Would Quotes (page 267)
-
-
-
After looking at myself in the mirror, I looked at Satsuko. I could not believe that we were creatures of the same species. The uglier the face in the mirror, the more extraordinarily beautiful Satsuko seemed. If that ugly face were only uglier, I thought regretfully, Satsuko would look even more beautiful.
Junichiro Tanizaki
It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery. The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious because it presents no new or special features from which deductions may be drawn. This murder would have been infinitely more difficult to unravel had the body of the victim been simply found lying in the roadway without any of those outr and sensational accompaniments which have rendered it remarkable. These strange details, far from making the case more difficult, have really had...
Arthur Conan Doyle
It's as if every conversation with a woman was a test, and men always failed it, because they always lacked the key to the code and so they never quite understood what the conversation was really about. If, just once, a man could understand, really comprehend the whole of the conversation, then the perfect union between male and female would be possible. But instead men and women continued to cohabit, even to love each other, without ever quite crossing over the chasm of misunderstanding...
Orson Scott Card
A tub was brought in to melt snow for mortar. They heard somebody saying it was twelve o'clock already. "It's sure to be twelve," Shukhov announced. "The sun's over the top already." "If it is," the captain retorted, "it's one o'clock, not twelve." "How do you make that out?" Shukhov asked in surprise. "The old folk say the sun is highest at dinnertime." "Maybe it was in their day!" the captain snapped back. "Since then it's been decreed that the sun is highest at one o'clock." "Who...
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Theology does not thrive in the world of action and reaction, change: it grows on calm, like the scum on a stagnant pool. And it flourishes, it prospers, on decline. Only in a world where everything is patently being lost can a priest stir men's hearts as a poet would by maintaining that nothing is in vain.
John Gardner
They tended to wield the huge blunt ax of the law in circumstances that required the delicate scalpel of common sense. [...] Policeman with their great big boots were not required here on a night like this. It would be a good idea to put a thumbtack under the ponderous feet of Justice.
Terry Prachett
Anna had been preparing herself for this meeting, had thought what she would say to him, but she did not succeed in saying anything of it; his passion mastered her. She tried to calm him, to calm herself, but it was too late. His feeling infected her. Her lips trembled so that for a long while she could say nothing."Yes, you have conquered me, and I am yours," she said at last, pressing his hands to her bosom."So it had to be," he said. "So long as we live, it must be so. I know it now.
Leo Tolstoy
