Quotes About Essence

What men call the shadow of the body is not the shadow of the body, but is the body of the soul.

The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I'll certainly try to forget the fact.

It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. (Algernon in The Importance of Being Ernest)

Me preguntas por qué compro arroz y flores? Compro arroz para vivir y flores para tener algo por lo que vivir.

If an urn lacks the characteristics of an urn, how can we call it an urn?

I want you to be everything that's you, deep at the center of your being.

I want you to be everything that's you, deep at the center of your being." "Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated

Wrong, and wrong agains,' he said. 'The likeness is already there. The metaphor only sees it. And it is not a mere figure of speech. It is the very essence of our minds as we seek to make sense of our surroundings, our experiences, ourselves, seeing similarities, parallels, connections. We cannot help it. Even as the mind fails, it goes on trying to make sense of what is happening to it.

Some people were born to the shape they would occupy all their lives. (Wait)

Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place.

The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing

The wolf is made he way the world is made. You cannot touch the world. You cannot hold it in your hand for it is made of breath only.

Where did the love come from? What was it made of?

Which skin shall I give you, Clara Ferber? Do you want fur? Do you want stone?

Yet surely she was as culpable as he was; recalling her casual speculation about when Jasper's wife's grandmother might die and thereby free Jasper and Susan to divorce, Liz wondered if a stronger sign of a relationship's essential corruptness could exist than for its official realization to hinge on the demise of another human being.

It all depended on what their grandmother was really like, inside herself where she was who she really was. Not outside. Dicey knew about the difference between outside and inside.

Man is a column of blood, with a voice in it, he said. And when the voice is still, and he is only a column of blood, he is better.

Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes it water, and nobody knows what it is." —D. H. Lawrence, Pansies

Yes there were two great groups of dogs wrangling for the bitching-goddess: the group of the flatterers, those who offered her amusement, stories, films, plays: and the other, much less showy, much more savage breed, those who gave her meat, the real substance of money. The well-groomed showy dogs of amusement wrangled and snarled among themselves for the favors of the bitch-goddess. But it was nothing to the silent fight-to-the-death that went on among the indispensables, the bone-bringers.

You wheedle the soul out of things, he said.

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!

There is only one tree, there is only one fruit, in your mouth.

The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer...

The words of my book are nothing, the drift of it everything.