Chloe > Chloe's Quotes

“The long drizzle had begun. Pedestrians had turned up collars and trousers at the bottom. Hands were hidden in the pockets of the umbrella-less - umbrellas were up. The street looked like a sea of round, black-cloth roofs, twisting, bobbing, moving. Trucks and vans were rattling in a noisy line, and everywhere men were shielding themselves as best they could.”
― Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie

“Sir, what is a pearl?"
"My worthy Ned," I answered, "to the poet, a pearl is a tear of the sea; to the Orientals, it is a drop of dew solidified; to the ladies, it is a jewel of an oblong shape, of a brilliancy of mother-of-pearl substance, which they wear on their fingers, their necks, or their ears; for the chemist, it is a mixture of phosphate and carbonate of lime, with a little gelatine; and lastly, for naturalists, it is simple a morbid secretion of the organ that produces the mother-of-pearl among certain bivalves.”
― Jules Verne

“The scullery roof had sprung a leak: she put down a bowl to catch the drips, but the rainwater spread and darkened, to make treasure maps and Whistler nocturnes of the walls and ceiling.”
― Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests

“Let me die the moment my love dies.
Let me not outlive my own capacity to love.
Let me die still loving, and so, never die.”
― Mary Zimmerman, Metamorphoses

“Margaret the Churchwoman, her father the Dissenter, Higgins the Infidel, knelt down together. It did them no harm.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister's address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money. It was in August, 1889. She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterised her thoughts, it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother's farewell kiss, a touch in her throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken.”
― Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie

“We used to live in your house," George said.
"And now, guess what?" Jerry added. "Now we're dead in your house!”
― R.L. Stine, Welcome to Dead House

“Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it’s heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“The iguanodon has modest powers of self awareness. She feels happy and complacent and content. She feels efficient, in a vague "I'm doing what I should be doing and I'm doing it well" sort of way.”
― Robert T. Bakker, Raptor Red

“Accustomed to the tranquil side of nature, she sought the dramatic in its stead. She loved the sea only for its storms, and the green grass only when it grew in patches among ruins.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it's true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“I know, in any case, that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of a bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past, I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“Big production, no story, as they say around the movie lots. I guess Sylvia is happy enough, though not necessarily with me. In our circle that's not too important. There's always something to do if you don't have to work or consider the cost. It's no real fun, but the rich don't know that. They never had any. They never want anything very hard except maybe somebody else's wife and that's a pretty pale desire compared to the way a plumber's wife wants new curtains for the living room.”
― Raymond Chandler "The Long Goodbye"

“Inevitably, he said, "What is the meaning of this?"
It is the precise question and precise wording thereof that has been put to the atmosphere on such occasions by an incredible variety of men since humanity was invented. In it not recorded that it has ever been asked for any purpose other than dignified effect.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire

“At last the revenants became so troublesome the peasants abandoned the village and it fell solely into the possession of subtle and vindictive inhabitants who manifest their presences by shadows that fall almost imperceptibly awry, too many shadows, even at midday, shadows that have no source in anything visible; by the sound, sometimes, of sobbing in a derelict bedroom where a cracked mirror suspended from a wall does not reflect a presence; by a sense of unease that will afflict the traveller unwise enough to pause to drink from the fountain in the square that still gushes spring water from a faucet stuck in a stone lion's mouth. A cat prowls in a weedy garden; he grins and spits, arches his back, bounces away from an intangible on four fear-stiffened legs. Now all shun the village below the château in which the beautiful somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes.”
― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories