First Quotes (page 204)
What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of Nazism, so the ethnic cleansing of Germans was a precondition for the Stalinization of Poland. I first noticed this point when reading an essay by the late Ernest Gellner, who at the end of the war had warned Eastern Europeans that collective punishment of Germans would put them under Stalin's tutelage indefinitely....
Christopher Hitchens
her heart swelled up with misery, until it felt too large for her bosom. It beat with odd little jerks; her hands were cold, and a feeling of disaster oppressed her. There were pain and bewilderment in her face, the bewilderment of a pampered chhild who has always had her own way for the asking and who now, for the first time, was in contact with the unplesantness of life.
Margaret Mitchell
The duty of the inn-keeper, is to sell to the first comer, stews, repose, light, fire, dirtysheets, a servant, lice, and a smile; to stop passers-by, to empty smallpurses, and to honestly lighten heavy ones; to shelter travelling familiesrespectfully: to shave the man, to pluck the woman, to pick the childclean; to quote the window open, the window shut, the chimney-corner, the arm-chair, the chair, the ottoman, the stool, the feather-bed, the mattressand the truss of straw; to know how much...
Victor Hugo
We can never know what we want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. [...] And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, 'sketch' is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.
Milan Kundera
The problem with time, I've learned, whether it's those first two weeks I got to spend with you, or the final two months I got to spend with him, eventually time always runs out. I have no idea where you are out there in the world, John. But I understand that I lost the right to know these things long ago. No matter how many years go by, I know one thing to be as true as ever was - I'll see you soon then.
Nicholas Sparks