Isolation In As I Lay Dying Quotes

1. "Instead of answering her as soon as he saw her hair grow electric, her face more vivid, her eyes like lightning, her body restless and jerky like a racehorse's, he retired behind this wall of objective understanding, this gentle testing and acceptance of her, just as one watches an animal in the zoo and smiles at his antics, but is not drawn into this mood. It was this which left Lilith in a state of isolation - indeed, like a wild animal in an absolute desert."
Author: Anaïs Nin

2. "The spring which moved my energies lay far away beyond seas, in an Indian isle."
Author: Charlotte Brontë

3. "The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? … The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind."
Author: Cormac McCarthy

4. "Should I anticipate all future conversations with you to take this bent?" Lynley enquired. "Frankly, I've always thought your appeal lay in your complete indifference to personal grooming.""Those days are past, sir. What c'n I do for you? I reckon this isn't a personal call, made to see if I'm keeping my legs shaved."
Author: Elizabeth George

5. "Now, when their glances met, they understood one another. The power that lay within both their souls had met, and, as it were, clasped hands. They accepted one another's sacrifice. Hers, mayhap, was the more complete of the two, because for her his absence would mean weary waiting, the dull heartache so terrible to bear."
Author: Emmuska Orczy

6. "You wake up on a winter morning and pull up the shade, and what lay there the evening before is no longer there--the sodden gray yard, the dog droppings, the tire tracks in the frozen mud, the broken lawn chair you forgot to take in last fall. All this has disappeared overnight, and what you look out on is not the snow of Narnia but the snow of home, which is no less shimmering and white as it falls. The earth is covered with it, and it is falling still in silence so deep that you can hear its silence. It is snow to be shoveled, to make driving even worse than usual, snow to be joked about and cursed at, but unless the child in you is entirely dead, it is snow, too, that can make the heart beat faster when it catches you by surprise that way, before your defenses are up. It is snow that can awaken memories of things more wonderful than anything you ever knew or dreamed."
Author: Frederick Buechner

7. "To be one of God's lilies means an interior abandonment of the rarest kind. It means that we are to be infinitely passive, and yet infinitely active also; passive as regards self and its workings, active as regards attention and response to God. It is very hard to explain this so as to be understood But it means that we must lay down all the activity of the creature, as such, and must let only the activities of God work in us, and through us, and by us. Self must step aside, to let God work."
Author: Hannah Whitall Smith

8. "Flesh, bodies, nerves, legs… things were getting all mixed up in his mind. It seemed to be filled with flesh, cloyed with the sweetish smell of flesh that is torn open and over which blood is pouring. It was his flesh, their flesh, lying about still alive, but dying, dying so slowly, dying so fast…"
Author: Humphrey Cobb

9. "Many Jesuit jokes play on our (supposed) struggles to be humble. One has a Jesuit, a Franciscan, and a Dominican dying and going to heaven. They are ushered into God's throne room, where God is seated on an immense, diamond-encrusted gold chair. God says to the Dominican, "Son of St. Dominic, what do you believe?" The Dominican answers, "I believe in God the Father, Creator of heaven and earth." God asks the Franciscan, "Son of St. Francis, what do you believe?" The Franciscan says, "I believe in your son, Jesus, who came to work with the poor." Finally God turns to the Jesuit and from his great throne asks, "Son of St. Ignatius, what do you believe?" The Jesuit says, "I believe... you're in my seat!"
Author: James Martin

10. "The earliest intelligence of the travellers' safe arrival at Antigua, after a favourable voyage, was received; though not before Mrs. Norris had been indulging in very dreadful fears, and trying to make Edmund participate them whenever she could get him alone; and as she depended on being the first person made acquainted with any fatal catastrophe, she had already arranged the manner of breaking it to all the others, when Sir Thomas's assurances of their both being alive and well made it necessary to lay by her agitation and affectionate preparatory speeches for a while."
Author: Jane Austen

11. "After my first coaching experience, the field looked more like Gettysburg than a normal defeat. But it wasn't that bad, as only about half my team lay dead, while the rest were merely dying."
Author: Jarod Kintz

12. "Days and nights passed over this despair of flesh, but one morning he awoke, looked (with calm now) at the blurred things that lay about him, and felt, inexplicably, the way one might feel upon recognizing a melody or a voice, that all this had happened to him before and that he had faced it with fear but also with joy and hopefulness and curiosity. Then he descended into his memory, which seemed to him endless, and managed to draw up from that vertigo the lost remembrance that gleamed like a coin in the rain - perhaps because he had never really looked at it except (perhaps) in a dream."
Author: Jorge Luis Borges

13. "I lay my head on his chest and listen to his heart beating, solid and sure.....he reads me so well. He's known about my emotional empathy since we were children. Nothing disturbs him...Few can lie to me... I don't know the truth, only that there is a lie. It takes a scrupulously honest man to love me. That's my Sean. We learned to trust each other completely before we were old enough to have learned suspicion."
Author: Karen Marie Moning

14. "During my three years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers. Not one of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making the Supreme Sacrifice."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

15. "It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H's family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon's scalpel to save our own lives, out loved ones' lives, but not to save a stranger's life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you'd call her."
Author: Mary Roach

16. "At the center of every fairy tale lay a truth that gave the story its power."
Author: Susan Wiggs

17. "I drank some chocolate milk and then lay down on the sofa in my "living" room, not really sad, just floating; trying to imagine what it was to be dead. Nothing much came to me. I remember closing my eyes and whispering her name, trying to make her come back. As we stared at each other, neither of us moving, I felt some...thing go shut in my heart while something else swung open"
Author: Tim O'Brien

18. "To me the definition of true masculinity - and femininity, too - is being able to lay in your own skin comfortably."
Author: Vincent D'Onofrio

19. "As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries-not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience."
Author: Willard Van Orman Quine

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