Did Quotes (page 35)
In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, 'I don't think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn't the way people write.'I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn't done deliberately.
Madeleine L'Engle
Small animals are a great problem. I wish God had never created small animals, or else that He had made them so they could talk, or else that He'd given them better faces. Space. Take moths. They fly at the lamp and burn themsleves, and then they fly right back again. It can't be instinct, because it isn't the way it works. They just don't understand, so they go right on doing it. Then they lie on their backs and all their legs quiver, and then they're dead. Did you get all that? Does it...
Tove Jansson
I have to give her what you did, don't I?" she said. "Enough of my personal information for Aurilelde to link to her own... so that the congruency between us is complete, and all this works out the way it should..."Kit didn't say anything.... But why wouldn't I? Nita thought. To make all this come out all right. She nodded to Irina. Irina nodded back, turned away. And only then did it occur to Nita, with a shock, that this would mean it hadn't been Aurilelde who Kit had been so attracted to....
Diane Duane
Peeta, you said at the interview you’d had a crush on me forever. When did forever start?
Oh, let’s see. I guess the first day of school. We were five. You had on a red plaid dress and your hair...it was in two braids instead of one. My father pointed you out when we were waiting to line up."
Your father? Why?"
He said, ‘See that little girl? I wanted to marry her mother, but she ran off with a coal miner.'"
What? You’re making that up!"
No, true story. And I said, 'A coal miner? Why did...
Suzanne Collins
We should realize that, if [Socrates] demanded that the wisest men should rule, he clearly stressed that he did not mean the learned men; in fact, he was skeptical of all professional learnedness, whether it was that of the philosophers or of the learned men of his own generation, the Sophists. The wisdom he meant was of a different kind. It was simply the realization: how little do I know! Those who did not know this, he taught, knew nothing at all. This is the true scientific spirit.
Karl Popper
Perhaps,” murmured his lordship, “I yielded to a compassionate impulse.”
“A what?” gasped his best friend.
“Oh, did you think I never did so?” said his lordship, the satirical glint in his eyes extremely pronounced. “You wrong me! I do, sometimes—not frequently, of course, but every now and then!
Georgette Heyer