Were Quotes (page 425)
Do you remember writing in your diary," he said, "that it did not matter whether I was a friend or an enemy, since I was at least a person who understood you and could be talked to? You were right. I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.
George Orwell
Madame Ratignolle hoped that Robert would exercise extreme caution in dealing with the Mexicans, who, she considered, were a treacherous people, unscrupulous and revengeful. She trusted she did them no injustice in thus condemning them as a race. She had known personally but one Mexican, who made and sold excellent tamales, and whom she would have trusted implicitly, so soft-spoken was he. One day he was arrested for stabbing his wife. She never knew whether he had been hanged or not.
Kate Chopin
You do not need to belong to the cat for a long time to realize the main thing that cats like to do is to wrap theirselves up in mystery, perhaps only except for a hobby of jumbling up everything that is in order. And if the cat can, and usually so, make a great mystery of where it was when you were searching for it even if a moment ago it was sitting by your side, do not have any doubts: its ancestors had a great pleasure to surround its origin by mystery.
Cleveland Amory
It is astonishing to think that millions of people in my time-now, too, I suppose-actually thought that at a given moment in history two human beings had evolved to a higher state than that of all the gods that ever were or ever will be. This is titanism, as the Greeks would say. This is madness.
Gore Vidal
Anybody who does not feel that he would be much happier were he only permitted to understand and obey the commandments of Jesus in a straightforward literal way, and e. g. surrender all his possessions at his bidding rather than cling to them, has no right to this paradoxical interpretation of Jesus' words. We have to hold the two together in mind all the time.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
For mines are for men, not for money. And money is not something to go mad about, and throw your hat into the air for. Money is for food and clothes and comfort, and a visit to the pictures. Money is to make happy the lives of children. Money is for security, and for dreams, and for hopes, and for purposes. Money is for buying the fruits of the earth, of the land where you were born.
Alan Paton

She left the room without looking in the glass. From which we deduce the fact, he said to himself, as if he were writing a novel, that Miss Sarah Pargiter has never attracted the love of men. Or had she? He did not know. These little snapshot pictures of people left much to be desired, these little surface pictures that one made, like a fly crawling over a face, and feeling, here’s the nose, here’s the brow.
Virginia Woolf
You would think, wouldn’t you, that if you were the child
of a happy marriage, then you ought to have a better than
average marriage yourself – either through some genetic
inheritance or because you’d learnt from example? But it
doesn’t seem to work like that. So perhaps you need the
opposite example – to see mistakes in order not to make
them yourself. Except this would mean that the best way for
parents to ensure their children have happy marriages
would be to have unhappy ones themselves....
Julian Barnes
Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important that television.
Aldo Leopold