Hardened Steel Bar

Famous quotes containing the words hardened, steel and/or bar:

    The years of imprisonment hardened me.... Perhaps if you have been given a moment to hold back and wait for the next blow, your emotions wouldn’t be blunted as they have been in my case. When it happens every day of your life, when that pain becomes a way of life, I no longer have the emotion of fear. ... there is no longer anything I can fear. There is nothing the government has not done to me. There isn’t any pain I haven’t known.
    Winnie Mandela (b. 1936)

    For when they meet, the tensile air
    Like fine steel strains under the weight
    Of messages that both hearts bear—
    Pure passion once, now purest hate....
    Allen Tate (1899–1979)

    I am of course confident that I will fulfil my tasks as a writer in all circumstances—from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer’s pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.
    Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)