“Much of what happens to us in life is due to chance and circumstances beyond our control. Being in the right place at the right time. Discovering that others have impacted us more than we know and for reasons that are not entirely clear. But hard work matters, too. There is an old saying: The harder I work, the luckier I get.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The High Druid's Blade
“The Highlander exhaled sharply, running his hands through his red hair. “I trusted him. I liked him. I don’t understand.”
She shook her head. “People are capable of terrible things. We think we know them, but we really don’t. We let ourselves be deceived because we are always expecting the best out of those who seem willing to provide it.”
“He was always so respectful when talking about you. ‘My mistress.’ He called you that constantly. He helped me with my training; he seemed to want to make things easier for me. But all along he was thinking of ways to help Arcannen. Even if it meant I got hurt. Or killed. Chrys, too. He knew what he was doing. He had to. How could he live with himself?”
“He would have explained everything away, given the chance to do so—telling himself and all of us it was necessary or unavoidable. He would have been able to provide reasons for all of it. A basket full of justifications. Sebec had so much potential; he could have done everything he said he wanted to do without giving in to Arcannen. But he didn’t see it. He believed there was only one choice—to use us, to betray the Druid order, to embrace the roles of traitor and spy.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The High Druid's Blade
“His world was a confusing and treacherously shifting ground, and he did not see that he had any better way to deal with it than simply to keep marching on. It”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The High Druid's Blade
“I don’t like to think too far ahead about what’s waiting around the corner. I like to be prepared, but not troubled.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The High Druid's Blade
“Your belief is as important as your physical strength. You need to believe in yourself and in your weapon both. Doubt is the enemy. Hesitation is potentially fatal.” Sebec”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The High Druid's Blade
“but sometimes when you took a chance it was better to hold nothing back and to go all-in. He”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The High Druid's Blade
“We think we know them, but we really don’t. We let ourselves be deceived because we are always expecting the best out of those who seem willing to provide it.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The High Druid's Blade
“She was talking about herself and Sebec. She was explaining to him how hard it could be to accept the way things sometimes worked out.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The High Druid's Blade
“Think about it. Think how it works. We deceive ourselves far more easily than others deceive us. Our false perceptions betray us. Our fears and doubts worm their way into our subconscious and cause us to believe what isn't necessarily true but becomes true through our own fixation on the possibilities.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The High Druid's Blade
“The tremendous historical need of our unsatisfied modern culture, the assembling around one of countless other cultures, the consuming desire for knowledge--what does all this point to, if not to the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical home, the mythical maternal womb?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from The Birth of Tragedy/The Case of Wagner
“Temple started to become excited. ‘I want to get this out before you get to the airport,’ she said, with a sort of urgency. She had been brought up an Episcopalian, she told me, but had rather early ‘given up orthodox belief’ – belief in any personal deity or intention – in favour of a more ‘scientific’ notion of God. ‘I believe there is some ultimate ordering force for good in the universe – not a personal thing, not Buddha or Jesus, maybe something like order out of disorder. I like to hope that even if there’s no personal afterlife, some energy impression is left in the universe. . . . Most people can pass on genes – I can pass on thoughts or what I write. ‘This is what I get very upset at. . . .’ Temple, who was driving, suddenly faltered and wept. ‘I’ve read that libraries are where immortality lies. . . . I don’t want my thoughts to die with me. . . . I want to have done something. . . . I’m not interested in power, or piles of money. I want to leave something behind. I want to make a positive contribution – know that my life has meaning. Right now, I’m talking about things at the very core of my existence.”
― Oliver Sacks, quote from An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales
“[U]nless one is to yield to biological determinism and accept that the possession of black sin creates a unique black mentality and character, it is hard to see what living connection exists between American blacks today and their heterogeneous West African ancestors three centuries ago. And biological determinism--the theory that race determines mentality--is of course just another word for racism. Biological determinism is exactly the theory apologists for slavery used in the American South before the Civil War. It is bizarre to hear blacks invoking the same theory today.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society
“عندما يكون المرء ضحية أيّ نوع من التعسف ؛ يمكن أن يفعل أحد أمرين، يمكنه تعلّم كيفيّة تحويل الألم إلى غاية وإحداث فرق في العالم، أو يمكنه السماح له باخماد النور في داخله”
― Jodee Blanco, quote from Please Stop Laughing at Me... One Woman's Inspirational Story
“When negative experiences such as having one's house shot at occur in my dad's life he tends to come alive. His confusion lifts. Pieces of life's puzzle fuse into meaning like the continents before that colossal rift. It's entirely logical to him that his house has been shot at and when he's able to spend a minute or two in a world that makes sense he appears almost happy. And when he gets happy he does decisive things like this time he went over to the bulletin board in the kitchen and took down the city bus schedule that we've had up there since Tash left and before the bus depot itself closed down. He put it in the garbage can under the sink. Phew. Done. Goodbye past.
But then I imagined him on a day when shitty things weren't happening and he'd be feeling his usual mystified self and go to the dump and there he would see that little piece of paper with the schedule on it and it would bring him to his knees. Just destroy him for a minute or two and he'd probably pick it up and wipe whatever seagull crap there was on it and straighten it out with the side of his hand and bring it back to the kitchen bulletin board and ARRANGE it on there so you'd know it was the centerpiece of his life.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
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