About Quotes (page 452)
What do you know about life? " Bitterness ached in her throat. " You were born with everything. You never had to struggle for a single thing you wanted, never had to worry if you'd be accepted or loved or wanted back." He stared at her, grateful for the moment that she couldn't see that he'd spent nearly half of his life worrying that she, the single thing he wanted, would accept him, love him, and want him back.
Nora Roberts
After a battle lasting many ages,
The Devil won,
And said to God
(who had been his Maker):
Lord,
We are about to witness the unmaking of Creation
By my hand.
I would not wish you
to think me cruel,
So I beg you, take three things
From this world before I destroy it.
Three things, and then the rest will be
wiped away.'
God thought for a little time.
And at last He said:
No, there is nothing.'
The Devil was surprised.
Not even you, Lord?' he said.
And God said:
No. Not even me.
Clive Barker
Since I speak and write about this a good deal, I am often asked at public meetings, in what sometimes seems to me a rather prurient way, whether I myself or my family have 'ever been threatened' by jihadists. My answer is that yes, I have, and so has everyone else in the audience, if they have paid enough attention to the relevant bin-Ladenist broadcasts to notice the fact.
Christopher Hitchens
Halfway through April Naoko turned twenty. She was seven months older than I was, my own birthday being in November. There was something strange about Naoko's becoming twenty. I felt as if the only thing that made sense, whether for Naoko or for me, was to keep going back and forth between eighteen and nineteen. After eighteen would come nineteen, and after nineteen, eighteen. Of course. But she turned twenty. And in the fall, I would do the same. Only the dead stay seventeen forever.
Haruki Murakami
I bet you could catch bullets,” she said, and threw the stick away. “How do you do that?”
“By not being human,” he said. “That’s why you could never trick a bear. We see tricks and deceit as plain as arms and legs. We can see in a way humans have forgotten. But you know about this; you can understand the symbol reader.
Philip Pullman
He’s wasted gallons of paint thinner striking his faithful Zippo, its charred wick, virility giving way to thrift, rationed down to a little stub, the blue flame sparking about the edges in the dark, the many kinds of dark, just to see what’s happening with her face. Each new flame, a new face.
Thomas Pynchon
C.-C.: My dear Arnold, we all hope that you have before you a distinguished political career. You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency. ARNOLD: But supposing it doesn't come off? Women are incalculable. C.-C.: Nonsense! Men are romantic. A woman will always sacrifice herself if you give her the opportunity. It is her favourite form of self-indulgence. ARNOLD: I never know whether you're a humorist or a cynic,...
W. Somerset Maugham
Toby had received, though not yet digested, one of the earliest lessons of adult life: that one is never secure. At any moment one can be removed from a state of guileless serenity and plunged into its opposite, without any intermediate condition, so high about us do the waters rise of our own and other people's imperfection.
Iris Murdoch
«“Everybody is in trouble with my dad. My dad only sort of gets the Internet. My dad started looking up all his old enemies on Facebook. My dad picks big flamewar fights. It’s like my dad just discovered that people can talk about politics without his permission. Facebook is like his new drug, he’s getting all sweaty and manic... Farfalla, is Facebook the work of the Devil? Google is ‘not evil,’ but nobody ever said that Facebook was ‘not evil.’”»
Bruce Sterling