Joe K. > Joe's Quotes

“Wait and see,” said Elphaba. “Wrong takes an awful long time to be proven, in my experience. Meanwhile, why don’t you come back sometime?”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“But if our paths cross in a legitimate way, Master Boq, I will do you the courtesy at least of not ignoring you. I trust you will be satisfied with that.” “Never,” said Boq with a smile, “but it’s a start.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so. But to me the future is still black and blank—is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers—shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle—to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“A successful dinner party needs just one person all the others loathe, Pete—it gives everyone something to unite against.”
― Kate Quinn, The Briar Club

“I sometimes think this country is an eternal battle between our best and our worst angels. Hopefully we’re listening to the good angel more often than the bad one.” She sighed. “We do that, and change will come.”
― Kate Quinn, The Briar Club

“Claire obeyed, thinking that for the first time, she knew why Miss Haskell and Miss Wing were lifers here. Because for every McCarthy this country threw at you, it also threw a Margaret Chase Smith. And by god, when you found one, you backed her up because she was going to find herself in a lot of tight corners.”
― Kate Quinn, The Briar Club

“Gloria felt herself floating toward a great open space where her anger at Papa could free her. But she would not, could not, take another step toward that void. Papa was a good man—an important man, Reverend Jenkins and the rest of the back-porch men said—and all important people made sacrifices.”
― Tananarive Due, The Reformatory

“They plan to arrest all the Danish Jews. They plan to take them away. And we have been told that they may come tonight.” “I don’t understand! Take them where?” Her father shook his head. “We don’t know where, and we don’t really know why. They call it ‘relocation.’ We don’t even know what that means. We only know that it is wrong, and it is dangerous, and we must help.”
― Lois Lowry, Number the Stars

“and I want you all to remember—that you must not dream yourselves back to the times before the war, but the dream for you all, young and old, must be to create an ideal of human decency, and not a narrow-minded and prejudiced one. That is the great gift our country hungers for, something every little peasant boy can look forward to, and with pleasure feel he is a part of—something he can work and fight for.”
― Lois Lowry, Number the Stars

“Be humble for you are made of earth
Be noble for you are made of stars. —SERBIAN PROVERB”
― Alka Joshi, The Secret Keeper of Jaipur

“Jacques wants to share the joy of discovering an author who speaks to one’s soul, the thrill of losing oneself in a story more vivid and exciting than real life. He will call his shop La Page Cachée – The Hidden Page – because he knows the magic that is to be found within the covers of a book.”
― Daisy Wood, The Forgotten Bookshop in Paris

“Everything I am is down to you. Your spirit gives me the courage to hope and dream and fight for what’s right. One day our children will grow up in a free country, we have to believe that, and they will be able to act and think as they please. Don’t be afraid, chéri. Death is coming for all of us, sooner or later. It’s how we live that matters.”
― Daisy Wood, The Forgotten Bookshop in Paris

“Jacques let the two men out, then ran through the mess that had been made of his shop and upstairs to their apartment. His mother’s room was silent. The only sound he could hear was the wheezing of his own lungs as he made his way over to the bed. Maman lay still, her eyes wide open but seeing nothing. Gently he pressed them shut, then sank to his knees and wept. He had failed his mother when she needed him most. She had died alone and he would never forgive himself for that – or the Germans, either.”
― Daisy Wood, The Forgotten Bookshop in Paris

“You don’t know that glass is broken if you don’t hear it break. Even when you see it, it still doesn’t fully register in your mind. But when you step on it, oh, then you feel it. That’s the moment of truth. Feeling is how reality makes itself known. Pain is its ultimate manifestation.”
― Iliana Xander, Love, Mom

“Having a teenager is like having a really, really shitty roommate. They eat all your food and steal your clothes and take money out of your purse and borrow your car without asking.” She put her hand over her heart. “But they soften you in ways you can’t imagine. It’s so unexpected. They just smooth out your hard lines. They make you into this better version of yourself that you never even knew was there.”
― Karin Slaughter, Pretty Girls

“it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (The Gothic Chronicles Collection): Deluxe Edition

“Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits,”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (The Gothic Chronicles Collection): Deluxe Edition

“Oh, Grace.” Jude looked at her granddaughter through a blur of tears. In the soft focus, she saw not only Grace, but Zach and Mia, too. And the Lexi who had been a part of them. They were all in Grace’s face, in her eyes, in the pink bow of her mouth. How had Jude forgotten that?”
― Kristin Hannah, Night Road

“Before, she would have seen disorder here, plants that grew where they weren’t supposed to and bloomed with abandon. She would have gone in search of her tools—clippers and trowels and stakes—and set about the task of re-creation. Now, though, on this bright morning, she saw what she hadn’t seen before. There was a beauty in chaos, a wildness that hinted at things gone wrong and mistakes overcome.”
― Kristin Hannah, Night Road

“Damn this war, anyway, he thought, and damn every war. What good was this to anybody? Men blowing each other to smithereens, flattening cities, setting islands on fire. And all of it getting worse by the day, with ever more horrible weapons.”
― Olivia Hawker, The Stars and Their Light

“She turned her head on the grass to look at Betty. The girl continued to gaze at the stars, and her face, in profile, was picked out by starlight, sharp and illumined as if by a halo of consecrated fire. Betty was braver than she realized, braver than Mary Agnes could ever be. For she looked full into the face of mystery and found the cold clarity of truth. It, too, was a mirror’s surface. Mary Agnes prayed that Betty’s looking glass would never break.”
― Olivia Hawker, The Stars and Their Light

“The bishop himself has made his decision. It’s not our place to question a man of such discernment.”
― Olivia Hawker, The Stars and Their Light

“But I also learned a lot about life. And here’s what I know. It’s hard. Also, love can be confusing because when someone loves you, they don’t always say the words out loud. Instead, they might say something like, “What are you, Denny Voss?” and I’d say, “One of the best things that ever happened to you,” then that person would say, “You got it, cowboy!” Or someone else might say, “You’re worth ten of those other kids, Denny, and don’t you ever forget it!” and another person might say, “Buck up” and “Don’t be a pussy” and “Life is hard all over” and it might not sound like any of them are saying they love you, but that’s what they’re doing—you know it all the way inside your bones. I also know it hurts when someone you love dies, but I think it’s supposed to because if it didn’t they’d be easy to forget and who wants to forget all the louds and quiets about someone you love after they’re gone? Not me.”
― Holly Kennedy, The Sideways Life of Denny Voss

“They still seem to like you, though,” says Rosie. “That’s because I lose,” says Ferdy. “If I’d won, they’d hate me. That’s politics.”
― Richard Osman, We Solve Murders

“I stood beside the pump organ and pulled my harmonica from my pocket, and Miss Stratton and I played together the song we’d been practicing in secret. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t cry. I wanted to deliver the only gift I had to offer in the memory of Cora Frost. But as I started blowing the first notes of “Shenandoah,” the tears began to run. I played on anyway, and Miss Stratton followed, and the music itself seemed to weep and not just for what we’d lost that week. It was for the families and the childhoods and the dreams that were, even for those of us so young, already gone forever. But as I continued, I went to that place only music could take me, and although Cora Frost was dead and about to be buried along with my fleeting hope of a better life, I imagined she was listening somewhere, with her husband at her side, and they were both smiling down on me and Emmy and Albert and Mose and all the others whose lives, at least for a while, had been better because of them. And in the end, that’s where my tears were coming from.”
― William Kent Krueger, This Tender Land

“Since Blacks weren’t really allowed to purchase homes, nice cars were really the only way to show affluence and accomplishment. And the automobiles they typically purchased were large because often whole families had to sleep in them. And the powerful engines were critical, to outrun whites intent on doing them harm, including the police.”
― David Baldacci, A Calamity of Souls

“That’s why reading is more personal than watching a TV drama, film or a stage play. In those two mediums, everyone sees the same thing at the same time,’ Jo says, still beaming.”
― Amanda James, The Midnight Bookshop

“Ferguson said to Poirot: “Do you think she really means that?” “Certainly.” “She prefers that pompous old bore to me?” “Undoubtedly.” “The girl’s mad,” declared Ferguson. Poirot’s eyes twinkled. “She is a woman of an original mind,” he said. “It is probably the first time you have met one.”
― Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile

“Yet sometimes”
― Evie Woods, The Story Collector