Quotes About Sacrifice

This is so American, man: either make something your god and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.

American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

Some persons can give themselves away to an ambitious pursuit and have that be all the giving-themselves-away-to-something they need to do. Though sometimes this changes as the players get older and the pursuit more stress-fraught. American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.

You believe you would die twice for another but in truth would die only for your alone self, its sentiment.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention ad awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad, petty, unsexy ways every day.

this was why mothers were so obsessively, consumingly, drivenly, and yet somehow narcissistically loving of you, their kid: the mothers are trying frantically to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember.

We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately—the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person.

Here is the truth - actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested. - David Foster Wallace, from The Pale King

I had to face: I had chosen. My choice, this was love. I had chosen I think the way out of the chains of the cage. I needed this woman. Without her to choose over myself, there was only pain and not choosing, rolling drunkenly and making fantasies of death.

We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose?

that Joelle even now lives hand-to-lung on a grossly generous trust willed her by a man she unveiled for but never slept with, the prodigious punter's father, infinite jester, director of a final opus so magnum he'd claimed to have had it locked away.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is really freedom. That is being taught how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race - the constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

Capii che gli ubriachi e gli storpi vengono trascinati fuori dall'arena come Cristi disossati, un uomo sotto ogni braccio, coi piedi che strisciano a terra, gli occhi al cielo.

mein kinder. Mein kinder, well it sort of means my family. He eyeballs me right square in the eye and says it's about how to reach down into parts of yourself you didn't know were there and get down in there and live inside these parts. And the only way to get to them: sacrifice. Suffer. Deny. What are you willing to give.

Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.

You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without .. thinking twice.

It's the sort of love whose measure is what it has cost, what one's given up for it. Whether there's choice involved is, at a certain point, of no interest... since it's the very surrender of choice and self that informs the love in the first place.

He had placed himself at her feet so long that the poor little woman had been accustomed to trample upon him. She didn't wish to marry him, but she wished to keep him. She wished to give him nothing, but that he should give her all. It is a bargain not unfrequently levied in love.

He went to the deuce for a woman. There must be good in a man who will do that.

Amelia stood scared and silent as William thus suddenly broke the chain by which she held him, and declared his independence and superiority. He had placed himself at her feet so long that the poor little woman had been accustomed to trample upon him. She didn't wish to marry him, but she wished to keep him. She wished to give him nothing, but that he should give her all. It is a bargain not unfrequently levied in love.

Jack or Donald marches away to glory with his knapsack on his shoulder, stepping out briskly to the tune of The Girl I left behind me. It is she who remains and suffers,-- and has the leisure to think, and brood and remember.

Her heart was dead long before her body. She had sold it to become

When women are brooding over their children, or busied in a sick-room, who has not seen in their faces those sweet angelic beams of love and pity?