Notable & Quotable

My new life goal is to start blogging lists of notable, quotable quotes I run across in my studies as an English and Philosophy and Religion major. I read so many great quotes and think, "Yeah! That'll preach!" Metaphorically and literally. But I never write them down or collect them in any organized way. That is changing now. Hopefully.

"In a corner, looking over our shoulders, was a statue of the crucified Savior, all bloody and beaten up. Charlene looked up and said, 'Look at that poor Indian. The pigs sure worked him over.' That was the closest I ever came to seeing Jesus," Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

"He wore black like a cleric; he had the voice of a great dog," Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn

"Conviction, caricature, callousness: the remainder of his sermon was a going back and forth among these" 

"He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in upon him"

"He stepped back from the lectern and held his head, smiling. In his mind the earth was spinning and the stars rattled around in the heavens. The sun shone, and the moon. Smiling in a kind of transport, the Priest of the Sun stood silent for a time while the congregation waited to be dismissed. 'Good night,' he said, 'and get yours"

"There was such pain in the priest's eyes he could not bear to look into them. He was embarrassed, humiliated; he hated the priest for suffering so"

"Even at fifteen, in Idaho, I hadn't written from within my despair until after I was safely over it, and now, all the more so, the stories that mattered to me were the ones told-- selected, clarified-- in retrospect" Jonathan Frazen, "Farther Away"

"In the summer before he died, sitting with him on the patio while he smoked cigarettes, I couldn't keep my eyes off the hummingbirds around his house, and was saddened that he could, and while he was taking his heavily medicated afternoon naps, I was studying the birds of Ecuador for an upcoming trip, and I understood the difference between his unmanageable misery and my manageable discontent was that I could escape myself in the joy of birds and he could not"

"How easy and natural love is if you are well! And how gruesomely difficult-- what a philosophically daunting contraption of self-delusion love appears to be-- if you are not! And yet  one of the lessons of David's work (and for me, of being his friend) is that the difference between well and not well is in more respects a difference of degree than of kind"

"As long as we have such complications, how dare we bored?"

"I like to play chess. I moved to a small town, and nobody played chess there, but one guy challenged me to checkers. I always thought it was kind of a simple game, but I accepted. And he beat me nine or ten games in a row. That's sort of like living in a small town. It's a simpler game, but it's played to a higher level" Peter Hessler, "Dr. Don"