Dickson Quotes

Life is like a coin. You can spend it any way you wish, but you only spend it once

Come on people! Somebody disagree with me! How can we learn anything if no one will disagree?" Rabbi Stern

Trouble rather the tiger in his lair than the sage among his books. For to you kingdoms and their armies are things mighty and enduring, but to him they are but toys of the moment, to be overturned with the flick of a finger.

That’s what happens with your first love. It carves a hole in the muscle and fiber, so that you have no choice but to wear it like a birthmark.

I am a mathematician, sir. I never permit myself to think.

We don't fall in love with a woman because of her good character.

He meets me where I am, and because of the downward tilt of the driveway, we are toe to toe, nose to nose. “Willowdean Opal Dickson, you are beautiful. Fuck anyone who’s ever made you feel anything less.” His chest heaves. “When I close my eyes, I see you. I can talk to you. In a way I never have with anyone else.

Some people like my advice so much that they frame it upon the wall instead of using it.

I get into a tearing passion about something I know very little about, and when I learn more my passion ebbs away.

I want to be with you,” he says. “But I can’t if you won’t let me.” “Why?” I drop my bag in the driveway. “Why do you want to be with this?” I wave my arm up and down the length of my body. Immediately, I hate myself for this. The only person making this about my body is me. “Because I like you. I think I might feel a lot more than that for you, Willowdean. How is that so hard to believe?

The eyes were of a color which he could never decide on, afterwards when he told the story he used to say they were the color of everything in Spring.

Forever is composed of nows.

When the power comes from within us and we claim it as our own, then we no longer have to affirm ourselves by dominating others. The irony is that we are actually afraid of our own power.

Humility is the noble choice to forgo your status, deploy your resources or use your influence for the good of others before yourself.

If you place belief on a pedestal, it will become your prison.

On that last day, somewhere ahead, inside an unseasonably warm winter night, he’ll say my name and leave a hole no one can fill – something to hold onto when my hands are full.

I have committed another crime, Hadley,' he said. 'I have guessed the truth again.

Atheism certainly promotes a low view of humanity- how much lower can you get than thinking yourself an accidental by-product of a series of even larger accidents!

The great curse of theology and ecclesiasticisim has always been their tendency to sacrifice large interests to small: Charity to Creed, Unity to Uniformity, Fact to Tradition, Ethics to Dogma.

I've tried to explain to people that I don't 'love' writing any more than I 'love' breathing. It's something I do and it's something I need. If I thought about it as a love/hate thing, I probably would have quit long ago. And then died.

our tragedy begins humid. in a humid classroom. with a humid text book. breaking into us. stealing us from ourselves. one poem. at a time. it begins with shakespeare. the hot wash. the cool acid. of dead white men and women. people. each one a storm. crashing. into our young houses. making us islands. easy isolations. until we are so beleaguered and swollen with a definition of poetry that is white skin and not us. that we tuck our scalding. our soreness. behind ourselves and learn poetry. as trauma. as violence. as erasure. another place we do not exist. another form of exile where we should praise. honor. our own starvation. the little bits of langston. phyllis wheatley. and angelou during black history month. are the crumbs. are the minor boats. that give us slight rest. to be waterdrugged into rejecting the nuances of my own bursting extraordinary self. and to have this be called education. to take my name out of my name. out of where my native poetry lives. in me. and replace it with keats. browning. dickson. wolf. joyce. wilde. wolfe. plath. bronte. hemingway. hughes. byron. frost. cummings. kipling. poe. austen. whitman. blake. longfellow. wordsworth. duffy. twain. emerson. yeats. tennyson. auden. thoreau. chaucer. thomas. raliegh. marlowe. burns. shelley. carroll. elliot… (what is the necessity of a black child being this high off of whiteness.) and so. we are here. brown babies. worshipping. feeding. the glutton that is white literature. even after it dies. (years later. the conclusion: shakespeare is relative. white literature is relative. that we are force fed the meat of an animal that our bodies will not recognize. as inherent nutrition. is not relative. is inert.)

Above all things, dragons are loyal. Perhaps that is what makes us to amenable to life with sticks. Our characters are larger than their shortfalls.

Soulless eyes watched me as countless seconds ticked away, increasing the potential of my suffering with each tick.

Facing facts is definitely preferable to facing defeat.

Life is a coin. You can spend it anyway you wish, but you can only spend it once.

Don't for once ever think that what you're doing is easy. If it feels that way, you're probably doing something wrong. Throwing words onto a page is easy. But writing, the real kind, is hard. It's damn hard.

The real power of effective leadership is maximizing other people’s potential which inevitably demands also ensuring that they get the credit. When our ego won’t let us build another person up, when everything has to build us up, then the effectiveness of the organization reverts to depending instead on how good we are in the technical aspects of what we do. And we have stopped leading and inspiring others to great heights.

Amongst many who sought to deter me, was one dear old Christian gentleman, whose crowning argument always was, 'The Cannibals, you will be eaten by cannibals!' John Paton replied to this man 'Mr Dickson, you are advanced in years now and your own prospect is soon to be laid in the grave, there to be eaten by worms; I confess to you that if I can live and die serving and honouring the Lord Jesus, it will make no difference to me whether I am eaten by Cannibals or by worms; and in the Great Day my resurrection body will rise as fair as yours in the likeness of our risen Redeemer.

More blood’s been spilled by the militant adherents of prophets of change than by any other group of people down through the history of man.

There never was a throne yet built so high that it could not be rocked by laughter from below.

[Cornell University will be] an asylum for Science—where truth shall be sought for truth's sake, not stretched or cut exactly to fit Revealed Religion.

Part of liberation is being free to do your own thing and letting everyone else be free to do theirs.

Why should there be some sort of virtue always attributed to a frank admission of vice?

Humility applied to convictions does not mean believing things any less; it means treating those who hold contrary beliefs with respect and friendship.

John Le Carre said that authenticity is less important than plausibility.

Man with a crossbow in the proper position at the proper time’s worth a corps of heavy artillery half an hour late and ten miles down the road from where it should be.

live today as if it was ur last and don't ever say it is impossible cos nothing great was achieved with ease

Alan Campbell opened one eye. From somewhere in remote distances, muffled beyond sight or sound, his soul crawled back painfully, through subterranean corridors, up into his body again. Toward the last it moved to a cacophony of hammers and lights. Then he was awake. The first eye was bad enough. But, when he opened his second eye, such as rush of anguish flowed through his brain that he hastily closed them again.

There was the whole collection of Arthur Conan Doyle, Maurice Leblanc’s Lupin series, and every translated work that the publishers Hakubunkan and Heibonsha had ever released. Then there was the Japanese section: it began with nineteenth-century novels by Ruiko Kuroiwa, and also featured Edogawa Ranpo, Fuboku Kozakai, Saburo Koga, Udaru Oshita, Takataro Kigi, Juza Unno, Mushitaro Oguri all crammed in together. And then as well as Japanese translations of Western novels, there were the original, untranslated works of Ellery Queen, Dickson Carr, Freeman Wills Crofts and Agatha Christie, etc. etc. etc. It was a magnificent sight: an entire library of detective novels.

That sounds silly, doesn't it? Running away just because you don't want to hurt somebody's feelings? But did you ever think how much of our lives we spend,dodging and twisting and making things difficult for ourselves, to avoid hurting somebody's feelings. Even people with absolutely no claim on us?

My only claim to distinction among writers is that I do not believe my life contains any materials for a novel. I have prowled around Limehouse and the gamiest sections of Paris, but I have never yet seen (a) a really choice murder in a locked room, (b) a mysterious mastermind or (c) a really good‐looking adventuress with slant eyes.

There is an aesthetic dimension to virtue. In real life, as opposed to in celluloid, we are attracted to the good and repelled by the bad. Even the woman who says she prefers the archetypal 'bad boy' probably doesn't actually like it when he is bad toward her.

The hardest part of writing a story is making bad things happen to good people. The hardest part of writing horror is knowing that it won't really get better for them.

People say that a Dragon breathes Fire. That is a myth. A Dragon IS Fire and his Whole Life is the Story of his Burning - Page by Blistering Page.

I, wanderer, stand awaiting the signal.

life of anticipating the future with joy instead of rehashing the past

I'm often in a situation that I have to prepare a pudding for surprise guests, only to find that the only thing I have in my cupboard is a box of dried figs.

In general, substance-induced mania will subside within four weeks.

To write good history is the noblest work of man.

Contented children are valuable, as is the peace that surrounds them.

INFRACANINOPHILE. One who habitually champions the underdog. The creation of American writer Christopher Morley (1890–1957).

She has also found nirvana in wearing yoga pants with no intention of doing poses, peace in ignoring ingredient lists, calories, and macro counts.

Not knowing when the dawn with come I open every door.

Not knowing when the dawn will come I open every door.

books by her favorite “Golden Age” British mystery writers—Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, John Dickson Carr, and Agatha Christie—evil

Now our world is at the present time firmly in the grip of a mechanical monster, whose head - if you want to call it that - is the World Engineer's Complex. That monster is opposed to us and can keep all too good a tab on us through every purchase we make with our credit numbers, every time we use the public transportation or eat a meal or rent a place to live.

Onward, and up, and up again, until the impossible was achieved, all barriers were broken, all pains conquered, all abilities possessed. Until all was lightning and no darkness left.

When a man can't sleep, he won't let anybody else sleep either. If he doesn't go off to dreamland the moment his head hits the pillow, he gets frightfully annoyed and won't stay in bed.

I have taken all my good deeds and all my bad deeds, and cast them … in a heap before the Lord, and fled from both, and betaken myself to the Lord Jesus Christ, and in him I have sweet peace!

It’s all very well to have your eight suspects parading in their endless ring-around-the-rosebush outside the library. That’s fine. But give some sensible reason why they were there. If you must shower the room with bus tickets, provide a reason for that too. In other words, construct your story. Your present problem is not to explain the villainy of the guilty: it’s to explain the stupidity of the innocent.

I’m not an expert,” said Cletus. “I’m a scholar. There’s a difference. An expert’s a man who knows a great deal about his subject. A scholar’s someone who knows all there is that’s available to be known about it.

He felt singularly light-hearted, and the immediate cause was his safety razor. A week ago he had bought the thing in a sudden fit of enterprise, and now he shaved in five minutes, where before he had taken twenty, and no longer confronted his fellows, at least one day in three, with a countenance ludicrously mottled by sticking-plaster.

I shared the novice aviary with three other drakes - a moss green by name of SeaTorrent, a brown called Darkling, and a red with a love of food named Majentrix. All were young, perhaps half my size, and afraid of me. Understandably so.

Belief is unprovable, but it is a stepping-stone to truth. Faith is unshakable. It is neither belief nor truth but lights the way between them. Truth is undeniable. It is both the intention and the end of belief, and the reward of faith.

We didn’t have words. We didn’t have writing or maps or language, but we had music and in that music, we spoke victory and loss, sadness and rage. We sang fire and water, earth and sky. We wrote the history of the Battle of Lamos and told the story of Selisanae of the Sun and wove the tragedy of the lives and deaths of dragons in every land. It was marvellous.

At present, Dickson said, the American Church is suffering from “bully syndrome.” Too many Christians are swaggering around and picking on marginalized people and generally acting like jerks because they’re angry and apprehensive. “Every teacher will tell you, the bully on the playground is usually the most insecure boy. It’s a compensation mechanism. If the boy were truly confident, he wouldn’t need to throw his weight around,” Dickson said. “It’s the same with the Church. The bully Church is the insecure Church.

What does it mean a 'greener life'? Well, let's be brutal. It doesn't meaning meditating in a centrally heated room on a macrame mat in front of an Amerindian dreamcatcher and a homemade candle surrounded by ugly spider plants, then rushing off in a gas-guzzling 4-wheel drive to collect the children from school and feeding them on pre-prepared supermarket meals heated in the microwave. If you have a faith, living a greener life demands a certain amount of self-sacrifice. You don't save the planet with notions and lip service. Like every adventure it requires a degree of suffering and getting your hands dirty.

Of the first million men screened by draft boards in 1940, at least 130,000 were rejected for severe disabilities relating to malnutrition.

the Army saw slang as a morale builder no matter how cynical it became.

They are called Stick People because they build their world of sticks.

Sir Brian told him in fulsome scatological terms what he could do with his lineage.

It was limitless, so beautiful and pure and free. I reached out and felt a soft, invisible give, as if the light itself was a malleable force. Ethereal putty.

Their solemn eyes told more stories than I had years to hear.

Over time, the illusion has begun to wear off, and the illusion of a feast most illustrious has now given way to the depressing banality of the inedible tripe beneath.

the trick with modern warfare was not to outgun the enemy, but carry weapons he could not gimmick.

They were secret, dark wishes, the kind of thing a person only pulls out when they’re too busy not appreciating how lucky they are.

During roll call, he asked Carlos his name, Carlos replied, “Fred.

If I forgot something he said, there was no point worrying: we’d repeat the same conversation again in a few minutes.

What? That’s a sissy way for a man to pee, but I’ll give you a break. Go Ken, go Ken, you can do it, yes you can,” Dr. Bonjani chanted, clapping in time.

For sooner or later, no matter what fantastic long-range weapons you mounted, the ground itself had to be taken —and for that there had never been anything but the man in the ranks.

I don’t care what bad songwriters do. I don’t care what lazy songwriters do. Just don’t try to do it with me. Even if I’m not going to be that great I’m damned sure going to try to be.

Mpelelezi wa Tume ya Dunia kutoka Israeli Daniel Yehuda Ben-Asher Ebenezer, Mhebrania aliyeishi Givat Ram, Jerusalem, na mke wake mrembo Hadara na mtoto wake mzuri Navah Ebenezer, alikuwa Ukanda wa Gaza siku alipopigiwa simu na Kiongozi wa Kanda ya Asia-Australia ya Tume ya Dunia U Nanda – kutoka Copenhagen kuhusiana na wito wa haraka wa kuonana na Rais wa Tume ya Dunia. Yehuda aliondoka usiku kwenda Yangon, Myama, ambapo alionana na U Nanda na kupewa maelekezo yote ya kikazi aliyotakiwa kuyafuata. Mbali na maelekezo yote ya kikazi aliyotakiwa kuyafuata, Nanda alimkabidhi Yehuda kachero wa Kolonia Santita Mandi Dickson Santana (bila kujua kama Mandi ni kachero wa Kolonia Santita) ili amsindikize mpaka stendi ya mabasi ya Maubin, nje ya Yangon. Baada ya hapo Yehuda alisafiri mpaka Copenhagen ambapo yeye na wenzake walikabidhiwa Operation Devil Cross, ya kung’oa mizizi ya Kolonia Santita duniani kote. Yehuda alifanya kosa kubwa kuonana na kachero wa Kolonia Santita Mandi Santana! Kwa sababu hiyo, sauti na picha ya Yehuda vilichukuliwa, watu wengi walikufa katika miji ya Copenhagen na Mexico City.

They are fools that think that wealth or women or strong drink or even drugs can buy the most in effort out of the soul of a man. These things offer pale pleasures compared to that which is greatest of them all, that task which demands from him more than his utmost strength, that absorbs him, bone and sinew and brain and hope and fear and dreams -- and still calls for more.

Most of these people had lived here their whole lives. Others had lived in the Cradle, being starved and tortured day after day. All had suffered, and they craved hope just as they craved any other nourishment.

He was too damn old to run now, too tired of that romantic idea of freedom that infected the heads of the young and later killed most of them with crushing disappointment. The Cassinis had always made sure he was just comfortable enough to want to sit tight and not risk the generosities they’d afforded him, and the older he got, the more comfortable he became. Comfort had a way of killing the romance in just about everybody.

But I’m not an expert,” said Cletus. “I’m a scholar. There’s a difference. An expert’s a man who knows a great deal about his subject. A scholar’s someone who knows all there is that’s available to be known about it.

It's all about self-preservation now, dying doesn't scare me, it's whatever he has planned for me before it comes to the end that does. After all, it takes more courage to suffer than to die. And I'm not about to give in easily.

When there are a hundred dragons in the sky, it is Hell Down and Hallow Fire. It is the winds of a hurricane and the roar of the storm. We blot out the sun, we blacken the clouds, we churn the sea like foam. It is a magnificent, terrifying sight.

Trouble rather the tiger in his lair than the sage amongst his books. For to you Kingdoms and their armies are things mighty and enduring, but to him they are but toys of the moment, to be overturned by the flicking of a finger … LESSONS: Anonymous

Living in filth was regarded by great numbers of holy men, who set an example to the Church and to society, as an evidence of sanctity. St. Jerome and the Breviary of the Roman Church dwell with unction on the fact that St. Hilarion lived his whole life long in utter physical uncleanliness; St. Athanasius glorifies St. Anthony because he had never washed his feet; St. Abraham's most striking evidence of holiness was that for fifty years he washed neither his hands nor his feet; St. Sylvia never washed any part of her body save her fingers; St. Euphraxia belonged to a convent in which the nuns religiously abstained from bathing. St. Mary of Egypt was emninent for filthiness; St. Simon Stylites was in this respect unspeakable - the least that can be said is, that he lived in ordure and stench intolerable to his visitors.

while I may not be able to trace the Artist’s hand at all times, I can always trust his motives. The God who is in control of all things, who acts behind the scenes in all things, is also the God who willingly suffers. He is the one I can shout at, cry with and find comfort in.

Already I could feel my mind detaching, going to a place to protect itself from the warhead that was about to go off in my heart. It wasn’t at all unlike how I dealt with Linny’s death, only this was worse. I was trying to escape the pain, then. This time, I was also outrunning madness.

What we would think of as a beef animal had the double purpose of being a working or draught animal that could pull heavy loads. There is an old adage, "A year to grow, two years to plough and a year to fatten." The beef medieval people would have eaten would have been a maturer, denser meat than we are used to today. I have always longed to try it. The muscle acquired from a working ox would have broken down over the fattening year and provided wonderful fat covering and marbling. Given the amount of brewing that took place, the odds are that the animals would have been fed a little drained mash from time to time. Kobe beef, that excessively expensive Japanese beef, was originally obtained from ex-plough animals whose muscles were broken down by mash from sake production and by massage. I'd like to think our beef might have had a not dissimilar flavour.

Her stare was cold, inscrutable, as if she were weighing him in the white, hot fire of her eyes. He allowed himself to be weighed in that scale for it seemed the only means by which she had to judge the world around her. So beautiful a measure, he noted, but the scales so dreadfully unbalanced.

there was more to modern mining than logic. The best engineers had feel. It was a sensitivity born of experience, of talent, and even of something like love, with which they commanded, not only the mountains, but the machine they rode and directed. Now this too was added to the list of man’s endeavors for which some special talent was needed.

...both Tom and I adore detective stories. Isn't that so, Tom?" [Lady Brace] "Right!" agreed her husband...."But they've got to be proper detective stories. They've got to present a tricky, highly sophisticated problem, which you're given fair opportunity to solve." "And," amplified Virginia, "no saying they're psychological studies when the author can't write for beans." "Correct!" her husband agreed again. "Couldn't care less when you're supposed to get all excited as to whether the innocent man will be hanged or the innocent heroine will be seduced. Heroine ought to be seduced; what's she there for? The thing is the mystery. It's not worth reading if the mystery is simple or easy or no mystery at all.

If you stood motionless in the stream of time, listening to crying voices out of the past, you might presently believe that your feelings or your neighbour's were of puny significance because they had been experienced so often before and would be experienced again when you had gone. Whereas they did matter; they were the only reality; there was no shame in feeling the hurt.

The True-Blue American" Jeremiah Dickson was a true-blue American, For he was a little boy who understood America, for he felt that he must Think about everything; because that’s all there is to think about, Knowing immediately the intimacy of truth and comedy, Knowing intuitively how a sense of humor was a necessity For one and for all who live in America. Thus, natively, and Naturally when on an April Sunday in an ice cream parlor Jeremiah Was requested to choose between a chocolate sundae and a banana split He answered unhesitatingly, having no need to think of it Being a true-blue American, determined to continue as he began: Rejecting the either-or of Kierkegaard, and many another European; Refusing to accept alternatives, refusing to believe the choice of between; Rejecting selection; denying dilemma; electing absolute affirmation: knowing in his breast The infinite and the gold Of the endless frontier, the deathless West. “Both: I will have them both!” declared this true-blue American In Cambridge, Massachusetts, on an April Sunday, instructed By the great department stores, by the Five-and-Ten, Taught by Christmas, by the circus, by the vulgarity and grandeur of Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon, Tutored by the grandeur, vulgarity, and infinite appetite gratified and Shining in the darkness, of the light On Saturdays at the double bills of the moon pictures, The consummation of the advertisements of the imagination of the light Which is as it was—the infinite belief in infinite hope—of Columbus, Barnum, Edison, and Jeremiah Dickson.

But you keep fighting!” “Of course!” said Child. “I am of God, whatever or whoever else is not. I must testify to Him by placing my body against the enemy while that body lasts; and by protecting those that my small strength may protect, until my personal end. What is it to me that all the peoples of all the worlds choose to march toward the nether pit? What they do in their sins is no concern of mine. Mine only is concern for God, and the way of God’s people of whom I am one. In the end, all those who march pitward will be forgotten; but I and those like me who have lived their faith will be remembered by the Lord—other than that I want nothing and I need nothing.” Godlun dropped his face into his hands and sat for a moment. When he took his hands away again and raised his head, Hal saw that the skin of his face was drawn and he looked very old. “It’s all right for you,” he whispered. “It is fleshly loves that concern thee,” said Child, nearly as softly. “I know, for I remember how it was in the little time I had with my wife; and I remember the children unborn that she and I dreamed of together. It is thy children thou wouldst protect in these dark days to come; and it was thy hope that I could give you reason to think thou couldst do so. But I have no such hope to give. All that thou lovest will perish. The Others will make a foul garden of the worlds of humankind and there will be none to stop them. Turn thee to God, my brother, for nowhere else shalt thou find comfort.

A look passed between Genevieve, Kaya, and I, a silent knowledge relating back to the warning Anansi had given us that Paine was growing corn here, recalling a vision I had not long ago about acres and acres of the stuff stretching on for miles beneath a moonlit sky, about so many lessons gleaned in the Divine Rite Academy as children regarding the “Devil’s Grain” and how to spot it and its many forms by sight and smell, so that we would always avoid it if it should ever reappear on this earth. That yellow sweet temptress. Its siren song was near impossible to avoid, even though I’d never once tasted it. But somehow I knew exactly how it would taste, how its rough grit would crunch between my teeth like grains of sand, as if it had been imprinted into my genes from so many ancestors going back thousands of years who were gluttons for those kernels of gold. We could drive it to extinction or turn it into a monster that would drive us to extinction, but it would always be a part of us, waiting for resurrection. I could tell by the way the women gazed at the platter of golden medallions that they were having a similar fight in their minds. Just one bite. One little taste. It wouldn’t be so bad. And then we could move on.