Alison Knock > Alison's Quotes

“Crickey, love, what happened here? Are you hurt?” he asked, lifting her to her feet, the surfboard leash still wrapped around her foot.

Her eyes worked their way up his torso, along the plush green towel hugging his midsection. Catherine couldn’t help staring at his well-formed abs and chest before making her way up to his concerned eyes.

“Obviously I fell,” Catherine said. “I think I got a splinter.”

“Let me see,” Jake insisted, taking her hand into his. “It’s small. I can take care of that in a snap.”

Staring up into his deep blue eyes, Catherine could feel herself drowning in the depths of them, unconsciously resting her other hand upon his dampened chest to steady herself.”
― Diane Merrill Wigginton, A Compromising Position

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done, it is a far, far better rest I that I go to than I have ever known."

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens”
― Barbara Sontheimer

“If one does not react to gossip, the informer hushes more quickly.”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“Used in combination with genomics, AI could help pharma companies to develop new drugs for rare diseases. The rarer a disease is, the smaller the market is and so the less likely it is to have been addressed. Big pharma is hesitant to take on the high development costs for new drugs if there’s no sign of a return on investment. Biological processes are complex, and that means that they lead to multidimensional data that human beings struggle to wrap their heads around. The good news is that AI is the perfect tool to spot patterns in this kind of data.”
― Ronald M. Razmi, AI Doctor: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare - A Guide for Users, Buyers, Builders, and Investors

“Aurelia frowned. "Are you saying that you hang around the women at court to gather intel?" "Oh, Your Grace, you are quick on the uptake," he said with an impressed look on his face. "It's not fair. Flaminius always gets the hot ones. Does he have to get the smart ones too?”
― Therisa Peimer, Taming Flame

“Josh's heart soared as he got a taste of the power and endurance in his elk body.”
― Lisa Kaniut Cobb, Down in the Valley

“We’re not here to argue with you about the wisdom of our alliance that has kept the Persians at bay for forty years. An argument requires a measure of equality between those in the dispute and Samos is not the equal of Athens.”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“obeyed.”
― Elizabeth George Speare, The Sign of the Beaver

“And [he] sailed back over a year
and in and out of weeks
and through a day
and into the night of his very own room
where he found his supper waiting for him
and it was still hot”
― Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are

“We are survival machines-robot vehicles blindly programmer to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”
― Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit”
― Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit: The Classic Edition

“What's your favorite book?
"The last one I read.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“You want our boy to grow up to be nothing but a no-account fiddle-footed rake, Aaron Kinney?” she said. “With never a thought in his head but to run wild in the woods with a passel of pesky hound-dogs?”

“No, Cora,” Papa said. “But a coon hunt now and then ain’t going to ruin him. I was on a few myself and got over it.”

“Yes, Mama pointed out, “but that was because I laid the law down about dogs. Hadn’t been for that, you’d still be fooling away your time in the woods, same as always. And we wouldn’t own a rag to cover our backs.”
― Fred Gipson, Hound Dog Man

“What is blindness? Where there should be a wall, her hands find nothing. Where there should be nothing, a table leg gouges her shin. Cars growl in the streets; leaves whisper in the sky; blood rustles through her inner ears. In the stairwell, in the kitchen, even beside her bed, grown-up voices speak of despair.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Shrove Tuesday is the very last day, allowed by our Holy Mother the Church for revelry, before the long austere forty days of Lent, and if we do not make use of her full permission to enjoy ourselves, to the full extent of out capacity, we shall have nothing left to atone for to-morrow, when the good fathers place the cross of ashes on our foreheads, and bid us remember that dust we are, to dust return.”
― Emmuska Orczy, Collected Works of Baroness Emma Orczy

“Because if you don't stand up for the stuff you don't like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you've already lost.”
― Neil Gaiman

“The have influence, but no power."
"In my experience, influence is power.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“We have to be what we are, so we don’t have to present a false image. If you love me the way I am, “Okay, take me.” If you don’t love me the way I am, “Okay, bye-bye. Find someone else.” It may sound harsh, but this kind of communication means the personal agreements we make with others are clear and impeccable.”
― Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

“The latter think the shortest distance between two points is from a blonde to a bed.”
― Raymond Chandler

“The only lasting beauty is the beauty of the heart”
― Rumi

“there is no collective guilt,...guilt is individual, like salvation.”
― Frederick Forsyth, The Odessa File

“μεταβάλλει δυσδαιμονία
[It is change that causes pain]”
― Euripides, Iphigeneia in Tauris

“I am a part of the part that at first was all, part of the darkness that gave birth to the light, that supercilious light which now disputes with Mother Night her ancient rank and space, and yet cannot succeed; no matter how it struggles, it sticks to matter and can't get free. Light flows from substance, makes it beautiful...”
― Goethe

“I don't believe in "original sin." I don't believe in "guilt." I don't believe in villains or heroes - only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents.
This is so simple I'm ashamed to say it, but I'm sure it's true. In fact, I would bet my life on it! And that's why I don't understand why our propaganda machines are always trying to teach us, to persuade us, to hate and fear other people on the same little world that we live in.”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“A veil hangs between the two opposites, a mere slip of a thing that is transparent to warn us or comfort us. You hate now but look through this veil and see the possibility of love; you're sad now but look through to the other side and see happiness. Absolute composure to a complete mess - it happens so quickly, all in the blink of an eye.”
― Cecelia Ahern, Thanks for the Memories

“Marjorie, darling, listen to me. You know—God knows—you’re not the first girl in my life nor the second, but I swear to you this is new. The reason you’re so crazily in love is that I am, too. There’s no other reason. It happens once in a lifetime to everyone, and I swear to God I’m beginning to think it’s happened for us.”
― Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar

“We were left with nothing because of a love like acid that ate its way through our entire family.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“The too tender mother, the too indulgent father, the too generous and affectionate friend, may sometimes, perhaps, on account of the softness of their natures, be looked upon with a species of pity, in which, however, there is a mixture of love, but can never be regarded with hatred and aversion, nor even with contempt, unless by the most brutal and worthless of mankind. It is always with concern, with sympathy and kindness, that we blame them for the extravagance of their attachment. There is a helplessness in the character of extreme humanity which more than any thing interests our pity. There is nothing in itself which renders it either ungraceful or disagreeable. We only regret that it is unfit for the world, because the world is unworthy of it, and because it must expose the person who is endowed with it as a prey to the perfidy and ingratitude of insinuating falsehood, and to a thousand pains and uneasinesses, which, of all men, he the least deserves to feel, and which generally too he is, of all men, the least capable of supporting.”
― Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

“It was as if she could hear music, where there was no music.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Shadow Land

“the ultimate truth about oppression: that it works by turning its victims against each other instead of against their oppressors. He”
― Ken Follett, The Man From St. Petersburg