Collier Quotes

Visualize this thing you want. See it, feel it, believe in it. Make your mental blueprint and begin.

There is a very great difference — is there not? — between the temporal and the eternal judgments, a very great difference between a man's reputation and a man's character, for reputation is what men think and say of us, while character is what God and the angels know of us.

Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.

The love that you withhold is the pain that you carry lifetime after lifetime.

I'm happiest when I'm with you" - Amanda Collier

Elections determine who is in power, but they do not determine how power is used.

Just two choices on the shelf, pleasing God or pleasing self.

You love him because this is what you do. Over and over again. You knit yourself right up into these men's lives, these men who will never ever be able to love you back, and then you wonder like a crazy person why you aren't the chosen one at the end. You have to stop doing this...

Your chances of success in any undertaking can always be measured by your belief in yourself.

There is nothing on earth that you cannot have once you have mentally accepted the fact that you can have it.

If you don't make things happen then things will happen to you.

Any thought that is passed on to the subconscious often enough and convincingly enough is finally accepted.

All power is from within and therefore under our control

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds. Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look. The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Rebels usually have something to complain about, and if they don't they make it up. All too often the really disadvantaged are in no position to rebel; they just suffer quietly.

You are today the result of your thoughts of yesterday, and the many yesterdays preceeding it. You are forming today the mold for what you will be in the years to come.

Qu'est-ce que donc que la vie humaine si ce n'est un collier de blessures que l'on porte autour de son cou? A quoi sert d'aller ainsi dans les jours, les mois, les années, toujours plus faible, toujours meurtri?

You are a citizen, and citizenship carries responsibilities.

I sometimes marvel that a third-rate writer like me has been able to palm himself off as a second-rate writer.

It takes an enormous amount of strength, courage and energy to allow yourself to be a positive person. It takes virtually no energy at all to allow yourself to become the opposite.

I'm enjoying two beautiful visions tonight. Watching you stand there against a marvelous background has to be the most intriguing sunset I have ever experienced.

You can do anything you wish to do, have anything you wish to have, be anything you wish to be.

That's the thing about trust. It's like broken glass. You can put it back together, but the cracks are always visible--like scars that never fully heal.

Without an informed electorate, politicians will continue to use the bottom billion merely for photo opportunities, rather than promoting real transformation.

Most of us, swimming against the tides of trouble the world knows nothing about, need only a bit of praise or encouragement - and we will make the goal.

Change in the societies at the very bottom must come predominantly from within; we cannot impose it on them.

Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves.

Sometimes people leave us because staying becomes an impossibility. Because the world just gets too small. Or, sometimes, because there is just one boat, and too many hands. ...Because maybe, life can be a bit bigger than it exists today. And because, somewhere else, there may be another boat.

Give me a hot coal glowing bright red, Give me an ember sizzling with heat, These are the jewels made from my beak. We fly between the flames and never get singed We plunge through the smoke and never cringe. The secrets of fire, its strange winds, its rages, We know it all as it rampages Through forests, through canyons, Up hillsides and down. We track it. We'll find it. Take coals by the pound. We'll yarp in the heart of the hottest flame Then bring back its coals an make them tame. For we are the colliers brave and beyond all We are the owls of the colliering chaw!

To look at people in capitalist society and conclude that human nature is egoism, is like looking at people in a factory where pollution is destroying their lungs and saying that it is human nature to cough

You were born with a song in the seat of your soul; let the life that you live be the singing of it.

The first principle of success is desire - knowing what you want. Desire is the planting of your seed.

No, for then we should be colliers.

I shall pass through this world but once. Any good, therefore, that I can do Or any kindness that I can show To any human being Let me do it now. Let me Not defer it or neglect it for I shall not pass this way again.

Today might be shitty, tomorrow might be shitty, the next day might be shitty... but who's to say that one of the next days won't be the best day of your life?

Most conduct is guided by norms rather than by laws. Norms are voluntary and are effective because they are enforced by peer pressure.

Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed." Hubbard, Elbert

Launching a turnaround takes courage. I cannot measure that and so it is not going to be included in my analysis, but behind the moments of change there are always a few people within these societies who have decided to try to make a difference.

If you see yourself as prosperous, you will be. If you see yourself as continually hard up, that is exactly what you will be.

now he sensed that she was saying goodbye to him

The aid agencies are not run by fools. they are full of intelligent people severely constrained by what public opinion permits.

I'll always choose you. Gabe Willoughby

See things as you would have them be instead of as they are. —ROBERT COLLIER

For the thousandth time, Adele Collier, don’t open the closet door or you’ll get crushed!

People forget that the colliers didn’t just bring the canaries into the mines to warn them against the gases. They took them down because they sang so beautifully, even in the dark.

...Mama used to say that when you don't know what to do, do nothing. She meant you can try too hard to solve a problem. If you give it a little time, the answer might just come to you plain as day.

La terre est bleue La terre est bleue comme une orange Jamais une erreur les mots ne mentent pas Ils ne vous donnent plus à chanter Au tour des baisers de s’entendre Les fous et les amours Elle sa bouche d’alliance Tous les secrets tous les sourires Et quels vêtements d’indulgence À la croire toute nue. Les guêpes fleurissent vert L’aube se passe autour du cou Un collier de fenêtres Des ailes couvrent les feuilles Tu as toutes les joies solaires Tout le soleil sur la terre Sur les chemins de ta beauté.

The devil?” Jason heaved the tick over his shoulder like a collier with his sack. “Satan. The adversary. The enemy of the plan of God. The undoer. The destroyer. Yes. He definitely was.” Jason smiled. “But he meant well.

There is a Spark of Divinity in YOU. What are you doing to fan it into flame? Are you giving it a chance to grow, to express itself, to become an all-consuming fire? Are you giving it work to do? Are you making it seek out ever greater worlds to conquer? Or are you letting it slumber neglected, or perhaps even smothering it with doubt and fear?

كان المشهد مروعاً. لقد قتلنا رفاقاً كانوا على وشك الانضمام إلينا. قبل بضع دقائق، كنا نستعد للتآخي، وعند الهجوم، قتلنا منهم كل من ظهر في وجهنا.

...one person can come along and change your life, and that being a misfit, as I was, doesn't mean you won't find friends and your place in the world.

Maybe freedom means defining yourself any way you want to be.

Only by understanding that there is but one power—and that this power is Mind, not circumstances or environment—is it possible

Poets can dodge. ("Evening Primrose")

Poverty is not intrinsically a trap, otherwise we would all still be poor.

Not all developing countries are the same.

Electorates tend to get the politicians they deserve.

Violence always leads to pain" Trendal Malian- Ishtaria: Prince of Blades

Think of things not as they are, but as they might be... Don't merely dream... but create..

We always place that little word "but" after our wishes and desires, feeling deep down that there are some things too good to be true.

The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.

Could we make it our own, there would be an eternally inexhaustible earth and a forever lasting peace.

An identity of being ‘on the left’ has become a lazy way of feeling morally superior; an identity of being ‘on the right’ has become a lazy way of feeling ‘realistic’.

Between 1910 and 1920, the percentage of married women who worked had nearly doubled, and the number of married women in the professions had risen by 40 percent, Collier noted. “The question, therefore, is no longer, should women combine marriage with careers, but how?”23

The pot that had simmered for fifty years boiled over. Colliers and miners, furnacemen and tram-road labourers were flooding down the valley to the Chartists' rendezvous: men from Dowlais under the Guests, Cyfartha under the Crawshays, Nantyglo under Bailey and a thousand forges and bloomeries in the hills: men of the farming Welsh, the Staffordshire specialists and the labouring Irish were taking to arms.

You can do as much as you think you can, But you'll never accomplish more; If you're afraid of yourself, young man, There's little for you in store. For failure comes from the inside first, It's there if we only knew it, And you can win, though you face the worst, If you feel that you're going to do it.

OK for now. I enjoyed my quick, high-powered visit over there and look forward to a dead-game replay when I'm in better condition. Tell Hinckle he'd better take some liver exercises...and also to get braced for my wild cards, which don't always mix well with grapefruit juice and burbon. - To Peter Collier 10/11/1967

The truth about any artist, however terrible, is better than the silence.... I know many writers fight fanatically to keep their published self separate from their private reality.... But I've always thought of that as something out of our social, time-serving side; not our true artistic ones. I don't see how the "lies" we write and the "lies" we live can or should be divided. They are seamless, one canvas, for me. While we live we can keep them apart, but not command the future to do the same. The outrage some Thomas Hardy fans have shown over all the revelations about the private man seems to me hypocritical in the extreme. They hugely enrich our understanding of him.... I have had to convince a number of friends and relatives that the kindest act to the [writer] is remembering them - and that all art comes from a human being, not out of mysterious thin air. (Letter to Jo Jones, September 15, 1980, arguing for the preservation of John Collier's personal papers)

Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become. Your vision is the promise of what you shall one day be; your Ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.

and in that single moment she felt as though she had seen into his soul and the very heart of the the love he bore for her and their children

A man may as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading

When in doubt, do that which makes you the most nervous. The easiest way out, is generally not the best.

The key obstacle to reforming aid is public opinion.. Public opinion drives them into the "I care" photo opportunities that dominate aid.

Politicians would only move beyond gestures once there was a critical mass of informed citizens.

If the pen is mightier than the sword, then what is the laptop? A light saber or a life saver?

Now he that planteth and he that watereth are one; and every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labour.

It was so beautiful I could hardly keep my eyes off it. “Father, it’s so big,” I said. He grinned. “This is nothing, Tim. Wait till we get down to Verplancks

For one does not have to be ignorant and poor to find that one’s life is barren as the dusty yards of one’s town

Encouraging your firm to have a decent sense of purpose is your contribution to society, but continuing to work for one which lacks purpose is personally soul-destroying.

Populism offers the headless heart; ideology offers the heartless head.

But nobody was really desperate.

I nipped into this sanctuary late this afternoon and soon heard the dying footfalls of closing time. From now on, my only effort will be to dodge the night watchman. Poets can dodge.

Is not that government both unjust and ungrateful, that is so prodigal of its favours to those that are called gentlemen, or goldsmiths, or such others who are idle, or live either by flattery or by contriving the arts of vain pleasure, and, on the other hand, takes no care of those of a meaner sort, such as ploughmen, colliers, and smiths, without whom it could not subsist?

Persuading everyone to behave decently to each other because the society is so fragile is a worthy goal, but it may be more straightforward just to make the societies less fragile, which means developing their economies.

...I could see the genius in allowing future to evolve. You could create momentum. You could launch something and see where it goes. You couldn't line everything up, like so many dominoes, and make everything fall into place.

Yet Malone, remarkably, was a model of restraint compared with others, such as John Payne Collier, who was also a scholar of great gifts, but grew so frustrated at the difficulty of finding physical evidence concerning Shakespeare’s life that he began to create his own, forging documents to bolster his arguments if not, ultimately, his reputation. He was eventually exposed when the keeper of mineralogy at the British Museum proved with a series of ingenious chemical tests that several of Collier’s “discoveries” had been written in pencil and then traced over and that the ink in the forged passages was demonstrably not ancient. It was essentially the birth of forensic science. This was in 1859.

- Je crois que la vraie différence avec les bêtes, poursuivit le juge, ce n'est pas la fidélité. Le trait le plus proprement humain et qui leur fait complétement défaut, c'est un autre sentiment, que vous avez de reste. - Lequel ? - L'orgueil.

The great successful men of the work have used their imagination…they think ahead and create their mental picture in all its details, filling in there, adding a little there, altering this a bit and that a bit, but steadily building – steadily building.

as architect of choosing... choose. to. live. awakened. entirely. wholly. wildly powerful,  deeply masterful,  authentically creative, thriving.  this is not a hoped-for possible self. [reminder: this is an immutable Law of your being] needing not to learn the skill of being whole,  the antidote is to unlearn the habit of living incompletely here’s the practice: ‘know thyself‘—its about spirit  righteousness is underrated elevate connection with the changeless essence seek similitude with the will of Source and will of self 'choose thyself'—its about substance sacred. sagacious. spacious. in thought, word and deed— intend to: honor virtue. innovate enthusiastically. master integrity. 'become who you are'—its about style  a human, being an entrepreneur of life experiences a human, being a purveyor of preferences being-well with the known experience of soul, in service your relationship with insecurities, contradictions, & failures? obstacles or...invitations to grow? [mindset forms manifestation] emotions are messengers are gifts data for discernment: dare to deconstruct them your fears a belief renovation: fear.less. & aspire towards ascendance, anyway support your shine lean into the Light be.come. incandescent as architect of choosing, I choose...  to disrupt the energy of the status quo, to eclipse the realms of ordinary, & to live--a life-well lived. w/ spirit, substance & style.

It just got ugly in the 1970s for New Journalism, hastened by the decline of general interest magazine. So what happened? Television, mostly, which siphoned away readers and ad dollars, turned celebrity culture into a growth industry, and assured the end of Life, the Saturday Evening Post, and Collier’s – magazine that had published Mailer, Didion, Hersey, and many others. Esquire, New York, and Rolling Stones were no longer must-reads for an engaged readership that couldn’t wait for the next issue to arrive in their mailboxes, eager to find out what Wolfe, Talese, Thompson, and the rest had in store for them. As the seventies drew to a close, so, too, did the last golden era of American journalism. But there was also a sense of psychic exhaustion – that the great stories had all been told and there was nothing left to write about.

My eyes were trying to tell me something that my brain refused to believe. They made their point. I was looking straight into another pair of eyes, human eyes, but large, flat, luminous. I have seen such eyes among the nocturnal creatures, which creep out under the artificial blue moonlight in the zoo.

Is not that government both unjust and ungrateful, that is so prodigal of it's favors to those called gentlemen, or goldsmiths, or such others who are idle, or live either by flattery or by contriving the arts of vain pleasure, and, on the other hand, takes no care of those of a meaner sort, such as ploughmen, colliers, and smiths, without whom it could not subsist? But after the public has reaped all the advantage of their service, and they come to be oppressed with age, sickness, and want, all their labours and the good they have done is forgotten, and all the recompense given them is that they are left to die in great misery.

Every condition, every experience of life is the result of our mental attitude. We can do only what we think we can do. We can be only what we think we can be. We can have only what we think we can have. What we do, what we are, what we have, all depend upon what we think. We can never express anything that we do not first have in mind. The secret of all power, all success, all riches, is in first thinking powerful thoughts, successful thoughts, thoughts of wealth, of supply. We must build them in our own mind first.

Let's press ahead a little further by sketching out a few variations among short shorts: ONE THRUST OF INCIDENT. (Examples: Paz, Mishima, Shalamov, Babel, W. C. Williams.) In these short shorts the time span is extremely brief, a few hours, maybe even a few minutes: Life is grasped in symbolic compression. One might say that these short shorts constitute epiphanies (climactic moments of high grace or realization) that have been tom out of their contexts. You have to supply the contexts yourself, since if the contexts were there, they'd no longer be short shorts. LIFE ROLLED UP. (Examples: Tolstoy's 'Alyosha the Pot,' Verga's 'The Wolf,' D. H. Lawrence's 'A Sick Collier.') In these you get the illusion of sustained narrative, since they deal with lives over an extended period of time; but actually these lives are so compressed into typicality and paradigm, the result seems very much like a single incident. Verga's 'Wolf' cannot but repeat her passions, Tolstoy's Alyosha his passivity. Themes of obsession work especially well in this kind of short short. SNAP-SHOT OR SINGLE FRAME. (Examples: Garda Marquez, Boll, Katherine Anne Porter.) In these we have no depicted event or incident, only an interior monologue or flow of memory. A voice speaks, as it were, into the air. A mind is revealed in cross-section - and the cut is rapid. One would guess that this is the hardest kind of short short to write: There are many pitfalls such as tiresome repetition, being locked into a single voice, etc. LIKE A FABLE. (Examples: Kafka, Keller, von Kleist, Tolstoy's 'Three Hermits.') Through its very concision, this kind of short short moves past realism. We are prodded into the fabulous, the strange, the spooky. To write this kind of fable-like short short, the writer needs a supreme self-confidence: The net of illusion can be cast only once. When we read such fable-like miniatures, we are prompted to speculate about significance, teased into shadowy parallels or semi allegories. There are also, however, some fables so beautifully complete (for instance Kafka's 'First Sorrow') that we find ourselves entirely content with the portrayed surface and may even take a certain pleasure in refusing interpretation. ("Introduction")

Pendant le long travail de contraction, ma très jeune mère observe d'un œil distrait flocons et oiseaux se casser silencieusement la gueule par la fenêtre. On dirait une enfant qui joue à être enceinte. Sa tête est pleine de mélancolie; elle sait qu'elle ne me gardera pas. Elle ose à peine baisser les yeux sur son ventre prêt à éclore... Elle pleurait déjà en escaladant la colline pour arriver ici. Ses larmes glacées ont rebondi sur le sol telles les perles d'un collier cassé. À mesure qu'elle avançait, un tapis d'étincelants roulements à billes se formait sous ses pieds. Elle a commencé à patiner, puis a continué encore et encore. La cadence de ses pas est devenue trop rapide. Ses talons se sont emmêlés, ses chevilles ont vacillé et elle a chuté violemment en avant. À l'intérieur, j'ai fait un bruit de tirelire cassée

THE BOTTOMS" succeeded to "Hell Row". Hell Row was a block of thatched, bulging cottages that stood by the brookside on Greenhill Lane. There lived the colliers who worked in the little gin-pits two fields away. The brook ran under the alder trees, scarcely soiled by these small mines, whose coal was drawn to the surface by donkeys that plodded wearily in a circle round a gin. And all over the countryside were these same pits, some of which had been worked in the time of Charles II, the few colliers and the donkeys burrowing down like ants into the earth, making queer mounds and little black places among the corn-fields and the meadows. And the cottages of these coal-miners, in blocks and pairs here and there, together with odd farms and homes of the stockingers, straying over the parish, formed the village of Bestwood.

This morning I had not so much as carfare. Now I am here, on velvet. You are itching to learn of this haven; you would like to organize trips here, spoil it, send your relations-in-law, perhaps even come yourself. After all, this journal will hardly fall into your hands till I am dead. I’ll tell you. I am at Bracey’s Giant Emporium, as happy as a mouse in the middle of an immense cheese, and the world shall know me no more.

كان مبدؤنا بسيطاً: فمن أجل أن تكون حركة المقاومة للحرب فعالة، كان لا بد من نشرها على جانبي الجبهة. وإلا، فإنها ستتحول إلى هزيمة لأحد الطرفين، وسيتهم أولئك الذين رفضوا القتال بالخيانة. لهذا، أردنا أن ننشر التآخي أولاً ومن ثم العصيان.

And so a miserable but possible scenario is that countries in the bottom billion oscillate between the traps and limbo, perhaps switching in the process from one trap to another.. Let me be clear: we cannot rescue them. The societies of the bottom billion can only be rescued from within. In every society of the bottom billion there are people working for change, but usually they are defeated by the powerful internal forces stacked against them. We should be helping the heroes. So far, our efforts have been paltry: through inertia, ignorance, and incompetence, we have stood by and watched them lose. Let me be clear: we cannot rescue them. These societies of the bottom billion can only be rescued from within.

We woke up before the sun, hitched the oxen to the wagon, herded the cattle out of the Platt’s pasture where they had spent the night, and started off again on the road toward Peekskill. Peekskill was on the Hudson River. We would turn south there and go down the river about five miles to Verplancks Point. From North Salem to Peekskill was more than twenty miles. It would take us all day to make fifteen miles to our next stop, Father’s friends south of Mohegan. We were supposed to pick up another escort. I hoped we would find it soon. I didn’t like traveling through this country alone, and I kept looking around all the time for galloping horsemen.