George Bernard Shaw
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.
Typing Practice - G and H
Gravely, with a ghastly laugh, a green giraffe greets his haughty guests. Phantom hens hug hordes of horrified hamsters. Gnomes, holding huge hedgehogs, laugh heartily at hairy humans hiding in Himalayan hyacinth. Haggard hunters hiccup gloomy hummingbirds. Eighty gallant knights giggle at a granny's garter. Helium grapes hang gracefully amongst the glowing thunder. Horses harass Galapagos Penguins; hyenas heckle hermetic gorillas. One hundred herculean grasshoppers hinder a gliding glacier.
Typing Practice - E and I
In an electrifying, illuminated aerie, an aging tortoise eagerly awaits an efflorescent metamorphosis. Surreptitiously, in an eerie cathedral devoid of ceilings, eighteen ingenious elite elucidate ancient decrees. Tied to a pier of lies, the imprisoned sovereign, her irises fierce orbs of ice, inveighs the coterie of thieving fiends with an ancient malediction. A weighty deity, receiver of primeval emblems of idolatry, entices both hermetic atheists and enraged believers to his funeral bier.
Virginia Woolf
- The New Dress
And one word of praise, one word of affection from Charles would have made all the difference to her at the moment. If he had only said, "Mabel, you're looking charming tonight!" it would have changed her life. But then she ought to have been truthful and direct. Charles said nothing of the kind, of course. He was malice itself. He always saw through one, especially if one were feeling particularly mean, paltry, or feeble-minded.
Virginia Woolf
- The New Dress
She faced herself straight in the glass; she pecked at her left shoulder; she issued out into the room, as if spears were thrown at her yellow dress from all sides. But instead of looking fierce or tragic, as Rose Shaw would have done - Rose would have looked like Boadicea - she looked foolish and self-conscious, and simpered like a schoolgirl and slouched across the room, positively slinking, as if she were a beaten mongrel.
Virginia Woolf
- The New Dress
We are all like flies trying to crawl over the edge of the saucer, Mabel thought, and repeated the phrase as if she were crossing herself, as if she were trying to find some spell to annul this pain, to make this agony endurable.
Virginia Woolf
- The New Dress
And at once the misery which she always tried to hide, the profound dissatisfaction - the sense she had had, ever since she was a child, of being inferior to other people - set upon her, relentlessly, remorselessly, with an intensity which she could not beat off, as she would when she woke at night at home, by reading Borrow or Scott; for oh these men, oh these women, all were thinking - "What's Mabel wearing? What a fright she looks! What a hideous new dress!"
Typing Practice - B and V
Bavarian butterfly veterinarians behave benevolently. Beware verboten shibboleths. Bubonic vermillion villains have brave veneer. Volcanic hubris behooves velveteen rabbits. Valiant barbarians enslave brave, brooding villains. Above the bloody buboes, blooming violets vivify broken, bereaved valleys. Verbose voles vociferate, brooking no glib bowdlerization. Verbs berate, vitiate, blaze, and banish. Be benevolent; be grave baboon vultures. A brash, vilifying vagrant abjures a vibrating bevy.
Tulsidas
- Ramcharitmanas
Then Ravana revealed his true form, and when he declared his name, Sita was filled with terror. But summoning all her courage, she said, 'Stay awhile, O wretch; my lord has come. Even as a hare would woo a lioness, so, oh king of demons, would you woo your own destruction.' On hearing these defiant words, Ravana flew into a rage, though in his heart he rejoiced and adored her feet.
Yann Martel
- Life of Pi
I would like to say in my own defense that though I may have anthropomorphized the animals till they spoke fluent English, the pheasants complaining in uppity British accents of their tea being cold and the baboons planning their bank robbery getaway in the flat, menacing tones of American gangster, the fancy was always conscious. I quite deliberately dressed wild animals in tame costumes of my imagination. But I never deluded myself as to the real nature of my playmates.
Yann Martel
- Life of Pi
We had to deal on occasion with stone throwers, who found the animals too placid and wanted a reaction. And we had the lady whose sari was caught by a lion. She spun like a yo-yo, choosing mortal embarrassment over mortal end. The thing was, it wasn't even an accident. She had leaned over, thrust her hand in the cage and waved the end of her sari in the lion's face, with what intent we never figured out. She was not injured; there were many fascinated men who came to her assistance.
Yann Martel
- Life of Pi
We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man. In a general way we mean how our species' excessive predatory-ness has made the entire planet our prey. More specifically, we have in mind the people who feed fishhooks to the otters, razors to the bears, apples with small nails in them to the elephants and hardware variations on the theme.
Yann Martel
- Life of Pi
Some people say God died during the Partition in 1947. He may have died in 1971 during the war. Or he may have died yesterday here in Pondicherry in an orphanage. That's what some people say, Pi. When I was your age, I lived in bed, racked with polio. I asked myself every day 'Where is God? Where is God? Where is God?' God never came. It wasn't God who saved me - it was medicine.
Flannery O'Connor
- The Life You Save May Be Your Own
A fat yellow moon appeared in the branches of the fig tree as if it were going to roost there with the chickens. He said that a man had to escape to the country to see the world whole and that he wished he lived in a desolate place like this where he could see the sun go down every evening like God made it to do.
Flannery O'Connor
- The Life You Save May Be Your Own
The daughter sat down too and watched him with a cautious sly look as if he were a bird that had come up very close. He leaned to one side, rooting in his pants pocket, and in a second he brought out a package of chewing gum and offered her a piece. She took it and unpeeled it and began to chew without taking her eyes off him. He offered the old woman a piece but she only raised her upper lip to indicate she had no teeth.
Willa Cather
- Eric Hermannson's Soul
It was as though some red-hot instrument had touched for a moment those delicate fibers of the brain which respond to acute pain and pleasure, in which lies the power of exquisite sensation, and had seared them quite away.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Bernice Bobs Her Hair
What a blow it must be when a man of imagination marries the beautiful bundle of clothes that he's been building ideals round, and finds that she's just a weak, whining, cowardly mass of affectations.
W.H. Auden
- Musée des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters: how well they understood its human position; how it takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; how when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting for the miraculous birth, there always must be children who did not specially want it to happen, skating on a pond at the edge of the wood.
Stephen King
- Pet Semetary
Louis Creed, who had lost his father at three and who had never known a grandfather, never expected to find a father as he entered his middle age, but that was exactly what happened... although he called this man a friend, as a grown man must do when he finds the man who should have been his father relatively late in life.
Mirabai
My loved one, the rains have come, and you promised that when they did, you'd come too. And now the days are gone: I've counted them one by one on the folds of my fingers till the lines at the joints have blurred and my love has left me pale, my youth grown yellow with age. Singing of Rama, your servant Mira has offered you an offering: her body and her mind.
