Quotes About Sacrifice

As Saint Paul says, marry or burn.

after the man had left, the mothers who had sold their children felt empty and sad. They felt as if this act, done freely by themselves (no one had forced them, no one had threatened them) had not been performed willingly. They felt cheated as well, as if the price had been too low. Why hadn't they demanded more?

Perfection exacts a price, but it's the imperfect who pay it.

Her speeches were about the sanctity of the home, about how women should stay home. Serena Joy didn't do this herself, she made speeches instead, but she presented this failure of hers as a sacrifice she was making for the good of all.

Of course there are mothers, squeezing their breasts dry, pawning their bodies, shedding teeth for their children, or that's our fond belief. But remember - Hansel and Gretel were dumped in the forest because their parents were starving.

I was to be Martha, keeping busy with household chores in the background; she was to be Mary, laying pure devotion at Alex's feet. (Which does a man prefer? Bacon and eggs, or worship? Sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending how hungry he is.)

I want to keep on living, in any form. I resign my body freely, to the uses of others. They

She is dying because she said. She is dying for the sake of the word. It is her body, silent and fingerless, writing this poem.

No romance, he says. Okay? That would have meant something else, once. Once it would have meant: no strings. Now it means: no heroics. It means: don't risk yourself for me, if it should come to that.

What virtue was once attached to this notion – of going beyond your strength, of not sparing yourself, of ruining your health! Nobody is born with that kind of selflessness: it can be acquired only by the most relentless discipline, a crushing-out of natural inclination, and by my time the knack or secret of it must have been lost. Or perhaps I didn't try, having suffered from the effects it had on my mother.

Rezábamos por la vacuidad, para hacernos dignas de ser llenadas: de gracia, de amor, de abnegación, de semen y de niños. Oh, Dios, Rey del universo, gracias por no haberme hecho hombre. Oh, Dios, destrúyeme. Házme fértil. Mortifica mi carne para que pueda multiplicarme. Permite que me realice…

How long will you demand I love you?

Perfection exacts a price, but it's the imperfect who pay it.

Art was a kind of demonic possession. Art would dance you to death. It would move in and take you over, and then destroy you.

What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all of those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave to the paper-mines for all time.

For the ones who come after you, it will be easier. They will accept their duties with willing hearts. She did not say: Because they will have no memories, of any other way. She said: Because they won't want things they can't have.

What well-to-do and once-young, once-beautiful woman or man, cranked up on hormonal supplements and shot full of vitamins but hampered by the unforgiving mirror, wouldn't sell their house, their gated retirement villa, their kids, and their soul to get a second kick at the sexual can?

And when I go that way, grow fur, start howling, scratch at your airwaves: no matter who I claim I am or how I love you, turn the key. Bar the window.

Many believed what they were told: that the welfare of the entire kingdom depended on their selflessness.

She wished him to owe his recovery to her alone – to her care, to her tireless devotion. That is the other side of selflessness: its tyranny.

Free love," Aunt Beatrice said scornfully. "It's never free. There's always a price.

We must all make sacrifices in order to help other people," she said in a soothing tone. "Men must make sacrifices in war, and women must make sacrifices in other ways. That is how things are divided.

Some of the best things are done by those with nowhere to turn, by those who don't have time, by those who truly understand the word helpless. They dispense with the calculation of risk and profit, they take no thought for the future, they're forced at spearpoint into the present tense. Thrown over a precipice, you fall or else you fly; you clutch at any hope, however unlikely; however - if I may use such an overworked word - miraculous. What we mean by that is, Against all odds.

T]he mothers who had sold their children felt empty and sad. They felt as if this act, done freely by themselves (no one had forced them, no one had threatened them) had not been performed willingly. They felt cheated as well, as if the price had been too low. Why hadn't they demanded more? And yet, the mothers told themselves, they'd had no choice.