FAVORITE SENTENCES WRITTEN BY OTHERS – 2014

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

– Martin Luther King, JR. “I Have a Dream“ (Kim)

They have not seen the stars.

– Ray Bradbury “They Have Not Seen the Stars” (Kim)

Did other men ever feel distaste at the sight of their own children?

--Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road (Carri)

We were into serious eating.

--Raymond Carver, “Cathedral” (Carri)

Supposing I collected old hair from a barbershop and sent it in parcels to people I didn't like.

--Alastair Reed, Supposing (Jami)

I decided to wake before dawn and tap my big toe to the tile floor first.

--Thanhha Lai, Inside Out and Back Again (Jami)

My heels are fettered, but my fist is free.

--Milton, Samson Agonistes (Nicole)

Guilded tombs do worms infold

--Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (Nicole)

To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes.

-- Roger Ebert (Erica)

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

-- Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Erica & Blake)

Get busy living, or get busy dying.

-The Shawshank Redemption (Blake)

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.

--Douglas Adams, A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Kate)

I'm guessing the barely literate waste of medicine wrote this one, because if you took a CAT scan of this author's brain, it would generate an image of two tiny wheelchairs crashing into each other.

--Cracked columnist Seanbaby, "4 Hilarious Self-Help Books for Crazy Old People" (Kate)

When I'm out there at night I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and fingernails, everything, it's like I'm full of electricity and I'm glowing in the dark - I'm on fire almost - I'm burning away into nothing - but it doesn't matter because I know exactly who I am.  

-Tim O'Brien on writing (Jessica)

Books and beer are the best and worst defense.

-Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (Jessica)

People lived on in [the town] and there were hospitals and cafes and artillery up side streets and two bawdy houses, one for troops and one for officers, and with the end of the summer, the cool nights, the fighting in the mountains beyond the town, the shell-marked iron of the railway bridge, the smashed tunnel by the river where the fighting had been, the trees around the square and the long avenue of trees that led to the square; these with there being girls in the town, the King passing in his motor car, sometimes now seeing his face and little long necked body and gray beard like a goat's chin tuft ; all these with the sudden interiors of houses that had lost a wall through shelling, with plaster and rubble in their gardens and sometimes in the street, and the whole thing going well on the Carso made the fall very different from the last fall when we had been in the country.

--Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (Tony)

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

--Stephen King, The Gunslinger (Tony)

“Two persons love in one another the future good which they aid one another to unfold.

--Margaret Fuller, “The Great Lawsuit”/Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 1843 (JR)

Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.

-Abraham Lincoln (JR)

I saw eternity the other night, like a great ring of pure and endless night.

-Henry Vaughn (Kelly)

Only quitters quit.

-Red Foreman, That 70’s Show (Kelly)

Steeple Bumpleigh must have come upon him as a totally new experience, causing him to wonder what had hit him--like a man who, stooping to pluck a nosegay of wild flowers on a railway line, is unexpectedly struck in the small of the back by the Cornish Express.

--P.G. Wodehouse, Joy in the Morning/Jeeves in the Morning (FG)

We deal in lead, friend.

--The Magnificent Seven (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GE9P56tK4o)(FG)