What If Quotes (page 171)
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Good morning, Eeyore," said Pooh."Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore gloomily. "If it is a good morning, which I doubt," said he."Why, what's the matter?"Nothing, Pooh Bear, nothing. We can't all, and some of us don't. That's all there is to it."Can't all what?" said Pooh, rubbing his nose."Gaiety. Song-and-dance. Here we go round the mulberry bush.
A. A. Milne
Here follows the substance of what I said, written out entirely for your benefit. Pay attention to it, or you will be all abroad, when we get deeper into the story. Clear your mind of the children, or the dinner, or the new bonnet, or what not. Try if you can't forget politics, horses, prices in the city and grievances at the club. I hope you won't take this freedom on my part amiss; it's only a way I have of appealing to a gentle reader. Lord! haven't I seen you with the greatest authors in...
Wilkie Collins
. . . for when women are the advisers, the lords of creation don't take the advice till they have persuaded themselves that it is just what they intended to do. Then they act upon it, and, if it succeeds, they give the weaker vessel half the credit of it. If it fails, they generously give her the whole.
Louisa May Alcott
They sat on a bench and Sproule held his wounded arm to his chest and rocked back and forth and blinked in the sun.
What do you want to do? said the kid.
Get a drink of water.
Other than that.
I dont know.
You want to try and head back?
To Texas?
I don't know where else.
We'd never make it.
Well you say.
I aint got no say.
He was coughing again. He held his chest with his good hand and sat as if he'd get his breath.
What have you got, a cold?
I got consumption.
Consumption?
He nodded. I...
Cormac McCarthy
Mercy!" cried Gandalf. "If the giving of knowledge is to be the cure of your inquisitiveness, I shall spend all the rest of my days in answering you. What more should you like to know?"The names of all the stars, and of all living things, and the whole history of Middle-Earth and Over-heave and of the Sundering Seas," laughed Pippin. "Of course! What less?
J. R. R. Tolkien
another tradition to politics, a tradition (of politics) that stretched from the days of the country’s founding to the glory of the civil rights movement, a tradition based on the simple idea that we have a stake in one another, and that what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done.
Barack Obama
Empty-page staring again tonight. It's maddening. I suppose people who don't write (like the Connollies) imagine anything that can be though can be expressed. Well, I don't know. I can't do it. It's this sort of thing that makes me belittle the whole business: what's the good of a 'talent' if you can't do it when you want to? What should we think of a woodcarver who couldn't woodcarver? or a pianist who couldn't play the piano? Bah, likewise grrr.
Philip Larkin
It was all he could do. To make her see what she was doing, what she was ending, and to punish her if she did so. Nobody would blame him. There might be finagling, there might be bargaining, there would certainly be humbling of herself, but there it was, like a round cold stone in her gullet, like a cannonball. And it would remain there unless she changed her mind entirely. The children stay,
Alice Munro
Hobbes: What are you doing?
Calvin: Being "cool."
Hobbes: You look more like you're being bored.
Calvin: The world bores you when you're cool.
Hobbes: Look, I brought a sombrero! Now we can both be "cool."
Calvin: A sombrero?! Are you crazy?! Cool people don't wear sombreros!
Hobbes: What fun is it being cool if you can't wear a sombrero?
Bill Watterson
A favorite liberal taunt is to accuse conservatives of clinging to an idealized past. Poor, right-wing Americans vaguely sense the world is changing and now they’re lashing out. What about the idealized past liberals cling to? They all act as if they were civil rights foot soldiers constantly getting beat up by 500-pound southern sheriffs, while every twenty-year-old Republican today is treated as if he is on Team Bull Connor. At best, the struggle for civil rights was an intra-Democratic...
Ann Coulter
Oh, hang it all! what's the good—I mean, the good of living in a room for ever? There one goes on day after day, same old game, same up and down to town, until you forget there is any other game. You ought to see once in a way what's going on outside, if it's only nothing particular after all.
E. M. Forster