ideal Quotes

“But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.”

“Ending patriarchal domination of children, by men or women, is the only way to make the family a place where children can be safe, where they can be free, where they can know love.”

“I...have a woman in my arms who has suffered greatly and desperately needs to believe once again that she is beautiful.”

“Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.”

“As we look over the list of the early leaders of the republic, Washington, John Adams, Hamilton, and others, we discern that they were all men who insisted upon being themselves and who refused to truckle to the people.”

“While we often moved to different cadences, our nation was alive with ideals. We were in motion. Violence was everywhere but so was a conviction that we must somehow make this a better world.”

“Immature love says: “I love you because I need you.” Mature love says: “I need you because I love you.”

“The boy looks at me. I would’ve expected his bright eyes to look dimmer in the night, but instead they seem to reflect the light coming from the windows above us. He’s amused. “Who said anything about you , sweetheart?”

″ ‘You left because you are against our cause as freedom fighters. Right?’ (...) What cause? I thought. I used the only freedom that I had then, my thought. ”

“I’ve got the directions all memorized from a little map Monsanto’s mailed me but in my imagination dreaming about this big retreat back home there’d been something larkish, bucolic, all homely woods and gladness instead of all this aerial roaring mystery in the dark.”

“My definition of love is being robbed in an alley eight times in a row and hoping that there’s something about today that makes all of this different.”

“When you first fall in love, you think you love the person, but you don’t really. You can’t know the person right away. That takes years. You actually love the idea of the person – and that is always, at first, one-dimensional and somewhat mistaken.”

“It was a once in a lifetime thing. ...

“I don’t want to say it, I truly don’t, but if you’ve gone this far I suppose it’s obvious that what was ignited when I loved you continues to burn. But that’s of small importance to you now, and that’s how it should be. Everything is in its place.”

“All I wanted was what I’d already had.”

“If endless love was a dream, then it was a dream we all shared, even more than we all shared the dream of never dying or of traveling through time, and if anything set me apart it was not my impulses but my stubbornness, my willingness to take the dream past what had been agreed upon as the reasonable limits, to declare that this dream was not a feverish trick of the mind but was an actuality at least as real as that other, thinner, more unhappy illusion we call normal life.”

“We who bore the mark, felt no anxiety about the shape the future was to take. All of these faiths and teachings seemed to us already dead and useless. The only duty and destiny we acknowledged was that each one of us should become so completely himself, so utterly faithful to the active seed which nature planted within him, that in living out its growth he could be surprised by nothing unknown to come.”

“The idea of living there, of not having to go back ever again to asphalt and shopping malls and modular furniture; of living there with Charles and Camilla and Henry and Francis and maybe even Bunny; of no one marrying or going home or getting a job in a town a thousand miles away or doing any of the traitorous things friends do after college; of everything remaining exactly as it was, that instant – the idea was so truly heavenly that I’m not sure I thought, even then, it could ever really happen, but I like to believe I did.”

“Lofty words of love and grand gestures can be suspicious: Why are you trying so hard to please? The details of a seduction? the subtle gestures, the offhand things you do? are often more charming and revealing.”

“I wanted to be able to tell you the exact moment I fell in love with you. But I can’t do that.” “You can’t?” A pin could have dropped in the grass and it would have been heard in that moment as everyone grew perfectly silent to listen for his reply.”

“Bridget’s room is too quiet, and she is tired of it. She wants a brother or a sister, a small, thin one that will fit in her doll’s bed. Or also a big brother who plays loud and noisy music. ”

“The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.”