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I tried to tell you, but words will not convey it. One has to be inside it to comprehend the magnitude. … It was the beginning. It's the only thing there is. But it was haphazard for so many aeons that it spooks me to think about it. There were always three or four maintaining it, but there was no one person strong enough to take it all over. "Somewhere there must be someone strong enough to take it all over," I said to myself in a direful moment, but the strongest person I could think of was myself. I've been doing it ever since. … By my attention I hold it all in being. Nothing exists unless it is perceived. If perception fails for a moment, then that thing fails forever. … I hate to be misjudged. They say that I bear it all on my shoulders, as though I were a stud or a balk. It's not on my great shoulders, it is amazing head on my great shoulders that maintains all.
--
Atlas, on bearing the burden of maintaining the worlds, in Ch. 4

 

R. A. Lafferty

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“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down on his shoulders—what would you tell him to do?” " To Shrug."

 

Ayn Rand

 

"You will have to know life," she declared, and her voice trembled with earnestness. She took hold of George Willard’s shoulders and turned him about so that she could look into his eyes. A passer-by might have thought them about to embrace. "If you are to become a writer you’ll have to stop fooling with words," she explained. "It would be better to give up the notion of writing until you are better prepared. Now it’s time to be living. I don’t want to frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of what you think of attempting. You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say."

 

Sherwood Anderson

 

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."

 

Kurt Vonnegut

 

...So I wasn't death to this guy, I was just a one-way ticket home. Now I don't know if you've ever stuck a .38 in somebody's navel, but if they look at you and say "Praise the Lord," I guarantee you one thing, it'll separate your head from your shoulders!

 

Mike Warnke

 

Guys I'm going to let you in on a secret. This is going to take a big weight off your shoulders, so I want you to may attention, cause here it comes... If you only have sex with your wife, you can't get caught. [Makes a gesture with his hands on his shoulders] You feel that, guys? Nobody gives a rat's ass. No guy is going to bust in the bedroom door, "White, you motherfu- Is that your wife you're screwing!" (Makes motions like he's having sex and turns and looks over his shoulder and says nothing just gives a look as if to say, "Smart ass!') Actually I may have exaggerated that stroke a little. (Makes motions again, but this time a lot faster.) Ferocious piece of ass. But easily winded.

 

Ron White