Annamaria Mechler > Annamaria's Quotes

“I kissed him once," she whispered.
"Well done. What did he do?"
"Um..." Deryn sighed. "He woke up.”
― Scott Westerfeld

“The Mother of God. Good-looking. Well-dressed. A good person. Knows how to make the absolute best of a situation. And never uppity about any of it.”
― Kathleen Zamboni McCormick, Dodging Satan: My Irish/Italian, Sometimes Awesome, But Mostly Creepy, Childhood

“Imagine, Dracula a pawn in the hands of the infidel. I wasted no time there-I learned everything I could about them, so that I might surpass them all. That was when I vowed to make history, not to be its victim.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

“Dancing and riding, it’s the same damn thing. It’s about trust and consent.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer

“By equating the human experience with data patterns, Dataism undermines our main source of authority and meaning, and heralds a tremendous religious revolution, the like of which has not been seen since the eighteenth century. In the days of Locke, Hume and Voltaire humanists argued that ‘God is a product of the human imagination’. Dataism now gives humanists a taste of their own medicine, and tells them: ‘Yes, God is a product of the human imagination, but human imagination in turn is the product of biochemical algorithms.’ In the eighteenth century, humanism sidelined God by shifting from a deo-centric to a homo-centric world view. In the twenty-first century, Dataism may sideline humans by shifting from a homo-centric to a data-centric view. The”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

“We saw the brutality around us not as a matter of taking an emotional side, or of good versus evil, but as the nature of evil itself, where good and bad do not come into play.”
― Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

“There's never any great risk as long as you have money.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Is that vodka?" Margarita asked weakly.
The cat jumped up in his seat with indignation.
"I beg pardon, my queen," he rasped, "Would I ever allow myself to offer vodka to a lady? This is pure alcohol!”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“I would rather have a mule I can depend upon than a race horse that I can’t depend upon.”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Do you think we ever really survive our childhoods?”
― Michael Cunningham, Day

“Why lock yourself in your own cage when someone is handing you a key?”
― Gregory Maguire

“Enough is the same as a feast.”
― Thomas Malory, Le Mort d'Arthur: King Arthur and the Legends of the Round Table - Volume I, Large Print

“The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“Sir Gerald Moore: I was at dinner last evening, and halfway through the pudding, this four-year-old child came alone, dragging a little toy cart. And on the cart was a fresh turd. Her own, I suppose. The parents just shook their heads and smiled. I've made a big investment in you, Peter. Time and money, and it's not working. Now, I could just shake my head and smile. But in my house, when a turd appears, we throw it out. We dispose of it. We flush it away. We don't put it on the table and call it caviar.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

“If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn't as cynical as real life.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“My prayers, my tears, my wishes, fears, and lamentations, were witnessed by myself and heaven alone. When we are harassed by sorrows or anxieties, or long oppressed by any powerful feelings which we must keep to ourselves, for which we can obtain and seek no sympathy from any living creature, and which yet we cannot, or will not wholly crush, we often naturally seek relief in poetry—and often find it, too—whether in the effusions of others, which seem to harmonize with our existing case, or in our own attempts to give utterance to those thoughts and feelings in strains less musical, perchance, but more appropriate, and therefore more penetrating and sympathetic, and, for the time, more soothing, or more powerful to rouse and to unburden the oppressed and swollen heart.”
― Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey

“Čuo sam već šumu gdje jauče poput čovjeka koji se nađe u nevolji; slušao sam kako vjetar pjeva svoju pjesmu među granjem drveća; slušao sam munju kako praska poput upaljena grmlja, kad bljuje iskre i rašljaste plamenove, i sve mi se to činilo tek kao volja Onoga koji drži sve stvari u svojoj ruci.”
― James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans

“Mavis' bear sailed through the air in Cassie's room, falling onto the bed. 'What's he in aid of?' 'He's reconnaissance expert. He wouldn't hear of me enterin' potential hostile ground without testin' for fire. Has his sacrifice been in vain?”
― Christine M. Knight

“We all make mistakes. Go and take your punishment, then come back and start again. Do even better next time. I know you can.”
― Jojo Moyes, One Plus One

“Who would have thought, Mr. Jiabao,
that of this whole family, the lady with the short skirt would be the one with
a conscience?”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“p.s. In case you don't know what "Do what needs to be done" means, it means that I want you to go bloody slaughter as many of the Sharan channelers as you can. I'll bet you a full Tar Valon mark-it's only been shaved on the sides a little-that you can't kill twenty.-MC

missive from Mat to Galad”
― Robert Jordan, A Memory of Light

“When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a ham trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can't get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

“Guilt is a hunter.
I was its hostage.”
― Ruta Sepetys, Salt to the Sea

“Hardly anyone still reads nowadays. People make use of the writer only in order to work off their own excess energy on him in a perverse manner, in the form of agreement or disagreement.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.”
― Jack London

“At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time . . . the moment when the atomic bomb flashed over Hiroshima . . . .”
― John Hersey, Hiroshima

“Shall I turn up the light for you?

No, give me deeper darkness. Money is not made in the light.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House

“War es ein Trost oder eine Qual, aus den Zellen des Gefängnisses den Blick auf die Stadt am See zu haben, in der das Leben seinen Lauf nahm? Oder wurde das Leben im Lager gar nicht als ständige Ausnahme- und Notlage empfunden, sondern auch als Leben, das seinen Lauf nahm?”
― Bernhard Schlink, Die Enkelin