Surely Quotes (page 58)
But nothing on this earth is guaranteed, when you get right down to it, you know ? I've been thinking about that. About how your kids aren't really YOURS, they're just these people that you try to keep an eye on, and hope you'll all grow up someday to like each other and still be in one piece. What I mean is, everything you get is really just on loan. Does that make sense?"Sure,"I said. "Like library books. Sooner or later they've all got to go back into the nightdrop.
Barbara Kingsolver
Um, there's a girl meeting her friend,' he went on. 'Her friend is giving her an ice-cream cone. Oh-it's dripping. Huh. It, uh, dripped on her... chest.'Iggy drew in a hissing breath. It's gonna stain for sure,' the Gasman said. 'That's chocolate.'Hmm,' Fang said, watching, the girl dab at her chest with a paper napkin.
James Patterson
We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past -- whether...
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Men who find themselves late are never sure. They are all the things the civics books tell us the good citizen should be: partisans but never zealots, respectors of the facts which attend each situation but never benders of those facts, uncomfortable in positions of leadership but rarely unable to turn down a responsibility once it has been offered . . . or thrust upon them. They make the best leaders in a democracy because they are unlikely to fall in love with power.
Stephen King
My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.
Grace Paley