They Say Quotes (page 53)
I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.
Neil Gaiman
I try to congure, to raise my own spirits, from wherever they are. I need to remember what they look like. I try to hold them still behind my eyes, their faces, like pictures in an album. But they won't stay still for me, they move, there's a smile and it's gone, their features curl and bend as if the paper's burning, blackness eats them. A glimpse, a pale shimmer on the air; a glow, aurora, dance of electrons, then a face again, faces. But they fade, though I stretch out my arms towards...
Margaret Atwood
My name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.
J. R. R. Tolkien
Peeta sighs. "Well, there is this one girl. I’ve had a crush on her ever since I can remember. But I’m pretty sure she didn’t know I was alive until the reaping."
Sounds of sympathy from the crowd. Unrequited love they can relate to.
She have another fellow?" asks Caesar.
I don’t know, but a lot of boys like her," says Peeta.
So, here’s what you do. You win, you go home. She can’t turn you down then, eh?" says Caesar encouraging-ly.
I don’t think it’s going to work out. Winning...won’t...
Suzanne Collins
At these repeated signs of decadence in a society which had once been the object of his envy and his highest ambition, Webber's face had begun to take on a look of scorn...Yes, all these people looked at one another with untelling eyes. Their speech was casual, quick, and witty. But they did not say the things they knew. And they knew everything. They had seen everything. They had accepted everything. And they received every new intelligence now with a cynical and amused look in their...
Thomas Wolfe
When people say they do not care what others think of them, for the most part they deceive themselves. Generally they mean only that they will do as they choose, in the confidence that no one will know their vagaries; and at the utmost only that they are willing to act contrary to the opinion of the majority because they are supported by the approval of their neighbours. It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your...
W. Somerset Maugham
We stood under a roadlamp, thumbing, when suddenly cars full of young kids roared by with streamers flying. 'Yaah! Yaah! we won! we won!' they all shouted. Then they yoohooed us and got great glee out of seeing a guy and a girl on the road. Dozens of such cars passed, full of young faces and 'throaty young voices,' as the saying goes. I hated every one of them. Who did they think they were, yaahing at somebody on the road just because they were little high-school punks and their parents...
Jack Kerouac
If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter--as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
All the world complain now a days of a press of trivial duties & engagements which prevents their employing themselves on some higher ground they know of, - but undoubtedly if they were made of the right stuff to work on that higher ground, provided they were released from all those engagements - they would now at once fulfill the superior engagement, and neglect all the rest, as naturally as they breathe. They would never be caught saying that they had no time for this when the dullest man...
Henry David Thoreau
When some people say, as they do, that when we preach faith alone good works are forbidden, it is as if I were to say to a sick man, “If you had health you would have the full use of all your limbs, but without health the works of all your limbs are nothing,” and from this he wanted to infer that I had forbidden the works of his limbs. Whereas on the contrary I meant that the health must first be there to work all the works of all his limbs. In the same way faith must be the master-workman...
Martin Luther
-We live in Rome, he says, turning his face to the room again,-Caligula's Rome, with a new circus of vulgar bestialized suffering in the newspapers every morning. The masses, the fetid masses, he says, bringing all his weight to his feet.-How can they even suspect a self who can do more, when they live under absolutely no obligation. There are so few beautiful things in the world...
William Gaddis