Kathleen Flynn > Kathleen's Quotes

“The last impression will have been good—one woman rendering homage to a poet and another mopping spilt coffee from the trousers of a critic. Things like that aren’t as trivial as you might think.”
― Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence

“Prudence’s flat was in the kind of block where Jane imagined people might be found dead, though she had never said this to Prudence herself; it seemed rather a macabre fancy and not one to be confided to an unmarried woman living alone.”
― Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence

“She had been feeling that things were pretty desperate if one found oneself talking about and almost quoting Matthew Arnold to comparative strangers, though anything was better than having to pretend you had winter and summer curtains when you had just curtains.”
― Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence

“Jane wanted to agree and to offer him the broken dwarf, perhaps for Constance’s grave, as a kind of comment on the futility of earthly love, but instead she said gently, ‘You must make Jessie happy. That will be the right thing for you now.”
― Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence

“It is evening.  I have dismissed, with the fee of an orange, the little orphan who serves me as a handmaid. ”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“for after all, the British peasantry are the best taught, best mannered, most self-respecting of any in Europe:”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Oh!  I will give my heart to God,” I said.  “You do not want it.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I had silently feared St. John till now, because I had not understood him.  He had held me in awe, because he had held me in doubt.  How much of him was saint, how much mortal, I could not heretofore tell: but revelations were being made in this conference:”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“during that time he made me feel what severe punishment a good yet stern, a conscientious yet implacable man can inflict on one who has offended him. ”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“We’re not in Rochester either, Jimmy.”
― Joel Van Valin, The Grand Dissolute

“It was rather like being in Europe, he thought.”
― Joel Van Valin, The Grand Dissolute

“I always thought this time travel was a bad business,” the constable observed dryly, taking a sip from his lemonade.”
― Joel Van Valin, The Grand Dissolute

“Sometimes it occurs to me that I think about you more than I ought to think about anything besides physics. Look at Nikola Tesla. Invented alternating current; died a virgin in his eighties. You should thank him every time you flip a light switch. If”
― Dexter Palmer, Version Control

“So if Rebecca wanted to hear the news about someone, she either had to e-mail them (which was only a little less weirdly formal these days than mailing a handwritten letter) or call them (which was far too intimate) or text them (and a text from someone you hadn’t kept in touch with regularly had a good chance of going ignored—people got too many texts to respond to them all). And all of these involved remembering that someone existed whom you hadn’t thought of in a while, an ability that had atrophied in the minds of people who could not remember a time without social networking,”
― Dexter Palmer, Version Control

“Big Data’s gift, the way it kept itself growing stronger, was in its ability to persuade the majority of people that the unique collection of physical and personality characteristics that they naively referred to as the “self” was in fact made up of a complex matrix of statistical values, too complicated for humans to process but not so hard for computers to comprehend.”
― Dexter Palmer, Version Control

“There were times, and this was one of them, when Rebecca quietly yearned for twentieth-century definitions of civility, when commonly shared air was meant to be filled with words generally agreed to be suitable for all. But in the years after Rebecca’s travels through the silent world, the exodus of its former citizens was nearly complete—the only people who remained were the ones who could not afford to leave.”
― Dexter Palmer, Version Control

“Still, though, he picked movies that someone his age should have had zero interest in—comedies about rich, lonely old men having their lives redeemed by perky, quirky women half their age; turgid tales of couples who lived in improbably spacious Brooklyn brownstones and who were forced to come to terms with their inherently adulterous natures.”
― Dexter Palmer, Version Control

“One life and another: that’s what matters. You have to understand: history can change people, but people can change history too. Because what is history made up of, if not people’s lives and stories and memories?”
― Dexter Palmer, Version Control

“Let us find our own paths; let us make our own attempts at fashioning this world; let us bear the sting of our own inevitable failures. To do otherwise would be to fail Yourself. And the only thing You cannot do is fail.”
― Dexter Palmer, Version Control

“Wild, strong hearts, and powerful minds, were hidden under an enforced propriety and regularity of demeanour and expression, just as their faces had been concealed by their father, under his stiff, unchanging mask.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte

“the widows of the slain, to the number of eleven score, in deep mourning, riding upon white palfreys, and each bearing her husband's bloody shirt on a spear, appeared”
― Walter Scott, Rob Roy

“He told her of horses which he had bought for a trifle and sold for incredible sums; of racing matches, in which his judgment had infallibly foretold the winner; of shooting parties, in which he had killed more birds (though without having one good shot) than all his companions together; and described to her some famous day’s sport, with the fox-hounds, in which his foresight and skill in directing the dogs had repaired the mistakes of the most experienced huntsman, and in which the boldness of his riding, though it had never endangered his own life for a moment, had been constantly leading others into difficulties, which he calmly concluded had broken the necks of many. Little as Catherine was in the habit of judging for herself, and unfixed as were her general notions of what men ought to be, she could not entirely repress a doubt, while she bore with the effusions of his endless conceit, of his being altogether completely agreeable.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“As I told you, I heard Barraclough bellowing in the midst of a conventicle like a possessed bull;”
― Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

“when both were seated on a tuft of heather, in some high lonely place,”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte

“He wrote the kind of books that nobody could be expected to read.”
― Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence

“I don’t think we should trust to what they call passion at all, Caroline. I believe it is a mere fire of dry sticks, blazing up and vanishing: but we watch him, and see him kind to animals, to little children, to poor people.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

“Indisputably, a great, good, handsome man is the first of created things.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

“the aspect of a smiling Melanchthon.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

“They confound it with sparks mounting from Tophet!”
― Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

“A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”
― Anthony Trollope