Something Quotes (page 141)
I was terrible in English. I couldn't stand the subject. It seemed to me ridiculous to worry about whether you spelled something wrong or not, because English spelling is just a human convention--it has nothing to do with anything real, anything from nature. Any word can be spelled just as well a different way.
Richard P. Feynman
If you read this, read it for that reason that Lestat is talking again, that he is frightened, that he is searching desperately for the lesson and for the song and for the raison d'etre, that he wants to understand his own story and he wants you to understand it, and that it is the very best story he has right now to tell. If that's not enough, read something else. If it is, read on. In chains, to my friend and my scribe, I dictated these words. Come with me. Just listen to me. Don't leave me...
Anne Rice
What hope is here for modern rhyme
To him, who turns a musing eye
On songs, and deeds, and lives, that lie
Foreshorten'd in the tract of time?
These mortal lullabies of pain
May bind a book, may line a box,
May serve to curl a maiden's locks;
Or when a thousand moons shall wane
A man upon a stall may find,
And, passing, turn the page that tells
A grief, then changed to something else,
Sung by a long-forgotten mind.
But what of that? My darken'd ways
Shall ring with music all the...
Alfred Lord Tennyson
There was hardly a touch of earth in her love for Clare. To her sublime trustfulness he was all that goodness could be—knew all that a guide, philosopher, and friend should know. She thought every line in the contour of his person the perfection of masculine beauty, his soul the soul of a saint, his intellect that of a seer. The wisdom of her love for him, as love, sustained her dignity; she seemed to be wearing a crown. The compassion of his love for her, as she saw it, made her lift up her...
Thomas Hardy
I know what it's like when people go away. It's agony for a week, then painful for a week, then you begin to forget, and then it seems as it never happened, it happened to someone else, and you start shrugging. You say, dingo, it's life, that's the way the things are. Stupid things like that. As if you haven't really lost something for ever.
John Fowles
[Wendy has just become the Lost Boys' mother] Peter: Discipline. That's what fathers believe in. We must spank the children immediately before they try to kill you again. In fact, we should kill them. Wendy: Father. I agree that they are... perfectly horrid, but... kill them and they should think themselves... important. The Lost Boys: So important, Peter. Curly: And unique. Wendy: I, propose something far more dreadful. Medicine. The sticky, sweet kind. The Lost Boys: Kill us, Peter.
J. M. Barrie
I think people are often quite unaware of their inner selves, their other selves, their imaginative selves, the selves that aren’t on show in the world. It’s something you grow out of from childhood onwards, losing possession of yourself, really. I think literature is one of the best ways back into that. You are hypnotized as soon as you get into a book that particularly works for you, whether it’s fiction or a poem. You find that your defenses drop, and as soon as that happens, an...
Jeanette Winterson
She argued. She cried. She took my faltering, my tortured refusals for something far finer than they really were. At the end of the afternoon, before we left the wood, and with a solemnity and sincerity, a complete dedication of herself that I cannot describe to you because such unconditional promising is another extinct mystery...she said, Whatever happens I shall never marry anyone but you.
John Fowles