22. "He felt the comfort of being part of an eternal cycle symbolized by the gold strips on either side of the black mourning band he wore. Light, dark, light. The dark was just an interval."
Author: Jack Campbell

23. "An interval of meditation, serious and grateful, was the best corrective of everything dangerous."
Author: Jane Austen

24. "No me supone ningún sacrificio aceptar ocasionalmente compromisos para la noche. Todos nos debemos a la sociedad, y confieso que soy de los que consideran que los intervalos de recreo y esparcimiento son recomendables para todo el mundo" - Mary"
Author: Jane Austen

25. "¿Qué tienen esos momentos intemporales que luego siempre se recuerdan con una dulce melancolía? A veces me parece que es en esos intervalos de vacío, sin que fuera consciente de ello, cuando he vivido de manera más real y auténtica."
Author: John Banville

26. "Love is the delightful interval between meeting a beautiful girl and discovering that she looks like a haddock."
Author: John Barrymore

27. "There are only certain intervals of time when life of any sort is possible in an expanding universe and we can practise astronomy only during that habitable time interval in cosmic history."
Author: John D. Barrow

28. "Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all."
Author: John Steinbeck

29. "No, what numbed these fields, peopled with bad dreams was not the oppressive grip of a plague but rather an ailing retreat, a sort of sad widowhood. Man had started to subdue these vacant expanses, then had grown weary of eating into it, and now even the desire to preserve what had been claimed had perished. He had established everywhere an ebb, a sorrowful withdrawal. His cuttings into the forest, which were seen at long intervals, had lost their hard edges, their distinct notches: now a thick brushwood had driven its sabbath into the broad daylight of the glades, hiding the naked trunks as high as their lowest branches."
Author: Julien Gracq

30. "A person needs at intervals to separate himself from family and companions and go to new places. He must go without his familiars in order to be open to influences, to change."
Author: Katharine Butler Hathaway

31. "This day was only the first of man similar ones for the emancipated Mole, each of them longer and fuller of interest as the ripening summer moved onward. He learned to swim and to row, and entered into the joy of running water; and with his ear to the reed stems he caught, at intervals, something of what the wind went whispering so constantly among them."
Author: Kenneth Grahame

32. "He actually listened, rather than pretending to listen while waiting a suitable interval before it was his time to talk again..."
Author: Laini Taylor

33. "Natasha, with a vigorous turn from her heel on to her toe, walked over to the middle of the room and stood still... Natasha took the first note, her throat swelled, her bosom heaved, a serious expression came into her face. She was thinking of no one and of nothing at that moment, and from her smiling mouth poured forth notes, those notes that anyone can produce at the same intervals, and hold for the same length of time, yet a thousand times leave us cold, and the thousand and first time they set us thrilling and weeping."
Author: Leo Tolstoy

34. "As with other paired bracketing devices (such as parentheses, dashes and quotation marks), there is actual mental cruelty involved , incidentally, in opening up a pair of commas and then neglecting to deliver the closing one. The reader hears the first shoe drop and then strains in agony to hear the second. In dramatic terms, it's like putting a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I and then having the heroine drown herself quietly offstage in the bath during the interval. It's just not cricket. Take the example, 'The Highland Terrier is the cutest, and perhaps the best of all dog species.' Sensitive people trained to listen for the second comma (after 'best') find themselves quite stranded by that kind of thing. They feel cheated and giddy. In very bad cases, they fall over."
Author: Lynne Truss

35. "And more even than the painter, the writer, in order to achieve volume and substance, in order to attain to generality and, so far as literature can, to reality, needs to have seen many churches in order to paint one church and for the portrayal of a single sentiment requires many individuals. For if art is long and life is short, we may on the other hand say that, if inspiration is short, the sentiments which it has to portray are not of much longer duration. It is our passions which draw the outline of our books, the ensuing intervals of repose which write them."
Author: Marcel Proust

36. "In the country neighbor­hood thereabouts, along the dusty roads, one found at intervals the prettiest little cottage homes, snug and cozy, and so cobwebbed with vines snowed thick with roses that the doors and windows were wholly hidden from sight-sign that these were deserted homes, forsaken years ago by defeated and disap­pointed families who could neither sell them nor give them away."
Author: Mark Twain

37. "Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regularly intervals through their life and live to regret them ever afterward? Was everyone's life filled with confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconcern, and any number of other pairings of polar opposites? Or were most people one thing or the other - good or bad, cheerful or crotchety, generous or miserly, and so on."
Author: Mary Balogh

38. "Mattia sentiu os cabelos dela a fazerem-lhe cócegas no pescoço. Sentiu o fino intervalo de ar que os separava a encher-se com o seu calor e a premer levemente sobre a sua pele, como algodão. Sentiu o instinto de a puxar a si, mas as mãos ficaram imóveis, como que adormecidas."
Author: Paolo Giordano

39. "For all that I announce at intervals that I want to go mad, it is apparently impossible: beyond me, beneath me. It took This for me to learn that I am a citadel of sanity."
Author: Philip Roth

40. "My life is not this steeply sloping hour,in which you see me hurrying.Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree;I am only one of my many mouths,and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.I am the rest between two notes,which are somehow always in discordbecause Death's note wants to climb over—but in the dark interval, reconciled,they stay there trembling.And the song goes on, beautiful."
Author: Rainer Maria Rilke

41. "It was a simple thing. All terror is a simplicity. ("Interval In Sunlight")"
Author: Ray Bradbury

42. "Poets are like baseball pitchers. both have their moments. the intervals are the tough things."
Author: Robert Frost

43. "I'm going to check on you in the night," he said. "At random intervals of my choosing.""I figured."
Author: Sara Zarr

44. "It'll be all right, Clay. Really." "So you say, but you have a persecution complex and delusions of grandeur." "That's true," Tom said, "but they're balanced out by poor self-image and ego menstruation at roughly six week intervals..."
Author: Stephen King

45. "... change and loss and sadness and grief are the shared lot of all human beings ... we are all making our way from one end of life to the other hoping--for whatever intervals of time we can manage it--to feel safe and content and strong and at ease. [p.40]"
Author: Sylvia Boorstein

46. "This native people he lived with, deep in the jungle—their language had dozens of words for rain. Because it was so common to them, you see. Where they lived, it rained almost constantly. Several times a day. So they had words for light rain, and heavy rain, and pounding rain. Something like eighteen different terms for storms, and a whole classification system for mist." "Why are you telling me this?" His touch skimmed idly down her arm. "Because I'm standing here, wanting to give you a fitting compliment, but my paltry vocabulary fails me. I think what I need is a scientific excursion. I need to venture deep into some jungle where beauty takes the place of rain. Where loveliness itself falls from the sky at regular intervals. Dots every surface, saturates the ground, hangs like vapor in the air. Because the way you look, right now . . ." His gaze caught hers in the reflection. "They'd have a word for it there."
Author: Tessa Dare

47. "Se queres convencer alguém da tua verdade, não a expliques ou demonstres – afirma-a. E ela será tanto mais convincente quanto mais força puseres na afirmação. A afirmação é compacta, a demonstração é cheia de buracos. Uma pedra não tem intervalos para os ratos se intervalarem nela. Se queres ser chefe e dominador e senhor, berra o teu SIM ou o teu NÃO e deixa aos fracos o TALVEZ. E terás ocupado o baldio das almas humanas em que elas não sabem que semear. E serás histórico, se fores grande,mesmo no crime. Porque o homem é míope de sua natureza e só vê acima do tamanho do boi."
Author: Vergílio Ferreira

48. "Only an object can suffer, but phenomenally subject and object, being one whole, spin like a coin so that the intervals between pile et face (heads and tails) are imperceptible. Consequently pain, or pleasure, appear to be continual.Noumenally, on the contrary, there is no object to suffer pain or pleasure. Noumenon is invulnerable, and cannot be otherwise. Noumenon is the unmanifested aspect of what we, sentient beings, are: Phenomenon is our manifestation."
Author: Wei Wu Wei

49. "Japanese naval officers in dress whites are frequent guests at Pearl Harbor's officers' mess and are very polite. They always were. Except, of course, for that little interval there between 1941 and 1945."
Author: William Manchester

50. "For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls , drop after drop after drop, like the second hand of a watch, carving up time. The shock of each individual drop is insignificant, but the sensation is impossible to ignore. At first, one might manage to think about other things, but after five hours, after ten hours, it becomes unendurable. The repeated stimulation excites the nerves to a point where they literally explode, and every sensation in the body is absorbed into that one spot on the forehead---indeed, you come to feel that you are nothing but a forehead, into which a fine needle is being forced millimeter by millimeter. You can't sleep or even speak, hypnotized by a suffering that is greater than any mere pain. In general, the victim goes mad before a day has passed."
Author: Yōko Ogawa

Interval Quotes Pictures