Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all) > Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)'s Quotes

“What must human beings be, to destroy what they can never create?”
― Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya

“One hundred years from now, the people who come after us, for whom our lives are showing the way--will they think of us kindly? Will they remember us with a kind word? I wish to God I could think so.”
― Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya

“When people's brains stop working, just go somewhere else." (Death of a Doxie)”
― Rex Stout

“A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about them."

[Life magazine, December 10, 1965]”
― Rex Stout

“Millions of American women, and some men, commit that outrage every summer day. They are turning a superb treat into mere provender. Shucked and boiled in water, sweet corn is edible and nutritious; roasted in the husk in the hottest possible oven for forty minutes, shucked at the table, and buttered and salted, nothing else, it is ambrosia. No chef’s ingenuity and imagination have ever created a finer dish. American women should themselves be boiled in water.”
― Rex Stout

“MY rule is never to be rude to anyone unless you mean it.”
― Rex Stout

“The more you put in your brain, the more it will hold -- if you have one.”
― Rex Stout

“E. M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He's a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain't going to be no tea.”
― Katherine Mansfield, Katherine Mansfield Notebooks: Complete Edition

“The ostrich burying its head in the sand does at any rate wish to convey the impression that its head is the most important part of it.”
― Katherine Mansfield, Journal of Katherine Mansfield

“The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.”
― Lorraine Hansberry

“Ach, Tchekov! Why are you dead? Why can’t I talk to you in a big darkish room at late evening—where the light is green from the waving trees outside? I’d like to write a series of Heavens: that would be one.”
― Katherine Mansfield, Journal of Katherine Mansfield

“The fact is, for most of us, what happens to ourselves is so much more important than what happens to other people that the smallest mote in our own eye will prevent us from being unduly harrowed by someone else's beam.”
― Patricia Wentworth, Eternity Ring

“When I was growing up I always wanted to be someone. Now I realize I should have been more specific.”
― Lily Tomlin

“Is it easier to be than to do?”
― Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede

“As with most situations in my life, Emery's dress was much harder to get out of than it had been to get into.”
― Hester Browne, The Little Lady Agency

“Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”
― Shel Silverstein

“Of love and my parents, there is little to be written; their relationship to their children was utilitarian. We were fed and housed and dressed and outfitted with more cash than our associates and that was all. We were also vaguely taught certain vague absolutes: that we were better than no one but infinitely superior to everyone...”
― Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black

“To get irritated is to lose our way in life.”
― Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

“No animal, according to the rules of animal-etiquette, is ever expected to do anything strenuous, or heroic, or even moderately active during the off-season of winter.”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“Phone calls in the dead of the night never brought good news.”
― Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973

“I always felt as if I'd been handed a cardboard box crammed full of monkeys. I'd take the monkeys out of the box one at a time, carefully brush off the dust, give them a pat on the bottom, and send them scurrying off into the fields. I never knew where they went from there.”
― Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973

“I told them a thousand times if I told them once:
Stop fooling around, I said, with straw and sticks;
They won’t hold up; you’re taking an awful chance.
Brick is the stuff to build with, solid bricks.
You want to be impractical, go ahead.
But just remember, I told them; wait and see.
You’re making a big mistake. Awright, I said,
But when the wolf comes, don’t come running to me.
The funny thing is, they didn’t. There they sat,
One in his crummy yellow shack, and one
Under his roof of twigs, and the wolf ate
Them, hair and hide. Well, what is done is done.
But I’d been willing to help them, all along,
If only they’d once admitted they were wrong.”
― Sarah Henderson Hay, Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle

“There's not a branch of publishing or broadcasting that doesn't depend in some way on advertising. It'd be like an aquarium without water. Why, ninety-five percent of the information that reaches you has already been preselected and paid for.”
― Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

“He was somewhat of a loner by temperament--because though never wholly happy when alone, he was usually slightly more miserable when with other people.”
― Colin Dexter, The Wench is Dead

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“She says she prays to God to strike Hitler dead. Cannot help thinking if God wanted to do that he would not have waited till Mrs. Helm asked him to do so.”
― Nella last, Nella Last's War: The Second World War Diaries of Housewife, 49

“It's true, I suffer a great deal--but do I suffer well? That is the question.”
― Therese de Lisieux, St. Therese of Lisieux: Her Last Conversations

“Judgement is poverty.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

“God is very precise in this point; he will say to such as invent ways to worship him of their own, coin means to mortify corruption, obtain comfort in their own mint: 'Who hath required this at your hands?' This is truly to be 'righteous over-much,' as Solomon speaks, when we will pretend to correct God's law, and add supplements of our own to his rule.”
― William Gurnall

“Beware of anger. It is the most difficult to remove of all the hindrances. But it is the alcohol of the body, you know, and the devil of it is that it deadens the perceptions.”
― Margery Allingham