Sorting Quotes (page 79)
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He liked to make his hearers jump, now and then, and he said that our gravel pit was much the same sort of place as Gehenna. My elders thought this far-fetched, but I saw no reason why hell should not have, so to speak, visible branch establishments throughout the earth, and I have visited quite a few of them since.
Robertson Davies
But if you caught my informant,' said Achilles, 'why in the world would Chamrajnagar—or Graff, if it was him—launch the shuttle anyway? Was catching me doing something naughty so important they’d risk a shuttle and it’s crew just to catch me? I find that quite… flattering. Sort of like winning the Nobel Prize for scariest villain.
Orson Scott Card
I also think pronunciation of a foreign tongue could be better taught than by demanding from the pupil those internal acrobatic feats that are generally impossible and always useless. This is the sort of instruction one recieves: 'Press your tonsils against the underside of your larynx. Then with the convex part of the septum curved upwards so as almostbut not quiteto touch the uvula try with the tip of your tongue to reach your thyroid. Take a deep breath and compress your glottis. Now...
Jerome K. Jerome
Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our life's hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don't; not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions.
Richard Dawkins
Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, do what you like, guys, oh, but don't eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting "Gotcha". It wouldn't have made any difference if they hadn't eaten it.'
'Why not?'
'Because if you're dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won't give up. They'll get you in the end.
Douglas Adams
Ow!' was the first thing out of her mouth, followed by a steam of articulate and literate curses that were neither blasphemous nor prurient. She'd had years to develop a vocabulary of invective that wouldn't offend anyone. It was the sort of thing a princess had to do if she was going to be able to adequately vent her feelings.
Mercedes Lackey
Reading is the first to go," my mother used to say, meaning that it was a luxury the brain dispensed with under duress. She claimed that after my father died she never again picked up anything more demanding than the morning paper. At the time I had thought that was sort of melodramatic of her, but now I found myself reading the same paragraph six times over, and I still couldn't have told you what it was about.
Anne Tyler
It was all here for me, just as it has all been here for you, the best and the worst of Western Civilization, if you cared to pay attention: music, finance, government, architecture, law and sculpture and painting, history and medicine and athletics and every sort of science, and books, books, books, and teachers and role models.
People so smart you can’t believe it, and people so dumb you can’t believe it. People so nice you can’t believe it, and people so mean you can’t believe it.
Kurt Vonnegut
Because if the whole universe could just explode out of Nothing and then just Be, don't you see that the opposite could also be true? That it is possible to implode and Un-Be as well as to explode and Be? That it's possible to implode and Un-Be as well as to explode and Be? That all human beings, Napoleon Bonaparte, for example, or the emperor Akbar, or Angelina Jolie or your father, could simply return to Nothing once they're...done? In a sort of Little, by which I mean personal, Un-Bang?
Salman Rushdie
That's right," said Pepper. "Because," she added, "if we beat them, we'd have to be our own deadly enemies. It'd be me an' Adam against Brian an' Wensley," She sat back. "Everyone needs a Greasy Johnson," she said. "Yeah," said Adam. "That's what I thought. It's no good anyone winning. That's what I thought." He stared at Dog, or through Dog. "Seems simple enough to me," said Wensleydale, sitting back. "I don't see why it's taken thousands of years to sort out.
Neil Gaiman
At least part of the reason I am a SNOOT is that for years my mom brainwashed us in all sort of subtle ways. Here's an example. Family suppers often involved a game: if one of us children made a usage error, Mom would pretend to have a coughing fit that would go on and on until the relevant child had identified the relevant error and corrected it. It was all very self-ironic and lighthearted; but still, looking back, it seems a bit excessive to pretend that your small child is actually...
David Foster Wallace
