Catherine Hines > Catherine's Quotes

“To love another person is to see the face of God.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.”
― Shelby Foote

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“The best index to a person's character is how he treats people who can't do him any good, and how he treats people who can't fight back.”
― Abigail Van Buren

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.”
― C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables & Reflections

“Books are the carriers of civilization...They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman

“All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life—where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.”
― Miranda July, It Chooses You

“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“I've always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you're over about twenty-five there is no other kind. Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming. Any man who claims he's not into strong women is fooling himself mindless; he's into strong women who know how to pout prettily and put on baby voices, and who will end up keeping his balls in her makeup bags.”
― Tana French, Faithful Place

“Truth came home one day, naked and wounded, having been beaten and cursed by the people who did not wish to hear, while his brother Falsehood went dressed in the brightest garments and feasted with every household.
“What shall I do?” cried Truth to the gods. “No man wishes to hear me and all beat me and throw things at me; look, I am covered with dung.”
“You are naked” said the goddess Maat, sympathetically. “No naked one can command respect. Therefore take these robes and you will walk without fear and all men will sit at your feet to hear your stories.” And she dressed Truth in Fable’s garments, and he was welcome at every house.”
― Kerry Greenwood, Out of the Black Land

“Things accumulated in purses. Unless they were deliberately unloaded and all contents examined for utility occasionally, one could find oneself transporting around in one's daily life three lipstick cases with just a crumb of lipstick left, an old eyebrow pencil sharpener without a blade, pieces of defunct watch, odd earrings, handkerchiefs (three crumpled, one uncrumpled), two grubby powder puffs, bent hairpins, patterns of ribbon to be matched, a cigarette lighter without fuel (and two with fuel), a spark plug, some papers of Bex and a sprinkling of loose white aspirin, eleven train tickets (the return half of which had not been given up), four tram tickets, cinema and theatre stubs, seven pence three farthings in loose change and the mandatory throat lozenge stuck to the lining. At least, those had been the extra contents of Phyrne's bag the last time Dot had turned it out.”
― Kerry Greenwood, Murder in Montparnasse

“Loss was like that, Gamache knew. You didn’t just lose a loved one. You lost your heart, your memories, your laughter, your brain and it even took your bones. Eventually it all came back, but different. Rearranged.”
― Louise Penny, The Cruelest Month

“...you have to bear witness to your dead. You simply have to. You have to step into their energy field of whatever remains of their spirit, their soul, their essence and let it pass through your body. And in the passing, maybe a wisp of it adheres to you, grafts itself to your cells. And in this communion, the dead continue to live. Or strive to.”
― Dennis Lehane, Since We Fell

“But he did grievously fear old age, mortal illness and disablement. He dreaded the loss of independence, the indignities of senility, the yielding up of privacy, the abomination of pain, the glimpses of patient compassion in the faces of friends who knew that their indulgences would not be claimed for long.”
― P.D. James, Shroud For A Nightingale

“Thinking that if a person did begin considering supernatural possibilities, that person would no longer be able to think of himself as a completely sane person, and thinking about one’s sanity was maybe not a good thing. It was like thinking about your heartbeat: if you had to go there, you might already be in trouble.”
― Stephen King, The Outsider

“person did what a person could, whether it was setting up gravestones or trying to convince twenty-first-century men and women that there were monsters in the world, and their greatest advantage was the unwillingness of rational people to believe.”
― Stephen King, The Outsider

“It’s Chateau Haut-Bailly 2009. Retails for about two hundred”
― Harlan Coben, Don't Let Go

“The faded engraving read: A Ma Vie de Coer Entier, which was a fifteenth-century French saying, “You Have My Whole Heart for My Whole Life.”
― Harlan Coben, Don't Let Go

“was yet another lesson to me in politics—an occupation which, if it is to be pursued successfully, demands the most extraordinary reserves of self-discipline, a quality that the naive often mistake for hypocrisy.”
― Robert Harris, Conspirata

“But popularity and power, as he well knew, are separate entities. Often the most powerful men in a state can pass down a street unrecognised, while the most famous bask in feted impotence.”
― Robert Harris, Dictator

“It was said, in an earlier age, that the mind of man is a far country which can be neither approached nor explored. But today, under present conditions of scientific achievement, it will be possible for a nation as rich in human and material resources as ours to make the most remote recesses of the mind accessible,” the president vowed. “The mentally ill and the mentally retarded need no longer be alien to our affections or beyond the help of our communities.”
― Eileen McNamara, Eunice: The Kennedy Who Changed the World

“Can a constitution devised centuries ago to replace a monarchy, and based upon a citizens’ militia, possibly hope to run an empire whose scope is beyond anything ever dreamed of by its framers? Or must the existence of standing armies and the influx of inconceivable wealth inevitably destroy our democratic system?”
― Robert Harris, Dictator

“A human being can only train for death by leading a life that is morally good; that is—to desire nothing too much; to be content with what one has; to be entirely self-sufficient within oneself, so that whatever one loses, one will still be able to carry on regardless; to do none harm; to realise that it is better to suffer an injury than to inflict one; to accept that life is a loan given by Nature without a due date and that repayment may be demanded at any time; that the most tragic character in the world is a tyrant who has broken all these precepts.”
― Robert Harris, Dictator

“There is a wonderful line in one of Cicero’s letters to Atticus in which he describes moving into a property and says: I have put out my books and now my house has a soul.”
― Robert Harris, Dictator

“Every evil is easily crushed at birth; allow it to become established and it always gathers strength.”
― Robert Harris, Dictator

“All that will remain of us is what is written down.”
― Robert Harris, Dictator

“I never saw a tree,” Dillard declares, in a valuable piece of advice to writers of any and every stripe, “that was no tree in particular.”
― Annie Dillard, The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New

“Only teenagers think boring is bad. Adults, grown men and women who've been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God. Life has more than enough excitement up its sleeve, ready to hit you with as soon as you're not looking, without you adding to the drama.”
― Tana French, Broken Harbour

“You know what it was like? It was like being in a blizzard. You can’t see what’s right in front of your face, you can’t hear anything except this white-noise roar that never lets up, you don’t have a clue where you are or where you’re heading, and it keeps just coming at you from every direction, just coming and coming and coming. All you can do is keep on taking the next step—not because it’ll actually get you anywhere, just so that you don’t lie down and die. That was what it was like.”
― Tana French, Broken Harbor