"Would you--be good enough--" Alice panted out, after running a little further, "to stop a minute--just to get--one's breath again...?" "I'm good enough," the King said, "only I'm not strong enough. You see, a minute goes by so fearfully quick. You might as well try to stop a Bandersnatch!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I can understand that if you have sold arms to the ayatollah why you might not be quite as sensitive to the need to get assault we...apons off our streets.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The whole business of your life overwhelms you when you live alone. One's stupefied by it. To get rid of it you try to daub some o...f it off on to people who come to see you, and they hate that. To be alone trains one for death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[There is a] no-win decision that innumerable people make, or try to make, or try to put off making daily: Whether to give up the ...job, the place, the people, the future one holds dear, denying one's own mental capacities, independence, and desires (what are left of them, what one remembers of them) just to get away. They will find themselves disgusting if they let their tormentor get his way, not ... by touching their body ... but by forcing them to flee, to change anything they would not have changed if they were free to keep it: their white collar career or their cash register at the supermarket, it doesn't matter in the slightest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To find the point where hypothesis and fact meet; the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality; the place where fantasy and ...earthly things are metamorphosed into a work of art; the hour when faith in the future becomes knowledge of the past; to lay down one's power for others in need; to shake off the old ordeal and get ready for the new; to question, knowing that never can the full answer be found; to accept uncertainties quietly, even our incomplete knowledge of God; this is what man's journey is about, I think.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is something in this native land business and you cannot get away from it, in peace time you do not seem to notice it much p...articularly when you live in foreign parts but when there is a war and you are all alone and completely cut off from knowing about your country well then there it is, your native land is your native land, it certainly is.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What one really wants is youth, and what one really loses is years. Life becomes at last a mere piece of acting. One goes on by ha...bit, playing more or less clumsily that one is still alive. It is ludicrous and at times humiliating, but there is a certain style in it which youth has not. We become all, more or less, gentlemen; we are ancien régime; we learn to smile while gout racks us.... We get out of bed in the morning all broken up, without nerves, color or temper, and by noon we are joking with young women about the play. One lives in constant company with diseased hearts, livers, kidneys and lungs; one shakes hands with certain death at closer embrace every day; one sees paralysis in every feature and feels it in every muscle; all one's functions relax their action day by day; and, what is worse, one's grasp on the interests of life relaxes with the physical relaxation; and, through it all, we improve; our manners acquire refinement; our sympathies grow wider; our youthful self-consciousness disappears; very ordinary men and women are found to have charm; our appreciations have weight; we should almost get to respect ourselves if we knew of anything human to respect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »