Famous quotes containing the words bottom, dead and/or center:
“At bottom there is in Joyce a profound hatred for humanity—the scholar’s hatred. One realizes that he has the neurotic’s fear of entering the living world, the world of men and women in which he is powerless to function. He is in revolt not against institutions, but against mankind.... Ulysses is like a vomit spilled by a delicate child whose stomach has been overloaded with sweetmeats.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“An oblong puddle inset in the coarse asphalt; like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with quicksilver; like a spatulate hole through which you can see the nether sky. Surrounded, I note, by a diffuse tentacled black dampness where some dull dun dead leaves have stuck. Drowned, I should say, before the puddle had shrunk to its present size.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.”
—John Donne (1572–1631)