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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #tory
A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders. ↗
Creatures of the Darkness BY VICKI JORDAN It was world of vampires and demons, where innocence was rare and so were the living. It was a world of darkness, where light had been outlawed and nightfall had swallowed us whole. An epic war had been fought, and the creatures of the dark had finally prevailed over the promoters of the light. Finally, for the first time in existence, the people of the shadows could come out and freely walk among one another in the rays of the dying sun, which had once been used to shun them away. A little girl, a child of the light, had survived the battle and crawled out from under the ashes of the destruction. She looked around at her altered world in dismay and confronted a vampire about the changes, of which she did not approve. “Why did you turn my world into a world of night, and make wrong into a new form of right? How could you make all the light disappear, and with it everyone I once loved so dear? Why are the shadows now the new sun, and why is everything lost what you have won?” The vampire looked down at the little girl with amusement and delight. “Because, little girl, this is the real world you see, where there’s no light to shine on false identities. We didn’t destroy the world just to scare; we simply uncovered what was already there. What has come out was all the darkness that was once hidden within, and you’ll soon meet the darkness in you once my fangs pierce your skin.” We are our own greatest fears….. ↗
Though we became experimental creatures of our own devising, it’s important to bear in mind that we had no inkling of this process, let alone its consequences, until only the last six or seven of our 100,000 generations. We have done it all sleepwalking. Nature let a few apes into the lab of evolution, switched on the lights, and left us there to mess about with an ever-growing supply of ingredients and processes. The effect on us and the world has accumulated ever since. Let’s list a few steps between the earliest times and this: sharp stones, animal skins, useful bits of bone and wood, wild fire, tame fire, seeds for eating, seeds for planting, houses, villages, pottery, cities, metals, wheels, explosives. What strikes one most forcefully is the acceleration, the runaway progression of change - or to put it another way, the collapsing of time. From the first chipped stone to the first smelted iron took nearly 3 million years; from the first iron to the hydrogen bomb took only 3,000. ↗
There is history the way Tolstoy imagined it, as a great, slow-moving weather system in which even tsars and generals are just leaves before the storm. And there is history the way Hollywood imagines it, as a single story line in which the right move by the tsar or the wrong move by the general changes everything. Most of us, deep down, are probably Hollywood people. We like to invent “what if” scenarios--what if x had never happened, what if y had happened instead?--because we like to believe that individual decisions make a difference: that, if not for x, or if only there had been y, history might have plunged forever down a completely different path. Since we are agents, we have an interest in the efficacy of agency. ↗
A Quote from Monty's journal in God Must Be Weeping, "I, too, wished to climb the ladder of life and reach the stars spangling by the gates of the Milky Way, where the wondrous mysteries of Heaven unfurled. ↗
Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is? - our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?... Take away the bomb threat and what are we? Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn...There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times. Plague? Funny weather? Dire things are happening... Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy - probably a necessary lie - that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different? ↗
