Topic: One-liners that mean a lot
Share some short phrases that are high on impact or that are sensory.
I have some favourites.
- Dill Carver
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Re: One-liners that mean a lot
A dream, all a dream
that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down
but I wish you to know that you inspired it
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
- corra
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Re: One-liners that mean a lot
"Reason is to Imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance." - Percy Shelley
- corra
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Re: One-liners that mean a lot
“My dear friend, I tell you, at times when I feel near to breaking, all the upheaval in me can be stilled by the sight of such a creature who, going her ways in happy serenity within the narrow circle of her existence, gets by from one day to the next and, seeing the leaves fall, thinks nothing other than that winter is coming.”
Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
- corra
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Re: One-liners that mean a lot
“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera.
- corra
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Re: One-liners that mean a lot
One of my favorites:
“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” – Middlemarch
- corra
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Re: One-liners that mean a lot
“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
- corra
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Re: One-liners that mean a lot
“Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
- Dill Carver
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Re: One-liners that mean a lot
(Ragnar the Viking, on Poets)
“These word-stringers make nothing, grow nothing, kill no enemies, catch no fish, and raise no cattle. They just take silver in exchange for words, which are free anyway. It is a clever trick, but in truth they are about as much use as priests.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom
- corra
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Re: One-liners that mean a lot
"She had always been fond of history, and here [in Rome] was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine." ―Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady.
- TirzahLaughs
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Re: One-liners that mean a lot
Besides, he wasn’t wrong about whatever the hell he meant.
-Sam Lipsyte, The Fun Parts
- TirzahLaughs
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Re: One-liners that mean a lot
She was an interloper, coming late, and with an expectation of slavish gratitude and devotion for the favor she was bestowing.
-Jonathan Franzen
- TirzahLaughs
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Re: One-liners that mean a lot
"Some failures stem from lack of vision, and some failures from too much."
from Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson
- TirzahLaughs
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Re: One-liners that mean a lot
"Success is a lousy teacher."
--Bill Gates from 'The Road Ahead'
- TirzahLaughs
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Re: One-liners that mean a lot
"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies."
George R. R. Martin
__________
"When a monster stops behaving like a monster, did it stop being a monster?"
-- Graceling
_____________
- Dill Carver
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Re: One-liners that mean a lot
"Never close your lips to those to whom you have opened your heart."
Charles Dickens
- corra
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Re: One-liners that mean a lot
"I almost wish we were butterflies and lived but three summer days — three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain."
– John Keats
- Dill Carver
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Re: One-liners that mean a lot
“We are all lonely and all seek a hand to hold in the darkness. It is not the harp, but the hand that plays it.”
Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom
- Dill Carver
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Re: One-liners that mean a lot
The harp tends to figure large within Cornwell's Saxon tales. I guess it was a 'wonderment' instrument capable of producing rare sophisticated music in the 9th century.
I do like this line and the cause/effect innuendo.
- corra
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Re: One-liners that mean a lot
"The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and story-tellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland." ― L.M. Montgomery, The Story Girl.
- Memphis Trace
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Re: One-liners that mean a lot
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again. ~ William Faulkner
