Took Quotes (page 21)
Your father was no longer a young man. he was already in his fifties.'
Fifty-six,' Eddie said blankly.
Fifty-six,' the old woman repeated. 'His body had been weakened, the ocean had left him vulnerable, pneumonia took hold of him, and in time, he died.'
Because of Mickey?' Eddie said.
Because of loyalty,' she said.
People don’t die because of loyalty.'
They don’t?' she smiled. 'Religion? government? Are we not loyal to such things, sometimes to the death?'
Eddie shrugged.
Better,' she said,...
Mitch Albom
At the end of her life she was aware of heat but not pain. She had time to consider his eyes, eyes of that blue which is the color of the sky at first light of the morning. She had time to think of him on the Drop, riding Rusher flat out with his black hair flying back from his temples and his neckerchief rippling; to see him laughing with an ease and freedom he would never find again in the long life which stretched out for him beyond hers, and it was his laughter she took with her as she...
Stephen King
ALL THINGS THAT ARE, ARE OURS. BUT WE MUST CARE. FOR IF WE DO NOT CARE, WE DO NOT EXIST. IF WE DO NOT EXIST, THEN THERE IS NOTHING BUT BLIND OBLIVION. AND EVEN OBLIVION MUST END SOMEDAY. LORD, WILL YOU GRANT ME JUST A LITTLE TIME? FOR THE PROPER BALANCE OF THINGS. TO RETURN WHAT WAS GIVEN. FOR THE SAKE OF PRISONERS AND THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS. Death took a step backwards. It was impossible to read expression in Azrael's features. Death glanced sideways at the servants. LORD, WHAT CAN THE HARVEST...
Terry Prachett
The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in ones own home." Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like...
Azar Nafisi
For Padilla the shared act of smoking was basically a staging of loneliness: the tough guys, the talkers, the quick to forget and the long to remember, lost themselves for an instant, the length of time it took the cigarette to burn, an instant in which time was frozen and yet all times in Spanish history were concentrated, all the cruelty and the broken dreams, and in that "night of the soul" the smokers recognized each other, unsurprised, and embraced. The spirals of smoke were the embrace.
Roberto Bolano
Tengo knew that time could become deformed as it moved forward. Time itself was uniform in composition, but once consumed, it took on a deformed shape. One period of time might be terribly heavy and long, while another could be light and short. Occasionally the order of things could be reversed, and in the worst cases order itself could vanish entirely.
Haruki Murakami
She looked at nobody, but just before she went out, she raised her eyes and took a speedy glance at me. There was something in that looks that startled me - though it was difficult to describe why. There was malice in it, and a curious intimate knowledge. I felt that, without effort, and almost without curiosity, she had known exactly what thoughts were in my mind.
Agatha Christie
Grant smiled-slowly, deliberately. Insolently? Gennie wasn't sure, but her heart rose to her throat and stuck there. However he smiled, whatever his intent, it added a wicked, irresistible charm to his face. She thought it was a smile a barbarian might have given his woman before he tossed her over his shoulder and took her into some dark cave.
Nora Roberts
But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking?—the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world—a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors. 'I can bear it no longer,' her spirit says. 'That man at lunch—Hilda—the children.' Oh, heavens, her sob! It's the spirit wailing its destiny, the spirit driven hither, thither, lodging on the diminishing...
Virginia Woolf