Leafy Quotes

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The newest book quotes in the Leafy Quotes collection — passages readers have just added, each with its author, book and the page it came from.

  1. "The thing to do with embarrassment," he told the young American couple who seemed determined to engage him, "is work it all the way to humiliation."

    p. 116

  2. At this stage of my own evolution, I was ready to curse men of small capacity for being the dwarfs their God had made them. In the process of my education I had lost all consciousness of the nature world about me. Thus, when a hidden rage took me to the small white-walled prison which I then called my room, I unknowingly turned away from my one salvation. Alone in my room, I sat like the petrified Indian woman of whom my mother used to tell me. I wished my heart's burdens would turn me to unfeeling stone. But alive, in my tomb, I was destitute! For the white man's papers I had given up my faith in the Great Spirit. For these same papers I had forgotten the healing in trees and brooks. On account of my mother's simple view of life, and my lack of any, I gave her up, also. I made no friends among the race of people I loathed. Like a slender tree, I had been uprooted from my mother, nature, and God. I was shorn of my branches, which had waved in sympathy and love for home and friends. The natural coat of bark which had protected my oversenstive nature was scraped off to the very quick.

  3. With the thought came the recollection of a poem he had once heard read, about a mouse so frightened it went to the cat for love.

    p. 139

  4. "We're at a very primitive stage of mankind," Nolan declared, "that's what people don't understand. Just pick up the Times on any given day and you've got a catalogue of ape behaviour. Strip away the slogans and excuses and verbiage, the so-called ideology, and you're reading about what one pack of chimpanzees did to another."

    p. 26

  5. "We have a proverb, sir, in my grandfather's country. In his island. I'm positive they have the same proverb in China. It goes 'To trust is good. Not to trust is better.' "

    p. 172

  6. "What I wonder," Bob Cole said in his strange tremulous voice, "is whether the people down here have to live this way so that we can live the way we do. We have to believe it's no, don't we? We couldn't face up to it otherwise. Because if most of the world lives in this kind of poverty so that we can have our goodies and our extra protein ration - what does that make us?"

    p. 158

  7. In all the working systems, she thought, the weakness was always yourself - that spot of gristle in the gears. It applied on every level - even the act of getting through a day could be performed with gusto and dispatch if you kept out of your own way. Justin believed that she knew as much as anyone about self-struggle.

    p. 264

  8. With the strong, happy sense that both great and small are so surely enfolded in His magnitude that, without a miss, each has his allotted individual ground of opportunities, I am buoyant with good nature.

  9. I would not forget that the pale-faced missionary and the hoodooed aborigine are both God's creatures, though small indeed their own conceptions of Infinite Love. A wee child toddling in a wonder world, I prefer to their dogma my excursions into the natural gardens where the voice of the Great Spirit is heard in the twittering of birds, the rippling of mighty waters, and the sweet breathing of flowers. Here, in a fleeting quiet, I am awakened by the fluttering robe of the Great Spirit. To my innermost consciousness the phenomenal universe is a royal' mantle, vibrating with His divine breath. Caught in its flowing fringes are the spangles and oscillating brilliants of sun, moon, and stars.

  10. It's what you want, he told himself. Don't obsess over it. Do it.

    p. 140

  11. They will turn my passion into something gross and wrong... It is only love, Helenonly that.

  12. These were my mother's pride,-my wild freedom and overflowing spirits. She taught me no fear save that of intruding myself upon others. ("Impressions of an Indian Childhood," chapter 1)