In Time Quotes (page 225)
A long time back, she thought, I dreamed a dream, and was enjoying it so much when someone wakened me, and that day I was born. And now? Now, let me see...She cast her mind back. Where was I? she thought. Ninety years...how to take up the thread and the pattern of that lost dream again? She put out a small hand. There...yes, that was it. She smiled. Deeper in the warm snow hill she turned her head upon her pillow. That was better. Now, yes, now she saw it shaping in her mind quietly, and with...
Ray Bradbury
The Germans have an inhuman way of cutting up their verbs. Now a verb has a hard time enough of it in this world when it's all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's just what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German. from "Disappearance of Literature
Mark Twain
I think that love is stronger than habits or circumstances. I think it is possible to keep yourself for someone for a long time, and still remember why you were waiting when she comes at last.... I would enter your sleep if I could, and guard you there, and slay the thing that hounds you, as I would if it had the courage to face me in fair daylight. But I cannot come in unless you dream of me.
Peter S. Beagle
Children would beg for a peppermint drop each time he walked into town, and they'd follow behind, asking for a second and a third. When he died suddenly, while working late at his office, every boy and girl in the village reported smelling mint in the night air, as if somehing sweet had passed them right by.
Alice Hoffman
Great pals we've always been. In fact there was a time when I had an idea I was in love with Cynthia. However, it blew over. A dashed pretty and lively and attractive girl, mind you, but full of ideals and all that. I may be wronging her, but I have an idea that she's the sort of girl who would want a fellow to carve out a career and what not. I know I've heard her speak favourably of Napoleon. So what with one thing and another the jolly old frenzy sort of petered out, and now we're just...
P. G. Wodehouse
My feelings are not God. God is God. My feelings do not define truth. God’s word defines truth. My feelings are echoes and responses to what my mind perceives. And sometimes - many times - my feelings are out of sync with the truth. When that happens - and it happens every day in some measure - I try not to bend the truth to justify my imperfect feelings, but rather, I plead with God: Purify my perceptions of your truth and transform my feelings so that they are in sync with the truth.
John Piper
I waver—in the dark—between the observation (but is it entirely accurate?) that I’m unhappy only by moments, by jerks and surges, sporadically, even if such spasms are close together—and the conviction that deep down, in actual fact, I am continually, all the time, unhappy since maman’s death.
Roland Barthes
-for though a very few hours spent in the hard labor of incessant talking will dispatch more subjects that can really be in common between two rational creatures, yet for the lovers is different. Between them no subject is finished; no communication is ever made, till it has been made at least twenty times over.
Jane Austen
Twenty years was a long time. But Tengo knew that if he were to meet Aomame in another twenty years, he would feel the same way he did now. Even if they were both over fifty, he would still feel the same mix of excitement and confusion in her presence. His heart would be filled with the same joy and certainty.
Haruki Murakami
Killing Japanese didn’t bother me at that time. It was getting the war over with that bothered me. So I wasn’t worried particularly about how many people we killed in getting the job done… . All war is immoral, and if you let it bother you, you’re not a good soldier.”
Schaffer, Ronald (1988-09-29). Wings of Judgment : American Bombing in World War II (p. 150). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Curtis LeMay
We closed the deal and moved to New York. Where in fact I had lived before, from the time I was twenty-one and just out of the English Department at Berkeley and starting work at Vogue (a segue so profoundly unnatural that when I was asked by the Cond Nast personnel department to name the languages in which I was fluent I could think only of Middle English) until I was twenty-nine and just married.
Joan Didion