Guessing Quotes (page 5)
Why don't you use some sense and try to be more like me? You might live to be a hundred and seven, too."
"Because it’s better to die on one’s feet than live on one’s knees,” Nately retorted with triumphant and lofty conviction. “I guess you’ve heard that saying before.”
“Yes, I certainly have,” mused the treacherous old man, smiling again. “But I’m afraid you have it backward. It is better to live on one’s feet than die on one’s knees. That is the way the saying goes.”
“Are you sure?” Nately...
Joseph Heller
Other bits of England might be cramped, crowded, and cluttered, but only because all the available space had been claimed by this guest suite. It was situated right in Trinity College, and Richard guessed it had been laid out eight hundred years ago so that noble guests could ride their horses directly into the bedchamber and bring all of their squires and wolfhounds with them too.
Neal Stephenson
All day long you sit and sew, Stitch life down for fear it grow, Stitch life down for fear we guess. At the hidden ugliness. Dusty voice that throbs with heat, Hoping with your steel-thin beat. To put stitches in my mind, Make it tidy, make it kind, You shall not: I'll keep it free. Though you turn earth, sky and sea. To a patchwork quilt to keep. Your mind snug and warm in sleep!
Edith Sitwell
We cuss them because we're not good enough for them. We hate them because they wouldn't look at us, couldn't be bothered to give us an interview. I guess there's a Trent & Brent in every city, in every field. I didn't make it and I don't belong, so I'll just go through life hating them.
John Grisham
Man," he said, "I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want."What do we want?" I asked blurrily."Aw, man, you know," he said. "We just want, well, the same things these people wanted."What was that?"He shrugged. "To live, I guess," he said.
Michael Cunningham
Several times that day, the name or thought of Papa had come up. And each time, Francie had felt a flash of tenderness instead of the old stab of pain. "Am I forgetting him?" she thought. "In time to come, will it be hard to remember anything about him? I guess it's like Granma Mary Rommely says: 'With time, passes all.' The first year was hard because we could say last 'lection he voted. Last Thanksgiving he ate with us. But next year it will be two years ago that he...and as time passes it...
Betty Smith
I am afraid I am one of those people who continues to read in the hope of sometime discovering in a book a single—and singular—piece of wisdom so penetrating, so soul stirring, so utterly applicable to my own life as to make all the bad books I have read seem well worth the countless hours spent on them. My guess is that this wisdom, if it ever arrives, will do so in the form of a generalization.
Joseph Epstein