All People Quotes (page 140)
Like her mother and all her mother's people before her, those inexhaustible blondes who staked their claims in verdant prairies, Marina was cut from Minnesota, the soil and the starry night. Instead of growing up inquisitive and restless, she had developed a profound desire to stay, as if her center of gravity was so low it connected her directly to this particular patch of earth.
Ann Patchett
For example, when Seymour told one of the twins or Zooey or Franny or even Mme. Boo Boo (who was only two years younger than myself, and often entirely the Lady), to take off his or her galoshes on coming into the apartment, each and all of them knew he mostly meant that the floor would get tracked up if they didn't and that Bessie would have to get out the mop. When I told them to take off their galoshes, they knew I mostly meant that people who didn't were slobs. It was bound to make no...
J. D. Salinger
The bowed head, the buried face. She is silent, she will never speak, never forgive, never reach a hand, never leave this frozen present tense. All waits, suspended. Suspended the autumn trees, the autumn sky, anonymous people. A blackbird, poor fool, sings out of season from the willows by the lake. A flight of pigeons over the houses; fragments of freedom, hazard, an anagram made flesh. And somewhere the stinging smell of burning leaves.
John Fowles
I suppose nowadays it's all a question of surgery, isn't it? Of course the notion is beautiful, the idea of staying a boy and a child forever, and I think you can. I have known plenty of people who, in their later years, had the energy of children and the kind of curiosity and fascination with things like little children. I think we can keep that, and I think it's important to keep that part of staying young. But I also think it's great fun growing old.
Johnny Depp
War happens to people, one by one. That is really all I have to say and it seems to me I have been saying it forever. Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.
Martha Gellhorn
I could tell her from personal experience that when people we love make choices we don't always understand them. But we can go on loving them, just the same. It isn't a matter of comprehension. It's forgiveness. But all this took me a lifetime to discover, and where has it gotten me?... Some lessons can't be taught, they simply have to be learned.
Jodi Picoult
There is no nation on earth powerful enough to accomplish our overthrow. Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence. I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and...
Daniel Webster
I've always wanted to be an expert on tadpoles; I've always fancied being a tadpole expert. It's a wonderful life if you become an experty tadpoleous, as they are known in the trade. You get invited out to all the smart parties and social gatherings. When smart people are making out their lists for the dinner parties, they say, 'Now, who can we have to make up the ten? A tadpole expert would be very nice. He could sit next to Lady Sonia.
Peter Cook