Elizabeth Bell > Elizabeth's Quotes

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“A baby is God's opinion that life should go on. A book that does nothing to you is dead. A baby, whether it does anything to you, represents life. If a bad fire should break out in this house and I had my choice of saving the library or the babies, I would save what is alive. Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby. The finest of our precision watches, the most super-colossal of our supercargo plants, don't compare with a newborn baby in the number and ingenuity of coils and springs, in the flow and change of chemical solutions, in timing devices and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable. A baby is very modern. Yet it is also the oldest of the ancients. A baby doesn't know he is a hoary and venerable antique — but he is. Before man learned how to make an alphabet, how to make a wheel, how to make a fire, he knew how to make a baby — with the great help of woman, and his God and Maker.”
― Carl Sandburg

“Jaime," I said softly, "are you happy about it? About the baby?" Outlawed in Scotland, barred from his own home, and with only vague prospects in France, he could pardonably have been less than enthused about acquiring an additional obligation.

He was silent for a moment, only hugging me harder, then sighed briefly before answering.

"Aye, Sassenach," His hand stayed downward, gently rubbing my belly. "I'm happy. And proud as a stallion. But I am most awfully afraid too."

"About the birth? I'll be all right." I could hardly blame him for apprehension; his own mother had died in childbirth, and birth and its complications were the leading cause of death for women in these times. Still, I knew a thing or two myself, and I had no intention whatever of exposing myself to what passed for medical care here.

"Aye, that--and everything," he said softly. "I want to protect ye like a cloak and shield you and the child wi' my body." His voice was soft and husky, with a slight catch in it. "I would do anything for ye...and yet...there's nothing I can do. It doesna matter how strong I am, or how willing; I canna go with you where ye must go...nor even help ye at all. And to think of the things that might happen, and me helpless to stop them...aye, I'm afraid, Sassenach.

"And yet"--he turned me toward him, hand closing gently over one breast--"yet when I think of you wi' my child at your breast...then I feel as though I've gone hollow as a soap bubble, and perhaps I shall burst with joy.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Dragonfly in Amber

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens.”
― Woody Allen

“All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt.”
― Charles M. Schulz

“Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it inflames the great.”
― Roger de Bussy-Rabutin

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet.”
― Phyllis McGinley

“I understand now that history only moves forward in a straight line when we learn from it. Otherwise it loops past the same mistakes over and over again,”
― Jennifer Latham, Dreamland Burning

“Love is never a sin.’ What a beautiful sentiment.”
― Elizabeth Bell, Necessary Sins

“An ass could not help being an ass, but it was still an ass.”
― Elizabeth Bell, Necessary Sins

“Why did God place the Tree of Knowledge in Paradise? Didn’t He know Adam would eat the forbidden fruit?”
― Elizabeth Bell, Necessary Sins

“One day, Joseph, all the false trappings will fall away, and only the perfection of God will remain. If we are wise, if we listen to Him alone, we can glimpse that perfection here on Earth.”
― Elizabeth Bell, Necessary Sins

“My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed;
My dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead;
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red.”
― Alfred Tennyson, Maud

“I'm not an advocate of promiscuity; but then I'm also not an advocate of being virginal. It's not like I put virginity or celibacy on a pedestal, and as long as I don't get your promiscuity rubbed into my face— I don't care about it! What I do care about is the ability to recognize the sanctity of a union of two souls— you just can't say your soul isn't being united with others' when you have sex with them. So I think you'd better own up to what you're doing— no matter how frequently or infrequently or with how many different people you do it. I mean, make good choices! You are, after all, entwining your soul with another's.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“There’s only one way to run away from your own story, and that’s to sneak into someone else’s.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.”
― Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

“A]nd I realized then the unmitigable chasm between all life and all print–that those who can, do, those who cannot and suffer enough because they can’t, write about it.”
― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished: The Corrected Text