J. Graham Quotes

I see no priestly garments on you. There is no ephod on your belt. You presume to speak for Yahweh? You speak his name aloud so lightly?

You must promise me. You can't desire the end without desiring the means.'Ah, but one can, he thought, one can: one can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns.

Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.

You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God.

Freedom, I thought, comes only to the successful

Scott himself had taught me that in the boundless sphere of the intellect there is no prudishness, no shockability. There is only evaluation of facts, and a morality founded on truth.

He [F. Scott Fitzgerald] had learned to theorize, to think, although he was always less interested in the dissection of his reading than in the enjoyment he received. (About F. Scott Fitzgerald)

The educational process must again provide the opportunity for students to make choices and live with the consequences of these choices. Teaching is not simply telling people what to believe and do.

the process through which any concept or subject (content) is taught becomes a part of the content. (p19)

School curriculum, learning activities--all educational pursuits--should be characterized by and should lead to a sense and experience of wholeness. (p25)

There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped' growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.

He was as incapable of imagining pain or danger to himself as he was incapable of conceiving the pain he caused others.

Today, I would pick the person who made me feel warm, rather than the one who left me cold.

Each man follows his own path - his own destiny, if you will. And only he is responsible for the choice.

Along our chosen paths, we all meet up with demons. We must meet them, and battle them, even when they are nothing but mist in the night.

… real life hardly ever unfolds the way we’d like it to, not like in a story.

Because who wants to Fast Forward anyway? You might miss some of the good parts.

There is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.

Instead of heading for a big mental breakdown, I decided to have a small breakdown every Tuesday evening.

There's nothing so heavy as books, sir--unless it's bricks.

I doubt if ever one ceases to love, but one can cease to be in love as easily as one can outgrow an author one admired as a boy.

Somewhere there must be women reading books, and talking of chicken rissoles to their cooks …(from, ‘Somewhere in England’)

And books, she knew by then, were one of the necessities, the rocks of her life.

Whats past is proloque, merely a way to a settled soul

But fear and fascination are yokefellows, oxen out of step but pulling in the same direction...

Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.

So much of war is sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left it doesn't seem worth even starting a train of thought.

They killed him because he was too innocent to live.

Neither of us mentioned him when we woke on the morning after his death...One is not jealous of the dead, and it seemed easy to me that morning to take up our old life together.

Innocence always calls mutely or protection when we would be so much wise to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

Suddenly watching her feet, so light and precise and mistress of his shuffle, I was in love again.

One always spoke of her like that in the third person as though she were not there. Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace.

Whew, ' he said, 'I'm glad that's over, Thomas. I've been feeling awfully bad about it.' It was only too evident that he no longer did.

The only good thing about that decision, Gatt, is that I'll get tea before you.

People who write about politics, whether on the left or the right, have a consistent bias: they take politics seriously.

You are good enough to make whatever you want to achieve possible. You just need to find your talent and passion, then put a heck a lot of work into it.

And though, indeed, it only happened once, it’s gone on happening, the way unique and momentous things do, for ever and ever, as long as there’s a memory for them to happen in …

The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.

There's something about physical labour that helps to chase away any lingering internal demons.

Nobody will achieve anything just by dreaming.

A mistake is simply another way of doing things.

... and for the first time he realized the pain inevitable in any human relationship - pain suffered and pain inflicted. How foolish we were to be afraid of loneliness.

Ill usage makes the sweetest of us vicious.

Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.

Married people grow like each other.

I also need to honor myself for working so hard, and that means treating the money I earn with respect.

Actually, Jake said, isn't life what we make it, wherever we are, whenever we may be - wherever it is that we are?

A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced

He began to realize what the criminal class knows so well, the impossibility of explaining anything to a man with power.

It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.