Which Way To Turn Quotes

1. "The world of magic is double, natural, and supernatural. Magic is impossible in a purely materialist world, a purely sceptical world, a world of pure reason. Magic depends on, it makes use of, the body, the body of desire, the libido, or life-force which Sigmund Freud said stirred the primitive cells as the sun heated the stony surface of the earth-cells which, according to him, always had the lazy, deep desire to give up striving, to return to the quiescent state from which they were roused."-The Biographer's Tale"
Author: A.S. Byatt

2. "Listen,' said Morrel; 'it is not the first time you have contemplated our present position, which is a serious and urgent one; I do not think it is a moment to give way to useless sorrow; leave that for those who like to suffer at their leisure and indulge their grief in secret. There are such in the world, and God will doubtless reward them in heaven for their resignation on earth, but those who mean to contend must not lose one precious moment, but must return immediately the blow which fortune strikes. Do you intend to struggle against our ill-fortune?.."
Author: Alexandre Dumas

3. "To his eyes all seemed beautiful, but to me a tinge of melancholy lay upon the countryside, which bore so clearly the mark of the waning year, Yellow leaves carpeted the lanes and fluttered down upon us as we passed, The rattle of our wheels died away as we drove through drifts of rotting vegetation--sad gifts, as it seemed to me, for Nature to throw before the carriage of the returning heir of the Baskervilles."
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

4. "Every story is an act of trust between a writer and a reader: each story, in the end, is social. Whatever a writer sets down can help or harm a community of which he or she is a part. When I write I can imagine a child in California wishing to give away what he's just seen- a wild animal fleeing though creosote cover in the desert, casting a bright-eyed backward glance or three lines of overheard conversation that seem to contain everything we need understand to repair the gaping rift between body and soul. I look back at that boy turning in glee beneath his pigeons and know it can take a lifetime to convey what you mean, to find the opening. You watch, you set it down. Then you try again."
Author: Barry Lopez

5. "As I lie in my bed,Your name running through my head.All I can think of is youAnd all that you do.The way you look at me.I feel as if I'm in a dream.The blue skyReminds me of your eyesWhich gives me butterflies.You have brightened my lifeWith that beautiful smile.No longer are my days a trial.Your touch is like heaven,Upon my young skin.If only you knewThat what I say is trueI would do anything just to be with you.Hand to hand, palm to palmJust hold me in your arms,I love you with all my heart'Till the very day it falls apart.I may be youngBut my heart is strong.I know what love isIt's my name and his.You make all the problems float awayNo matter how was my day.I love our heart to heart chatsWhen our beats connect,And when my head starts to fade backFrom when the blue skyTurns sacred black."
Author: Bethany Walkers

6. "He hadn't spoken a word since they'd left the manor except to snap out directions, telling her which way to turn at a fork in the road, or ordering her to skirt a pothole. Even then she doubted if he would have minded much if she'd fallen into the pothole, except that it would have slowed them down."
Author: Cassandra Clare

7. "God can and does use anything God chooses to get our attention. Who's to say the hawk wasn't sent as an agent of grace to catch my wandering attention and quiet what Buddhists might call my "monkey mind," which is more often than not swinging wildly from branch to branch on intellectual and emotional trees. On the way back down the hiking trail after my encounter with the hawk in Big Sky, I stopped thinking and started looking and listening. That's when I realized winter was turning into spring before me. Change was happening. Creation, and perhaps the Creator, was speaking. I just needed to be outside to hear the voice."
Author: Cathleen Falsani

8. "I looked for that which is not, nor can be,And hope deferred made my heart sick, in truth;But years must pass before a hope of youthIs resigned utterly.I watched and waited with a steadfast will:And, tho' the object seemed to fly awayThat I so longed for, ever, day by day,I watched and waited still.Sometimes I said,-'This thing shall be no more;My expectation wearies, and shall cease;I will resign it now, and be at peace.'-Yet never gave it o'er.Sometimes I said,-'It is an empty nameI long for; to a name why should I giveThe peace of all the days I have to live?'-Yet gave it all the same.Alas! thou foolish one,- alike unfitFor healthy joy and salutary pain,Thou knowest the chase useless, and againTurnest to follow it."
Author: Christina Rossetti

9. "This historic general election, which showed that the British are well able to distinguish between patriotism and Toryism, brought Clement Attlee to the prime ministership. In the succeeding five years, Labor inaugurated the National Health Service, the first and boldest experiment in socialized medicine. It took into public ownership all the vital (and bankrupted) utilities of the coal, gas, electricity and railway industries. It even nibbled at the fiefdoms and baronies of private steel, air transport and trucking. It negotiated the long overdue independence of India. It did all this, in a country bled white by the World War and subject to all manner of unpopular rationing and controls, without losing a single midterm by-election (a standard not equaled by any government of any party since). And it was returned to office at the end of a crowded term."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

10. "I was to grow used to hearing, around New York, the annoying way in which people would say: 'Edward Said, such a suave and articulate and witty man,' with the unspoken suffix 'for a Palestinian.' It irritated him, too, naturally enough, but in my private opinion it strengthened him in his determination to be an ambassador or spokesman for those who lived in camps or under occupation (or both). He almost overdid the ambassadorial aspect if you ask me, being always just too faultlessly dressed and spiffily turned out. Fools often contrasted this attention to his tenue with his membership of the Palestine National Council, the then-parliament-in-exile of the people without a land. In fact, his taking part in this rather shambolic assembly was a kind of noblesse oblige: an assurance to his landsmen (and also to himself) that he had not allowed and never would allow himself to forget their plight. The downside of this noblesse was only to strike me much later on."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

11. "I've started dreaming in Spanish, which has never happened before. I wake up feeling different, like something inside me is changing, something chemical and irreversible. There's a magic here working its way through my veins. There's something about the vegetation, too, that I respond to instinctively - the stunning bougainvillea, the flamboyants and jacarandas, the orchids growing from the trunks of the mysterious ceiba trees. And I love Havana, its noise and decay and painted ladyness. I could happily sit on one of those wrought-iron balconies for days, or keep my grandmother company on her porch, with its ringside view of the sea. I'm afraid to lose all this, to lose Abuela Celia again. But sooner or later I'd have to return to New York. I know now it's where I belong - not instead of here, but more than here. How can I tell my grandmother this?"
Author: Cristina García

12. "Memory is igneous more than ingenious, igneous, and like granite, intrusive, heaved up within oneself, the whole range of one's life, mountains' forbidding height looming over the plains where one lives, mountains formed by the life already lived, but toward which one is always walking, one's own past ahead of him, seeking the improbable path already forged, this path back through oneself, this path we call the present tense, which becomes the continental divide when the tense shifts and the path is lost, path from which the walker emerges only to turn around and see the peaks pulled up by his feet, and the snowy pass, and alpine heights, where those stranded must sometime feed on themselves to survive, where sometimes, through the icy crust, the crocus blooms."
Author: Dan Beachy Quick

13. ".... They both professed to be atheists, but, judging by their conduct, they exhibited in their daily lives all those attributes which are fundamental to real, active Christianity. They were thoughtful for my comfort in every way, and shared many of my interests and pursuits with a zest which might well have been envied by much younger people. Together we went down to Torquay for a two-week holiday and returned to Brentwood completely refreshed."
Author: E.R. Braithwaite

14. "Neythen looked perplexed. 'My mum always said I'm named after a saint, not an illness.''Which one?''Well he had his head chopped off, see? And then he picked it up and carried it down the road a time. All the way back home, I think.''Messy,' Piers said. 'Not to mention unlikely, though one has to think of chickens and their post-mortal abilities. Did she think that you would inherit the same gift?'Neythen blinked. 'No, my lord.''Perhaps she was just hopeful. It behooves mothers to look ahead to this sort of possibility, after all. I'm tempted to behead you just to see if she was right.Sometimes the most unlikely superstitions turn out to have a basis in fact."
Author: Eloisa James

15. "Am I jealous? he thought, astonished. Jealous of the chance object to which she has attached herself? Jealous of something that does not concern me? One can be jealous of a love that has turned away, but not of that to which it has turned."
Author: Erich Maria Remarque

16. "We must expose to the light of public inquiry those forces which would destroy our country and our way of life. We should pay no attention to the recommendations of men who call the Constitution an eighteenth-century agrarian document-who apologize for capitalism and free enterprise. We should refuse to follow their siren song of increasingly concentrating the powers of government in the chief executive, of delegating American sovereign authority to non-American institutions of the United Nations and pretending that it will bring peace to the world by turning our armed forces over to a United Nations worldwide police force. (Title of Liberty, p. 16.)"
Author: Ezra Taft Benson

17. "How desperate she had been for a storybook ending, and a life to which Gaia would always want to return; because her daughter's departure was hurtling towards Kay like a meteorite, and she foresaw the loss of Gaia as a calamity that would shatter her world."
Author: J.K. Rowling

18. "You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and how you could do it) and where you could live and whom you could marry. I know your countrymen do not agree with me about this, and I hear them saying "You exaggerate." They do not know Harlem, and I do. So do you. Take no one's word for anything, including mine- but trust your experience. Know whence you came."
Author: James Baldwin

19. "Mary made him lie down in the middle of the stage. Then she started singing, "Everything's all right, yes, everything's fine …" and rubbing something on his forehead, which wasn't going to help him. No one ever gets saved by a forehead rub. Ask Laura Ingalls Wilder if you don't believe me. But Mary kept doing it anyway, begging him to let the world turn without him tonight because everything was all right—which it wasn't, because even his best friend, Judas, was acting weird."
Author: Jennifer Gooch Hummer

20. "There's a place beyond words where experience first occurs to which I always want to return. I suspect that whenever I articulate my thoughts or translate my impulses into words, I am betraying the real thoughts and impulses which remain hidden."
Author: Jerzy Kosiński

21. "When he saw Tyler, his face went serious, which struck me as comical. Andy had always been protective, but when it came to me having anything to do with guys, he felt it was his duty to inform and protect me from the ones he thought were most like himself. When I turned thirteen, he pulled me aside and we had his version of 'the talk,' which mostly consisted of a bunch of 'uhs' and 'ums,' but I got the gist of his speech: boys only wanted one thing, and I shouldn't give it to them until I was at least thirty-three. And married."
Author: Jessi Kirby

22. "A lovely, pure, noble, and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden which it cannot bear, and must not cast away. All duties are holy for him; the present is too hard. Impossibilities have been required of him; not in themselves impossibilities, but such for him. He winds, and turns, and torments himself; he advances and recoils, is ever put in mind, ever puts himself in mind; at last does all but lose his purpose from his thoughts; yet still without recovering his peace of mind."
Author: Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

23. "True, you're not a slave. You're worse off than that by a long, long way. You're a predatory beast shut up in a cage of which the bars aren't fixed, solid objects you can gnaw at or in despair batter against with your head until you get punch-drunk and stop worrying. No, those bars are the competing members of your own species, at least as cunning as you on average, forever shifting around so you can't pin them down, liable to get in your way without the least warning, disorienting your personal environment until you want to grab a gun or an axe and turn mucker."
Author: John Brunner

24. "Here is a truth, a truth by which to live: there is hope. There is always hope. If we choose to abandon it, our souls will turn to ash and blow away."
Author: John Connolly

25. "Dennis, can I just say one last thing about Mars? – which may be strange coming from a Science-Fiction writer – But right now, you and me here, put together entirely of atoms, sitting on this round rock with a core of liquid iron, held down by this force that seems to trouble you, called gravity, all the while spinning around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour and whizzing through the milkyway at 600,000 miles an hour in a universe that very well may be chasing its own tail at the speed of light; And admist all this frantic activity, fully cognisant of our own eminent demise – which is our own pretty way of saying we all know we're gonna die – We reach out to one another. Sometimes for the sake of entity, sometimes for reasons you're not old enough to understand yet, but a lot of the time we just reach out and expect nothing in return. Isn't that strange? Isn't that weird? Isn't that weird enough? The heck do ya need to be from Mars for?"
Author: John Cusack

26. "But us, we got a job to do, and there's a thousand ways, and we don't know which one to take. And if I was to pray, it'd be for the folks that don't know which way to turn."
Author: John Steinbeck

27. "The Lord compensates the faithful for every loss. That which is taken away from those who love the Lord will be added unto them in His own way. While it may not come at the time we desire, the faithful will know that every tear today will eventually be returned a hundredfold with tears of rejoicing and gratitude."
Author: Joseph B. Wirthlin

28. "I do love it when I am right," Hyacinth said triumphantly."Which is fortunate, since I so often am."Penelope just looked at her. "You do know that you areinsufferable.""Of course." Hyacinth leaned toward Penelope with adevilish smile. "But you love me, anyway, admit it.""I admit nothing until the end of the evening.""After we have both gone deaf?""After we see if you behave yourself."Hyacinth laughed. "You married into the family. Youhave to love me. It's a contractual obligation.""Funny how I don't recall that in the wedding vows.""Funny," Hyacinth returned, "I remember it perfectly"
Author: Julia Quinn

29. "In these days Melissa's absorbed and provoking gentleness had all the qualities of a rediscovered youth. Her long uncertain fingers - I used to feel them moving over my face when she thought I slept, as if to memorize the happiness we had shared. In her there was a pliancy, a resilience which was Oriental - a passion to serve. My shabby clothes - the way she picked up a dirty shirt seemed to engulf it with an overflowing solicitude; in the morning I found my razor beautifully cleaned and even the toothpaste laid upon the brush in readiness. Her care for me was a goad, provoking me to give my life some sort of shape and style that might match the simplicity of hers. Of her experiences in love she would never speak, turning from them with a weariness and distaste which suggested that they had been born of necessity rather than desire. She paid me the comlpiment of saying: "For the first time I am not afraid to be light-headed or foolish with a man"."
Author: Lawrence Durrell

30. "When she shut her eyes, her mind grew alert. Her senses opened. All around her, she felt how quickly things formed and were consumed. How there was so much blind feeling. It was going on beyond the wall of her sight, out of her control. Unheard, unnoticed, the blood dropped into her hands and feet, so that she was anchored. Which she was glad for, because the light was so feeble and the blackness so strong that she felt as though she could drift away like a boat of skin, never to return, leaving only her crumpled dress."
Author: Louise Erdrich

31. "Eva sipped her coffee. Today, her hair was bound back in a singular knot, the sides rolled in smooth twists, the knot itself in the shape of the figure eight, which Delphine knew was the ancient sign for eternity. Eva rose and turned away, walked across the green squares of linoleum to punch some risen dough and cover it with towels. As Delphine watched, into her head there popped a strange notion: the idea that perhaps strongly experienced moments, as when Eva turned and the sun met her hair and for that one instant the symbol blazed out, those particular moments were eternal. Those moments actually went somewhere. Into a file of moments that existed out of time's range.."
Author: Louise Erdrich

32. "If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from? A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism's ostensible 'realism' turns out to be nothing of the sort."
Author: Mark Fisher

33. "Tom's army won a great victory, after a long and hard-fought battle. Then the dead were counted, prisoners exchanged, the terms of the next disagreement agreed upon, and the day for the necessary battle appointed; after which the armies fell into line and marched away, and Tom turned homeward alone."
Author: Mark Twain

34. "Mr Rutger cornet de Groot. Never read any American poetry or any other foreign poetry, which is why he always mentions 2 poets as a reffering point, either Lucebert or Tonnus Oosterhoff. The guy started reading when he was 48 years old with a few library books and was turned instantly in one of the most important critics hired by the fund of literature. Oh well."
Author: Martinus Hendrikus Benders

35. "Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn into food, has in no small measure become a process of converting fossil fuels into food."
Author: Michael Pollan

36. "Within the biblical worldview (which has not so much been disproved as ignored in much modern thought), heaven and earth overlap, and do so at certain specific times and places, Jesus and the Spirit being the key markers. In the same way, at certain places and moments God's future and God's past (that is, events like Jesus's death and resurrection) arrive in the present--rather as though you were to sit down to a meal and discover your great-great-grandparents, and also your great-great-grandchildren, turning up to join you. That's how God's time works."
Author: N. T. Wright

37. "[To] mechanical progress there is apparently no end: for as in the past so in the future, each step in any direction will remove limits and bring in past barriers which have till then blocked the way in other directions; and so what for the time may appear to be a visible or practical limit will turn out to be but a bend in the road.(Opening address to the Mechanical Science Section, Meeting of the British Association, Manchester.)"
Author: Osborne Reynolds

38. "There were pools of light among the stacks, directly beneath the bulbs which Philip had switched on, but it was now with an unexpected fearfulness that he saw how the books stretched away into the darkness. They seemed to expand as soon as they reached the shadows, creating some dark world where there was no beginning and no end, no story, no meaning. And if you crossed the threshold into that world, you would be surrounded by words; you would crush them beneath your feet, you would knock against them with your head and arms, but if you tried to grasp them they would melt away. Philip did not dare turn his back upon these books. Not yet. It was almost, he thought, as if they had been speaking to each other while he slept."
Author: Peter Ackroyd

39. "Metal is from the earth, he thought as he scrutinized. From below: from that realm which is the lowest, the most dense. Land of trolls and caves, dank, always dark. Yin world, in its most melancholy aspect. World of corpses, decay and collapse. Of feces. All that has died, slipping and disintegrating back down layer by layer. The daemonic world of the immutable; the time-that-was.And yet, in the sunlight, the silver triangle glittered. It reflected light. Fire, Mr. Tagomi thought. Not dank or dark object at all. Not heavy, weary, but pulsing with life. The high realm, aspect of yang: empyrean, ethereal. As befits work of art. Yes, that is artist's job: takes mineral rock from dark silent earth transforms it into shining light-reflecting form from sky.Has brought the dead to life. Corpse turned to fiery display; the past had yielded to the future."
Author: Philip K. Dick

40. "Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it, in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world."
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

41. "I came to Him because I did not know which way to turn. I remained with Him because there is no other way I wish to turn. I came to Him longing for something I did not have. I remain with Him because I have something I will not trade. I came to Him as a stranger. I remain with Him in the most intimate of friendships. I came to Him unsure about the future. I remain with Him certain about my destiny. I came amid the thunderous cries of a culture that has 330 million deities. I remain with Him knowing that truth cannot be all-inclusive."
Author: Ravi Zacharias

42. "[E]very man hath liberty to write, but few ability. Heretofore learning was graced by judicious scholars, but now noble sciences are vilified by base and illiterate scribblers, that either write for vain-glory, need, to get money, or as Parasites to flatter and collogue with some great men, they put out trifles, rubbish and trash. Among so many thousand Authors you shall scarce find one by reading of whom you shall be any whit better, but rather much worse; by which he is rather infected than any way perfected…What a catalogue of new books this year, all his age (I say) have our Frankfurt Marts, our domestic Marts, brought out. Twice a year we stretch out wits out and set them to sale; after great toil we attain nothing…What a glut of books! Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast Chaos and confusion of Books, we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning. For my part I am one of the number—one of the many—I do not deny it..."
Author: Robert Burton

43. "What is it which makes a man and a woman know that they, of all other men and women in the world, belong to each other? Is it no more than chance and meeting? no more than being alive together in the world at the same time? Is it only a curve of the throat, a line of the chin, the way the eyes are set, a way of speaking? Or is it something deeper and stranger, something beyond meeting, something beyond chance and fortune? Are there others, in other times of the world, whom we should have loved, who would have loved us? Is there, perhaps, one soul among all others--among all who have lived, the endless generations, from world's end to world's end--who must love us or die? And whom we must love, in turn--whom we must seek all our lives long--headlong and homesick--until the end?"
Author: Robert Nathan

44. "Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They turned the pain of others into memories of one's own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity."
Author: Roberto Bolaño

45. "As an instinct told her which way to turn, her wisdom told her that it will be a long path to manifest."
Author: Sarah Pussell

46. "Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know. For me, the spark that turns an acquaintance into a friend has usually been kindled by some shared enthusiasm . . . At fifteen, I couldn't say two words about the weather or how I was doing, but I could come up with a paragraph or two about the album Charlie Parker with Strings. In high school, I made the first real friends I ever had because one of them came up to me at lunch and started talking about the Cure."
Author: Sarah Vowell

47. "Careful the things you say,Children will listen.Careful the things you do,Children will see.And learn.Children may not obeyBut children will listen.Children will look to youFor which way to turn,To learn what to be.Careful before you say,"Listen to me."Children will listen."
Author: Stephen Sondheim

48. "Humans have a light side and a dark side, and it's up to us to choose which way we're going to live our lives. Even if you start out on the dark side, it doesn't mean you have to continue your journey that way. You always have time to turn it around."
Author: Taraji P. Henson

49. "Such are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace beside, put their faces in front of, the actual thing; often overpowering the solitary traveller and taking away from him the sense of the earth, the wish to return, and giving him for substitute a general peace, as if (so he thinks as he advances down the forest ride) all this fever of living were simplicity itself; and myriads of things merged in one thing; and this figure, made of sky and branches as it is, had risen from the troubled sea (he is elderly, past fifty now) as a shape might be sucked up out of the waves to shower down from her magnificent hands, compassion, comprehension, absolution. So, he thinks, may I never go back to the lamplight; to the sitting-room; never finish my book; never knock out my pipe; never ring for Mrs. Turner to clear away; rather let me walk on to this great figure, who will, with a toss of her head, mount me on her streamers and let me blow to nothingness with the rest."
Author: Virginia Woolf

50. "Billy's native arrogance might well have been a gift of miffed genes, then come to splendid definition through the tests to which a street like Broadway puts a young man on the make: tests designed to refine a breed, enforce a code, exclude all simps and gumps, and deliver into the city's life a man worthy of functioning in this age of nocturnal supremacy. Men like Billy Phelan, forged in the brass of Broadway, send, in the time of their splendor, telegraphic statements of mission: I, you bums, am a winner. And that message, however devoid of Christ-like other-cheekery, dooms the faint-hearted Scottys of the night, who must sludge along, never knowing how it feels to spill over with the small change of sassiness, how it feels to leave the spillover on the floor, more where that came from, pal. Leave it for the sweeper."
Author: William Kennedy

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