A Quote by James Lee Burke

It has been my experience that most human stories are circular rather than linear. Regardless of the path we choose, we somehow end up where we commenced - in part, I suspect, because the child who lives in us goes along for the ride.

James Lee Burke

Quote Topics

Along Along For The Ride Because Been Child Choose Circular End Experience Goes Human Linear Lives Most Part Path Rather Regardless Ride Somehow Stories Suspect Than Up Us

Quote Author

James Lee Burke
American - Author

We know that the end of any conflict is always messy. It's never a linear path when you've been at war for almost 20 years. It's never a clean, straight linear path to the end.

Morgan Ortagus

Stories hold power because they convey the illusion that life has purpose and direction. Where God is absent from the lives of all but the most blessed, the writer, of all people, replaces that ordering principle. Stories make sense when so much around us is senseless, and perhaps what makes them most comforting is that, while life goes on and pain goes on, stories do us the favor of ending.

John Hodgman

The world is like a ride in an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it's very brightly coloured and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question: "Is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, "Hey, don't worry, don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride." And we kill those people.

Bill Hicks

Most of us sleepwalk through our lives. We take all its glories, its wine, food, love, and friendship, its sunsets and its stars, its poetry and fireplaces and laughter, for granted. We forget that experience is not, or should not be, a casual encounter, but rather an embrace. Consequently, for too many of us, when we come to the end, we wonder where the years have gone. And we suspect we have not lived.

Jack McDevitt

Teachers who have plugged away at their jobs for twenty, thirty, and forty years are heroes. I suspect they know in their hearts they've done a good thing, too, and are more satisfied with themselves than most people are. Most of us end up with no more than five or six people who remember us. Teachers have thousands of people who remember them for the rest of their lives.

Andy Rooney

I think continuity is the devil. I think it's constricting and restrictive, I think it's alienating and off-putting, and it inflicts an artifact of linear time as we experience it on something that exists outside of linear time as well as keeps new readership away by keeping comics a matter of trivia and history rather than actual stories.

Matt Fraction

We want to make sure the stories that show up in Path are both good stories and are a big part of people's lives.

Dave Morin

...mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism...they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters.

Alan Watts

There are few of us but who have been touched somehow by death. Some may not have been touched closely by it nor yet have kept vigil with it, but somewhere along our lives, most of us are sorely bereft of someone near and deeply cherished - and all of us will some day meet it face to face.

Richard L. Evans

I've never been convinced that experience is linear, circular, or even random. It just is. I try to put it in some kind of order to extract meaning from it, to bring meaning to it.

Toni Cade Bambara

I know our policies work best to lift young men and women up - regardless of their background - so that they can choose their own path and live lives of dignity, purpose, and meaning.

Carly Fiorina

The political spectrum is not linear but circular. In my experience the extreme left always ends up rubbing shoulders with the extreme right. They are philosophically blood brothers.

Jimmy Reid

In some ways, Valiant Gentlemen grows out of Tales of the New World, my collection of short stories about explorers who lived "great" lives, but whose experience of it was in the same register as all our lives are - we feel the same extent of human emotion regardless of how exceptional our actions are: nothing is more exceptional than one's own life.

Sabina Murray

We read to find out what the world is like, to experience lots of lives, not just the one we live. If it is true that our lives are chaotic and we crave a shape, stories are the shapes that we put on experience, containing all the wisdom in the world. We can even choose what kind of wisdom suits us.

Ramona Koval

I find that it is important to work slowly. Anyone who looks at such a canvas will follow the same path the artist took, and he will experience that it is the path which counts more than the outcome of it, and that the route taken has been the most interesting part.

Georges Braque

For many years now I have listened to the stories of people with cancer and other life-threatening illnesses as their counselor. From them I have learned how to enjoy the minute particulars of life once again, the grace of a hot cup of coffee, the presence of a friend, the blessing of having a new cake of soap or an hour without pain. Such humble experience is the stuff that many of the very best stories are made of. If we think we have no stories it is because we have not paid enough attention to our lives. Most of us live lives that are far richer and more meaningful than we appreciate.

Rachel Naomi Remen

A Quote by James Lee Burke

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors