Michael Tharp > Michael's Quotes

“I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Do you know, André, I sometimes think that you have no heart.'
'Presumably because I sometimes betray intelligence.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

“I would give you my soul in a blackberry pie; and a knife to cut it with.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Disorderly Knights

“I wish to God,” said Gideon with mild exasperation, “that you’d talk—just once—in prose like other people.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

“Facts are the soil from which the story grows. Imagination is a last resort.”
― Dorothy Dunnett

“I despised men who accepted their fate. I shaped mine twenty times and had it broken twenty times in my hands.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

“Today,’ said Lymond, ‘if you must know, I don’t like living at all. But that’s just immaturity boggling at the sad face of failure. Tomorrow I’ll be bright as a bedbug again.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Disorderly Knights

“[Robin Stewart] was your man. True for you, you had withdrawn the crutch from his sight, but still it should have been there in your hand, ready for him. For you are a leader-don't you know it? I don't, surely, need to tell you?-And that is what leadership means. It means fortifying the fainthearted and giving them the two sides of your tongue while you are at it. It means suffering weak love and schooling it till it matures. It means giving up you privicies, your follies and your leasure. It means you can love nothing and no one too much, or you are no longer a leader, you are led.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, Queens' Play

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Habits are the ruin of ambition, of initiative, of imagination.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

“The crossroads may not be of your own seeking, but at least the road you choose will be your own.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, Queens' Play

“...it is human nature, I suppose, to be futile and ridiculous.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

“To do what you imply would require nothing short of divine intervention. You must change man, not systems.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

“Speed will follow when the mechanism of the movements is more assured.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

“It turns out that one can perpetrate all manner of heinous villainy under a cloak of courtesy and good cheer. . .a man will forfeit all sensible self-interest if he finds you affable enough to share your company over a flagon of ale.”
― Christopher Moore, Fool