Best 17 quotes of Andre Alexis on MyQuotes

As beings who cannot know the outcome of any particular action, it is difficult for us to act in a way that will be necessarily beneficial to another, or necessarily detrimental.

In our male-oriented God phase, it's always about conquering and control of life and death. This power leads to a kind of thinking that is no thinking; it is only sterile and what can overcome. To reach that depth in terms of female divinity is to accept nurture as godly. It's not just something that your mom does for you when something's broken and you need a bandage; it's about something deeper and it is in contradistinction from the endless displays of power.

Now I'm a Catholic agnostic by the way. Yet those myths still live within me.

The book it reminded me of most is Henry Miller’s The Books in My Life. Like Miller, Shields manages to convey his affection for and admiration of literature, and that, the enthusiasm and admiration, can revitalize the reader’s love for the art form. I’m grateful for How Literature Saved My Life because the book has made me think again – and for the first time in a while – 'Well, what is it we do when we read?' It’s a damned annoying question, but it needs to be asked now and then, and Shields has asked it in a way I find resonant and moving.

The important thing for me is that one accepts that one is irretrievably flawed and as you say, takes responsibility for those flaws, rather than hiding them in some code that allows "this" and doesn't allow "that" as if there were a way of being sure of how to be good in the world.

We are stuck with not knowing what our actions will actually lead to.

Also intriguing was all the bowing. The association of height and status did not, of course, faze him. If anything, it made the Japanese seem noble. But where were the ones who made themselves big? That was the question. With so many people bowing down, it seemed to Majnoun like a competition amongst the low to see who could be lowest. In which case, discretion was strength, a paradox that Majnoun found almost as compelling as the film's relative absence of dogs.

Benjy's greatest wish was for a place where the echelon was clear to all, where the powerful cared for the weak and the weak gave their respect without being coerced. He longed for balance, order, right and pleasure.

Death was in every fibre of these creatures. It was hidden in their languages and at the root of their civilizations. You could hear it in the sounds they made and see it in the way they moved. It darkened their pleasures and lightened their despair.

Having experienced what I did, it seemed to me that religion - its language, biblical advice, sacred ritual, and so on - was insignificant to the universe. I now felt that the universe is and that one is and that sermons, prayers, and vows were all an outdated way of pointing to the depths you could not reach.

He was a committed leader, capable of - or prone to - instinctive decisions. More: he could put aside thought in the service of forceful action. But in quiet moments his sensitivity sometimes led him to reconsider his own behaviour. In other words, Atticus had a conscience, and it was this that led him to what some would call faith.

It was not boring, said Majnoun, but it was strange. The people were always looking away to where you couldn't see. The whole time, I thought there was something coming. Then at the end, it was death that came.

Prince's words had not been meant as a warning. Rather, he had been playing. He had been pretending. He had been speaking for speaking's sake. Could there be a more despicable use for words?

... she refused to allow anyone - even Miguel - to refer to Majnoun as 'her' dog. - I'm as much his as he's mine, she'd insist. Her friends - and her husband - thought this an annoying eccentricity. Majnoun knew what she meant - that she was not his master - and he was grateful. But in his heart he felt as if he did belong to her, in the sense that he was a part of Nira and she a part of him.

The city had been built by people from innumerable elsewheres. It was a chaos of cultures ordered only by its long streets. It belonged to no one and never would, or maybe it was a million cities in one, unique to each of its inhabitants, belonging to whoever walked its streets.

The group of people in front of her was jovial and paid her no attention. The group behind was much the same. She was alone without being alone.

The white dogs with black spots were the worst. It wasn't so much their aggression; other dogs were sometimes even more aggressive. It was that they were - without question - the stupidest creatures on earth, and that was even if one included cats. It was useless to try reasoning with them, whatever language one chose. Worse, you could never tell when one of them would come at you. It was not in his nature to hate other dogs, but Benjy disliked Dalmatians the way some humans dislike men named Steve or Biff.