Would Quotes (page 587)
-
-
-
The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far in between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the...
Stephen Leacock
You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you.
Anton Chekhov
The earth will never be the same again
Rock, water, tree, iron, share this greif
As distant stars participate in the pain.
A candle snuffed, a falling star or leaf,
A dolphin death, O this particular loss
A Heaven-mourned; for if no angel cried
If this small one was tossed away as dross,
The very galaxies would have lied.
How shall we sing our love's song now
In this strange land where all are born to die?
Each tree and leaf and star show how
The universe is part of this one cry,
Every life...
Madeleine L'Engle
Horror would not annoy a soldier any more than the sight of a hammer annoys a carpenter. It is sentimental to pretend that horror is not the tool of the soldier, just as the hammer is the tool of the carpenter. We live off death and the threat of death and we must take it calmly and use it well.... Eventually I came to enjoy killing, as a pianist enjoys the Czerny which keeps his fingers limber for the Beethoven.
Irwin Shaw
It is our discomforts which provoke, which create consciousness; their task accomplished, they weaken and disappear one after the other. Consciousness however remains and survives them, without recalling what it owes to them, without even ever having known. Hence it continually proclaims its autonomy, its sovereignty, even when it loathes itself and would do away with itself.
Emile M. Cioran
For the first time in her life Granny wondered whether there might be something important in all these books people were setting such store by these days, although she was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy.
Terry Prachett
Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walkthe same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occursto adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, tofind the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knewa dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.
Neil Gaiman
From that time on the parish priest began to show signs of senility that would lead him to say years later that the devil had probably won his rebellion against God, and that he was the one who sat on the heavenly throne, without revealing his true identity in order to trap the unwary.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
My mouth was dry as cotton and my head hurt like hell. I tried to lift it, and the effort left me shaken and nauseated. I satisfied myself with just shifting my eyes around. I thought of all the books I'd read, all the mysteries. Spencer wouldn't have ended up this way. Neither would Kinsey Milhone. Or Henry O. Or Stephanie Plum, Well, yeah, maybe Stephanie Plum.
Charlaine Harris
