Buts Quotes (page 582)
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She never sent the castle to sleep”, said Granny, “that’s just and old wife’s tale. She just stirred up time a little. It’s not as hard as people think, everyone does it all the time. It’s like rubber, is time, you can stretch it to suit yourself.”
Magrat was about to say: That’s not right, time is time, every second lasts a second, that’s its job. The she recalled weeks that had flown past and afternoons that had lasted forever. Some minutes had lasted hours, some hours had gone past so...
Terry Prachett
Not many songs can fend off evil. But the right song with the right voice can be a weapon; anyone who's listened to music through headphones while riding the subway or plowing angrily through a rush-hour sidewalk knows how it can and separate you from them, allows you to say to the teeming masses that you are this and they are that.
Dave Eggers
Once more the odious courtesies began, the first handed the knife across K. to the second, who handed it across K. back again to the first. K. now perceived clearly that he was supposed to seize the knife himself, as it traveled from hand to hand above him, and plunge it into his own breast. But he did not do so, he merely turned his head, which was still free to move, and gazed around him. He could not completely rise to the occasion, he could not relieve the officials of all their tasks;...
Franz Kafka
I've developed a theory that there's an inverse relationship between money and imagination. That if you've got lots of imagination then you don't really need much money, and if you've got lots of money then you won't bother with much imagination. You've got to be able to pay your bills, otherwise you're not going to sleep at night. But beyond that, the world inside my head has always been a far richer place than the world outside it. I suppose that a lot of my art and writing are meant to...
Alan Moore
Would that Christmas could just be, without presents. It is just so stupid, everyoneexhausting themselves, miserably hemorrhaging money on pointless items nobody wants: nolonger tokens of love but angst-ridden solutions to problems. (Hmm. Though must admit, pretty bloody pleased to have new handbag.) What is the point of entire nation rushing round for sixweeks in a bad mood preparing for utterly pointless Taste-of-Others exam which entire nation thenfails and gets stuck with hideous unwanted...
Helen Fielding
If you serve a child a rotten hamburger in America, federal, state, and local agencies will investigate you, summon you, close you down, whatever. But if you provide a child with a rotten education, nothing happens, except that you're liable to be given more money to do it with. Well, we've discovered that money alone isn't the answer.
Ronald Reagan
He looks at Mama out of the corner of his eye, again surprised by how little she is. As if all of her life has been a slow process of shrinkage.
But just what is that shrinkage?
Is it the real shrinkage of a person abandoning his adult dimensions and starting on the long journey through old age and death toward distances where there is only a nothingness without dimension?
Milan Kundera
Don't worry,' he said. 'So long as the facts are there, I can write the story. But please,' he added, 'let me have plenty of detail. That's what counts in our business, tiny little details, like you had a broken shoelace on your left shoe, or a fly settled on the rim of your glasses at lunch, or the man you were talking to had a broken front tooth...
Roald Dahl
Legally, Moosbrugger's case could be summed up in-a sentence. Hewas one of those borderline cases in law and forensic medicineknown even to the layman as a case of diminished responsibility. These unfortunates typically suffer not only substandard healthbut also have a substandard disease, Nature has a peculiar prefer-ence for producing such people in droves. Natura non fecit saltus, she makes no jumps but prefers gradual transitions; even on thegrand scale she keeps the world in a...
Robert Musil
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there unable to decide the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they popped to the ground at my feet.
Sylvia Plath
My grandmother told me once that when you lose somebody you think you've lost the whole world as well, but that's not the way things turn out in the end. Eventually, you pick yourself up and look out the window, and once you do you see everything that was there before the world ended is out there still. There are the same apple trees and the same songbirds, and over our heads, the very same sky that shines like heaven, so far above us we can never hope to reach such heights.
Alice Hoffman