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Quotes by Novelist
"The lamplight was eerie, and, standing there motionless in our bathrobes, sleepy, with shadows flickering all around, I felt as though I had woken from one dream into an even more remote one, some bizarre wartime bomb shelter of the unconscious."
42
"The prudence of the best heads is often defeated by the tenderness of the best hearts."
42
"She would be one of those who kneel to their own shadows till feet grow on their knees; then go down on their hands till their hands grow into feet; then lay their faces on the ground till they grow into snouts; when at last they are a hideous sort of lizards, each of which believes himself the best, wisest, and loveliest being in the world, yea, the very centre of the universe. And so they run about for ever looking for their own shadows that they may worship them, and miserable because they cannot find them, being themselves too near the ground to have any shadows; and what becomes of them at last, there is but one who knows."
42
"If you have behaved badly repent make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean."
42
"Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live life."
42
"Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn't die when he should but when he can."
42
"If a composer suffers from loss of sleep and his sleeplessness induces him to turn out masterpieces, what a profitable loss it is!"
42
"It comforts everybody to think of all Negroes as dirt poor, and to regard those who were not, who earned good money and kept it, as some kind of shameful miracle. White people liked that idea because Negroes with money and sense made them nervous. Colored people liked it because, in those days, they trusted poverty, believed it was a virtue and a sure sign of honesty. Too much money had a whiff of evil and somebody else's blood."
42
"Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard."
42
"One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep."
42
"Being reliable is something. Being good."
42
"Where the bodily presence is weak and the speech contemptible, surely there cannot be error in making written language the medium of better utterance than faltering lips can achieve?"
42
"But if one doesn't really exist, one wonders why..." she hesitated."Why one makes such a fuss about things," Anthony suggested. "All that howling and hurrahing and gnashing of teeth. About the adventures of a self that isn't really a self-just the result of a lot of accidents. And of course," he went on, "once you start wondering, you see at once that there is no reason for making such a fuss. And then you don't make a fuss-that is, if you're sensible. Like me," he added, smiling."
42
"Women have always moaned about men...but it turns out that their deepest complaints are reserved for one another, because while they expect men to be fickle, treacherous, and weak, they judge their own sex by higher standards, they expect more from their own sex--loyalty, understanding, trustworthiness, love...."
42
"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed."
42
"This one sank deep into her marrow and made her heart soar like the shuttles piercing the stratosphere."
42
"I have a garden, and I'm passionately interested in young people."
42
"To say that its wrong to feel this way is not the point; you do feel it. All you see is a flash of fire and, depending on your altitude, you don't even see that sometimes."
42
"The cave floor rumbled. A large stone emerged from the dirt-a smooth, oval rock exactly the same size and weight as a baby god... She wrapped the stone in swaddling clothes and gave the real baby Zeus to the nymphs to take care of... She marched right up to King Cannibal and shouted, "This is the best baby yet! A fine little boy named, uh, Rocky!"
42
"Sarcasm will make your tits fall off."
42
"To us, it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England's policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg was wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have the with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolensk and Moscow and were killed by them."
42
"Not to look back or feel sad about things, that home is wherever I am."
42
"Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device."
42
"Master books, but do not let them master you. Read to live, not live to read."
42
"You are the son of the Lord God! She said. That's why you can kill and bring back to life, that's why you can heal a blind man as Joseph saw you do, that's why you can pray for snow and there will be snow, that's why you can dispute with your uncle Cleopas when he forgets you're a boy, that's why you make sparrows from clay and bring them to life. Keep your power inside you. Guard it until your Father in Heaven shows you the time to use it. If he's made you a child, then he's made you a child to grow in wisdom as well as in everything else."
42
"One can't have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for. You're paying for it, Mr. Watson - paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty."
42
"Pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard, had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing grew there, and that which passed through it, more heedless than children, did not even, like them, leave a name carved upon the wall."
42
"Liberties aren't given, they are taken."
42
"When he is cheerful--when the sun shines into his mind--then I venture to peep in, just as far as the light reaches, but no further. It is holy ground where the shadow falls!"
42
"Say that you don't love him! Amarantha shrieked, and the blood on my hands became the blood of that rabbit-became the blood of what I had lost.But I wouldn't say it. Because loving Tamlin was the only thing I had left, the only thing I couldn't sacrifice.A path cleared through my red-and-black vision. I found Tamlin's eyes-wide as he crawled toward Amarantha, watching me die, and unable to save me while his wound slowly healed, while she still gripped his power.Amarantha had never intended for me to live, never intended to let him go."Amarantha, stop this, Tamlin begged at her feet as he clutched the gaping wound in his chest. "Stop. I'm sorry-I'm sorry for what I said about Clythia all those years ago. Please."
42
"Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature."
42
"My writing day has grown shorter as I've aged, although it seems to produce the same number of pages."
42
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