Buts Quotes (page 632)
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When I was going out with her, it always seemed that her actions were instinctive. But then I was resistant to the whole idea that women were or could be manipulative. This may tell you more about me than it does about her. And even if I were to decide, at this late stage, that she was and always had been calculating, I’m not sure it would help matters. By which I mean: help me.
Julian Barnes
More than that, I believe that the grass is green because green is restful to the human eye, that the sky is blue to give us an idea of the infinite. And that blood is red so that murder will be more easily detected and criminals will be brought to justice. Yes, and I believe that I shall live forever, but I shall live without reason.
Penelope Fitzgerald
As his lord stared at the door another figure appeared, a girl of about fifteen with long, rather wild black hair. She was gauche in movement and in a sense, ugly of face, but with how small a twist might she not suddenly have become beautiful. Her sullen mouth was full and rich? her eyes smouldered.
Mervyn Peake
It’s a good excuse, though, orphanhood. It explains everything—every mistake and wrong turn. As Sherlock Holmes declared. She had no mother to advise her. How we long for it, that lack of advice! Imprudence could have been ours. Passionate affairs. Reckless adventures. Of course we’re grateful for our stable upbringings, our hordes of informative relatives, our fleece-lined advantages, our lack of dramatic plots. But there’s a corner of envy in us all the same. Why doesn’t anything of...
Margaret Atwood
Full many a gem of purest ray serene. The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear: Full many a flower is born to blush unseen. And waste its sweetness on the desert air"A good many flowers bloom and fade away in deserted places, seen by no one. In its context in Thomas Gray's "Elegy" it is actually a metaphor for common folk who do heroic things that are never reported in the news or recorded in history. Like a precious stone unmined at the bottom of the ocean or a beautiful flower blooming in...
Thomas Gray
I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning; my great thought in living is himself. Nelly, I AM Heathcliff--he's always, always in my mind--not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself--but as my own being.
Emily Bronte
The art of reading is to skip judiciously. Whole libraries may be skipped these days, when we have the results of them in our modern culture without going over the ground again. And even of the books we decide to read, there are almost always large portions which do not concern us, and which we are sure to forget the day after we have read them. The art is to skip all that does not concern us, while missing nothing that we really need. No external guidance can teach us this; for nobody but...
Philip Gilbert Hamerton
It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring, this hatred, which, especially since her illness, had power to make her feel scraped, hurt in her spine; gave her physical pain, and made all pleasure in beauty, in friendship, in being well, in being loved and making her...
Virginia Woolf