Being Quotes (page 626)
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I wanted to get away,' said she; 'everybody wants to plague and worry me about nothing. They'll be all right tomorrow. What's worrying them?'
'They are sacrificing to our Canadian God,' said Solly. 'We all believe that if we fret and abuse ourselves sufficiently, Providence will take pity and smile upon anything we attempt. A light heart, or a consciousness of desert, attracts ill luck. You have been away from your native land too long. You have forgotten our folkways. Listen to that gang...
Robertson Davies
No matter how good the walls and the materials are; if the foundations are not strong, the building will not stand. By and by, in some upper room, a crack will appear; and men will say: "There is the crack; but the cause is the foundation." So if, in youth, you lay the foundation of your character wrongly, the penalty will be sure to follow. The crack may be far down in old age, but somewhere it will certainly appear.
Henry Ward Beecher
If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him; and it will then be but poor consolation to believe the world equally in the dark. There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost any attachment, that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all begin ‘freely’- as light preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have a heart enough to be really in love without encouragement.
Jane Austen
A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about digestion: the subject may be fatal cowardice for the one as for the other. But if either comes t o regard it as the natural food of the mind—if either forgets that we think of such things only in order to be able to think of something else—then what was undertaken for the sake of health has become itself a new and deadly disease.
C. S. Lewis
I never told my own religion nor scrutinized that of another. I never attempted to make a convert, nor wished to change another's creed. I am satisfied that yours must be an excellent religion to have produced a life of such exemplary virtue and correctness. For it is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be judged.
Thomas Jefferson
There was a silence. Then: ‘What you are saying,’ said Philippa slowly, ‘is that the child Khaireddin would be better unfound?’ The Dame de Doubtance said nothing. ‘Or are you saying,’ pursued Philippa, inimical from the reedy brown crown of her head to her mud-caked cloth stockings, ‘that you and I and Lymond and Lymond’s mother and Lymond’s brother and Graham Malett would be better off if he weren’t discovered?’
‘Now that,’ said the Dame de Doubtance with satisfaction, ‘is precisely what...
Dorothy Dunnett
Option three: Edward loved me. The bond forged between us was not one that could be broken by absence, distance, or time. And no matter how much more special or beautiful or brillant or perfect than me he might me, he was as irreversibly altered as I was. As I would always belong to him, so would he always be mine. Was that what I'd been trying to tell myself?"Oh!"Bella?"Oh. Okay. I see."Your epithany?" he asked, his voice uneven and strained."You love me," I marveled. The sense of conviction...
Stephenie Meyer
But it would have made me a whore to leave it incomplete. It would have made it easier to leave future work incomplete. It would have made it more and more difficult to draw upon that additional aching surge of effort that is always the difference between integrity and deceit in a created work. I would not be the whore to my own existence. Can you understand that? I would not be the whore to my own existence.
Chaim Potok