Inocencia Casares > Inocencia's Quotes

“Get up you lazy bastard. The Governor wants a word with you,” said a guard. 
He opened his eyes and smiled. There was another guard standing near the cell door in 
anticipation of any trouble. The prisoner smiled at him, too. 
Now what can the Governor want from me? He wondered. His dishevelled form seemed 
incapable of coherent thought. “It’s nice of him to remember me,” he said aloud, trying to 
concentrate.
“Surprising he’s got any time for a worthless shit like you,” said the first guard. 
“I once used to be a very important person,” the prisoner said feebly.”
― Max Nowaz, The Arbitrator

“Temples are for the gods,” Thucydides said. “No city has the hubris to put her own citizens on a temple.” Phidias promised, “The Athenians will look like gods.”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“The point is to be compassionately, not cruelly, honest. Tell the person what you have heard that worries you. Allow him to respond. You may be surprised at how much sense his answers make.”
― Nancy O'Meara, The Cult around the Corner: A Handbook on Dealing with Other People's Religions

“I’m not convinced we can take them out from a distance, Nathan. That’s always been the American solution, by the way. Bigger guns. Nukes. Drone strikes.”
― Barry Kirwan, When the children come

“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.”
― Oscar Wilde

“It may sound reactionary, I know. But we can all feel it. We've changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries--we're actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation's responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie?
...
Something has happened where we've decided on a personal level that it's all right to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“We’re not at all like the rest of Georgia. We have a saying: If you go to Atlanta, the first question people ask you is, ‘What’s your business?’ In Macon they ask, ‘Where do you go to church?’ In Augusta they ask your grandmother’s maiden name. But in Savannah the first question people ask you is ‘What would you like to drink?”
― John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

“I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere, as far ahead of me as the seniors at Rye when I was in the sixth grade; people who knew everything instinctively, who made their lives work out the way they wanted without even trying, who never had to make the best of a bad job because it never occured to them to do anything less then perfectly the first time. Sort of heroic super-people, all of them beautiful and witty and calm and kind, and I always imagined that when I did find them I'd suddenly know that I Belonged among them, that I was one of them, that I'd been meant to be one of them all along, and everything in the meantime had been a mistake; and they'd know it too. I'd be like the ugly duckling among the swans.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“For thirty years and more,” he said to the slack featured Vatia and Appius Claudius, “I have denied my nature. I have denied myself love and pleasure at first for the sake of my name and my ambition, and later when these had run their course for the sake of Rome. But it is over. Over, over, over! I hereby give Rome back to you to all you little, cocksure, maggot minded men! You are at liberty once more to vent your spleen on your poor country to elect the wrong men, to spend the public moneys foolishly, to think not beyond tomorrow and your own gigantic selves. In the thirty years of one generation I predict that you and those who succeed you will bring ruin beyond redemption upon Rome’s undeserving head!”
― Colleen McCullough, Fortune's Favorites

“Everybody was stark naked, day and night. Luckily it was hot. They let me wear socks.”
― Henri Charrière, Papillon

“You can’t set fires, Anna. Never again. Promise.”
[Anna] aimed her defiance at Mary.
“And you? What’s your reason to hate me?”
Caroline spoke quietly. “We nearly died — in the fire in those mountains and at the house when Ravi had a gun pointed at us.” Her eyes were full of tears. “The fire you set at The Old Hospital could have killed me as well as Janet and Agnes.”
Anna muttered into the syrupy dregs of her tea. “Fire, you’re firing me?”
Mary grimaced. There had been too much fire.”
― Susan Rowland, The Alchemy Fire Murder

“If you always try to subjugate people by coercion, because you are strong, then sooner or later you will run into somebody who is just as strong, if not stronger. Then you'll be in trouble.”
― Max Nowaz, The Polymorph

“Writing is such a damn lonely sickness.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Marcellus cudgeled his memory. What did he know about Arpino? Delicious little melons! Arpino melons! And exactly the right time for them, too.”
― Lloyd C. Douglas, The Robe

“For {she} had adopted the standard of the young: what there was in the moment was everything. And moments followed one another without necessarily belonging to one another.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“Ought to be havin’ a first-rate eddication, at their age. When I was their age I was doin’ all this Latin and stuff”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.”
― Marcel Proust

“Sometimes
when you are trying
not to think about something
it keeps popping back in your head
you can't help it
you think about it
and
think about it
and
think about it
until your brain
feels like
a squashed pea.”
― Sharon Creech, Love That Dog