Yquotes.com

 

She was devastatingly cruel about our home town and told an elaborate, embossed tale about how she made good her escape. She referred to it as 'The Planet Brisbane' and ridiculed its unpleasant combination of smug self-satisfaction and provincial defensiveness.
--
Page 46.

 

Susan Johnson (Australian)

» Susan Johnson (Australian) - all quotes »

Similar quotes

 

With respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essentially provincial still, not metropolitan, — mere Jonathans. We are provincial, because we do not find at home our standards, — because we do not worship truth, but the reflection of truth, — because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufactures and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end.

 

Henry David Thoreau

 

The flying Rumours gather'd as they roll'd,
Scarce any Tale was sooner heard than told;
And all who told it, added something new,
And all who heard it, made Enlargements too,
In ev'ry Ear it spread, on ev'ry Tongue it grew.

 

Alexander Pope

 

I pick myself up off the ground to have you knock me back down
Again and again and when I ask you to explain
You say, you've got to be...
Cruel to be kind in the right measure
Cruel to be kind it's a very good sign
Cruel to be kind means that I love you
Baby, you got to be cruel, you got to be cruel to be kind.

 

Nick Lowe

 

If this was the plan - was it made by someone who likes us? And if so, why have 99.9% of all the other species that have ever been created already died out? And part of what plan was that?; If it is a plan or a design, the planner must be either very capricious - really toying with his creation; and/or very clumsy, very tinkering and fantastically wasteful - throw away 99.9% of what you've made; or very cruel and very callous; or just perhaps very indifferent; or some combination of all the above. And so it's no good saying that He moves in mysterious ways, or that He has purposes that are opaque to us, because even that kind of evasion has to make itself predicate on the assumption that the person saying this knows more than I do about the supernatural, and I haven't yet met anyone who does have a private line to the creator, of the sort that would be required even to speculate about it. In other words, I haven't met anyone, in holy orders or out of it, who isn't also a primate. And neither have you.

 

Christopher Hitchens

 

A final word. Drowning by Numbers is a story of three women who murder their husbands -- one in a bath, one in the sea and one in a swimming pool. It is a black and ironic fairy-tale for adults, half invented by children who are innocently obsessed with sex and death -- especially death. It is a poetic, amoral tale told morally to support the belief that the good are seldom rewarded, the bad go largely unpunished and the innocent are always abused.

 

Peter Greenaway