“In the pale light of daybreak the gravestones looked like so many white sails that would never again be filled with wind, sails that, too long unused and heavily drooping, had been turned into stone just as they were. The boats' anchors had been thrust so deeply into the dark earth that they could never again be raised.”
― Yukio Mishima, quote from The Sound of Waves
“He heard the sound of waves striking the shore, and it was as though the surging of his young blood was keeping time with the movement of the sea's great tides. It was doubtless because nature itself satisfied his need that Shinji felt no particular lack of music in his everyday life.”
― Yukio Mishima, quote from The Sound of Waves
“With a heart unaccustomed to doubting, he never wondered for an instant whether the girl would brave such a storm to keep their rendezvous. He knew nothing of that melancholy and all-too-effective way of passing time by magnifying and complicating his feelings, whether of happiness or uneasiness, through the exercise of imagination.”
― Yukio Mishima, quote from The Sound of Waves
“El hecho de que Shinji no experimentara ningún tipo de carencias musicales en en su vida cotidiana se debía sin duda a que el mar satisfacía su necesidad.”
― Yukio Mishima, quote from The Sound of Waves
“The surface of the sea in the lee of the island was black, but the offing was stained with dawn. The mountains enclosing the Gulf of Ise could be seen clearly. In the pale light of daybreak the gravestones looked like so many white sails of boats anchored in a busy harbor. They were sails that would never again be filled with wind, sails that, too long unused and heavily drooping, had been turned into stone just as they were.”
― Yukio Mishima, quote from The Sound of Waves
“The belief that all knowledge is culturally determined and therefore lacks certainty is largely the product of an uncertain cultural milieu.”
― Michael Shermer, quote from Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time
“There was a click of high heels in the hall behind us, and a young woman appeared. She was pretty enough, I suspected, but in the tight black dress, black hose, and with her hair slicked back like that, it was sort of threatening. She gave me a slow, cold look and said, "So. I see that you’re keeping low company after all, Ravenius."
Ever suave, I replied, "Uh. What?"
"’Ah-ree," Thomas said.
I glanced at him.
He put his hand flat on the top of his head and said, "Do this."
I peered at him.
He gave me a look.
I sighed and put my hand on the top of my head.
The girl in the black dress promptly did the same thing and gave me a smile. "Oh, right, sorry. I didn’t realize."
"I will be back in one moment," Thomas said, his accent back. "Personal business."
"Right," she said, "sorry. I figured Ennui had stumbled onto a subplot." She smiled again, then took her hand off the top of her head, reassumed that cold, haughty expression, and stalked clickety-clack back to the bistro.
I watched her go, turned to my brother while we both stood there with our hands flat on top of our heads, elbows sticking out like chicken wings, and said, "What does this mean?"
"We’re out of character," Thomas said.
"Oh," I said. "And not a subplot."
"If we had our hands crossed over our chests," Thomas said, "we’d be invisible."
"I missed dinner," I said. I put my other hand on my stomach. Then, just to prove that I could, I patted my head and rubbed my stomach. "Now I’m out of character—and hungry.”
― Jim Butcher, quote from Side Jobs: Stories from the Dresden Files
“الحرية الإنسانية لا تقاس تبعاً للإختيار المتاح للفرد، وإنما العامل الحاسم والوحيد في تحديدها هو ما يستطيع الفرد اختياره وما يختاره”
― Herbert Marcuse, quote from One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
“This is a sickness rooted and inherent in the nature of a tyranny: that he that holds it does not trust his friends.”
― Aeschylus, quote from Prometheus Bound
“They did not ask to be accepted but declared themselves the Americans that perhaps few others recognized but that they had always been deep within their hearts. NOTES ON METHODOLOGY I began this work because of what I saw as incomplete perceptions, outside of scholarly circles, of what the Great Migration was and how and why it happened, particularly through the eyes of those who experienced it. Because it was so unwieldy and lasted for so long, the movement did not appear to rise to the level of public consciousness that, by any measure, it seemed to deserve. The first question, in my view, had to do with its time frame: what was it, and when precisely did it occur? The Great Migration is often described as a jobs-driven, World War I movement, despite decades of demographic evidence and real-world indicators that it not only continued well into the 1960s but gathered steam with each decade, not ending until the social, political, and economic reasons for the Migration began truly to be addressed in the South in the dragged-out, belated response to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The second question had to do with where it occurred. The migration from Mississippi to Chicago has been the subject of the most research through the years and has dominated discussion of the phenomenon, in part because of the sheer size of the black influx there and because of the great scholarly interest taken in it by a cadre of social scientists working in Chicago at the start of the Migration. However, from my years as a national correspondent at The New York Times and my early”
― Isabel Wilkerson, quote from The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
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