Famous quotes containing the words sole, official and/or language:
“Theres only one way for an individual to remain upright, not to fall to pieces, not to sink into the mire of self-oblivion ... or self-contempt. Thats calmly to turn away from everything, to say, Enough! and, folding ones useless arms across ones empty breast, to retain the ultimate, the sole attainable virtue, the virtue of recognizing ones own insignificance.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (18181883)
“We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the periods official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was mans fate.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)
“Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)