Alan Macfarlane Quotes
We live in a glass-soaked civilization, but as for the bird in the Chinese proverb who finds it so difficult to discover air, the substance is almost invisible to us. To use a metaphor drawn from glass, it may be revealing for us to re-focus, to stop looking through glass, and let our eyes dwell on it for a moment to contemplate its wonder.
Alan Macfarlane
Quotes to Explore
If your reader has been given a rousing opening, he will usually then sit still for at least some exposition. But be sure to follow that chunk of telling with one or more dramatized scenes. That's much more effective than being given section after section of telling.
Nancy Kress
Basically, my mother couldn't hold a tune and when I was a baby, a rather tactless baby, I would ask her not to sing... you can't get to sleep if someone is singing off key nearby.
Vikram Seth
In order to defend the Chinese race, one must first defend the Confucian culture; and in order to defend the Confucian culture, one must first defend the State. This is because what preserves the race relies upon intelligence, which is in turn nurtured by Confucian education.
Zhang Zhidong
Many good sayings are to be found in holy books, but merely reading them will not make one religious.
Ramakrishna
I love '80s horror.
A. J. Bowen
I was in Asia and people asked me about being considered sex symbol. I don't know if that's good or not, because where I come from, sex isn't something you're allowed to talk about.
Bai Ling
You have the power to remind us all that human dignity is not just a universal aspiration, but a human right.
Barack Obama
Virtue is not a mushroom, that springeth up of itself in one night when we are asleep, or regard it not; but a delicate plant, that groweth slowly and tenderly, needing much pains to cultivate it, much care to guard it, much time to mature it, in our untoward soil, in this world's unkindly weather.
Isaac Barrow
The Labour Party should oppose the Government arms plan root and branch.
Aneurin Bevan
The greatest part of the job was... that was for nine years it was a pleasure to go to work.
Jason Alexander
If you follow a strict diet for a few months, flaunting six packs abs is no big deal.
Akkineni Nagarjuna
We will discover through our own experience that this precious mind of love is the real wish-granting jewel, because it fulfills the pure wishes of both ourself and all living beings.
Kelsang Gyatso
The art of biography is different from geography. Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.
Edmund Clerihew Bentley
Science kills credulity and superstition, but to the well-balanced mind it enhances the feeling of wonder, of veneration, and of kinship which we feel in the presence of the miraculous universe.
John Burroughs
Our phone bills were astronomical, and when I found the letters Frank wrote me the other day, the total could fill a suitcase. Every single day during our relationship, no matter where in the world I was, I'd get a telegram from Frank saying he loved me and missed me. He was a man who was deseperate for companionship and love. Can you wonder that he always had mine!
Ava Gardner
It is difficult to understand these people who democratically take part in elections and a referendum, but are then incapable of democratically accepting the will of the people.
Jose Saramago
In a language known to us, we have substituted the opacity of the sounds with the transparence of the ideas. But a language we donot know is a closed place in which the one we love can deceive us, making us, locked outside and convulsed in our impotence, incapable of seeing or preventing anything.
Marcel Proust
We live in a glass-soaked civilization, but as for the bird in the Chinese proverb who finds it so difficult to discover air, the substance is almost invisible to us. To use a metaphor drawn from glass, it may be revealing for us to re-focus, to stop looking through glass, and let our eyes dwell on it for a moment to contemplate its wonder.
Alan Macfarlane