Christopher Scotton · 466 pages
Rating: (7.3K votes)
“I guess I learned that even though most people are good, they can be talked into doing bad things by one or two jerks...And I guess, people sometimes need someone who can stand up and remind them that they are good people and they know what's right.”
― Christopher Scotton, quote from The Secret Wisdom of the Earth
“I held her and she cried into my shoulder so deeply that I could feel the sorrow from her soul blending completely and profoundly with my own.”
― Christopher Scotton, quote from The Secret Wisdom of the Earth
“Finally the pieces started to make sense and I began to feel a pensive awareness of circumstances other than my own; a knowing that brings with it a kind is stillness that I didn't quite understand but accepted it for its own.”
― Christopher Scotton, quote from The Secret Wisdom of the Earth
“Pops smiled. “Son, the more people I meet, the less good I get at labeling them. That’s a wisdom I hope you acquire.”
― Christopher Scotton, quote from The Secret Wisdom of the Earth
“kind, sad eyes that seemed to carry with them the secret wisdom of the earth.”
― Christopher Scotton, quote from The Secret Wisdom of the Earth
“..fresh friends from completely different worlds faced with the hard shapings of truth and deceit, of right and wrong, and of the equivalent damage when high expectations and low expectations are devastatingly unmet.”
― Christopher Scotton, quote from The Secret Wisdom of the Earth
“For Arthur, words gathered in waterfall thoughts that spilled off the page into the pools of imaginaton collecting in his head.”
― Christopher Scotton, quote from The Secret Wisdom of the Earth
“They [stag's eyes] were moist and pink, which gave then a strangely intelligent mien--kind, sad eyes that seemed to carry with them the secret wisdom of the earth.”
― Christopher Scotton, quote from The Secret Wisdom of the Earth
“They ran past him without notice, but I paused and stood over the boy. I wanted to feel something--wanted to find some understanding in his actions; some empathy in his upbringing; at least a fragment of sympathy for the secret he carried.”
― Christopher Scotton, quote from The Secret Wisdom of the Earth
“He looked at me with sunken eyes, unburdened by any great curiosity and ringed in gray and dark-blue shadows that logged his hard living like tree rings.”
― Christopher Scotton, quote from The Secret Wisdom of the Earth
“She nodded her head silently to the demons taking tea with her on the sofa.”
― Christopher Scotton, quote from The Secret Wisdom of the Earth
“Men like Bubba Boyd think the earth owes them a living. They take whatever wealth they can from the mountains and move on. I actually feel sorry for him, I really do. He can’t for the life of him see the simple beauty in a waterfall or understand the importance of history and place. If I have one hope for you, Kevin, it’s that you never become one of those men.”
― Christopher Scotton, quote from The Secret Wisdom of the Earth
“The philosopher Didactylos has summed up an alternative hypothesis as "Things just happen. What the hell".”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Hogfather
“The greatest of love letters are always coded for the one and not the many.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves
“Our “increasing mental sickness” may find expression in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are conspicuous and extremely distressing. But “let us beware,” says Dr. Fromm, “of defining mental hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend; where there are symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life which strive for integration and happiness are still fighting.” The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish “the illusion of individuality,” but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But “uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too. . . . Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World / Brave New World Revisited
“Good luck, good will, good fortune, not ill.”
― Stephen King, quote from Hearts in Atlantis
“It was at times like this that one of those waves of bestiality ran through the mine, the sudden lust of the male that came over a miner when he met one of these girls on all fours, with her rear in the air and her buttocks busting out of her breeches.”
― Émile Zola, quote from Germinal
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