John Wolfe > John's Quotes

“The Jewish sages also tell us that God dances when His children defeat Him in argument, when they stand on their feet and use their minds. So questions like Anne's are worth asking. To ask them is a very fine kind of human behavior. If we keep demanding that God yield up His answers, perhaps some day we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God.”
― Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

“There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.”
― Oscar Levant

“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
― E.B. White

“I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”
― Jerome K. Jerome

“The covers of this book are too far apart.”
― Ambrose Bierce

“It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent

“I never made a mistake in my life; at least, never one that I couldn't explain away afterwards.”
― Rudyard Kipling, Under The Deodars

“To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it’s ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.”
― Robert Harris, The Ghost

“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Immaturity

“If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.”
― W.C. Fields

“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.”
― Neal Stephenson

“She would've been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
― Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

“Learn Languages the Right Way. Language acquisition games and abstract communicative method are bullshit. The second-best way to learn a foreign language is alone in a room doing skull-numbing rote memorization of vocabulary, grammar, key phrases, and colloquialisms. The best way is in bed.”
― Chuck Thompson, Smile When You're Lying

“From Orient Point

The art of living isn't hard to muster:
Enjoy the hour, not what it might portend.
When someone makes you promises, don't trust her

unless they're in the here and now, and just her
willing largesse free-handed to a friend.
The art of living isn't hard to muster:

groom the old dog, her coat gets back its luster;
take brisk walks so you're hungry at the end.
When someone makes you promises, don't trust her

to know she can afford what they will cost her
to keep until they're kept. Till then, pretend
the art of living isn't hard to muster.

Cooking, eating and drinking are a cluster
of pleasures. Next time, don't go round the bend
when someone makes you promises. Don't trust her

past where you'd trust yourself, and don't adjust her
words to mean more to you than she'd intend.
The art of living isn't hard to muster.

You never had her, so you haven't lost her
like spare house keys. Whatever she opens,
when someone makes you promises, don't. Trust your
art; go on living: that's not hard to muster.”
― Marilyn Hacker

“RAYMONDE: What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“Why am I standing in this stupid empty, empty tub?" she asked.
"So it catches all the blood," he replied.”
― Kevin O'Brien, Make Them Cry

“Our job is to stand up for our beliefs, cling to them no matter what, and wait for our redemption. Jesus will not let us down.”
― Terri Blackstock, If I Run

“Let me tell you who occupies this prison cell. Perfidious, his name is Perfidity. His name is Liar, Blasphemer, Defiler of Truth, Black-Tongued. He lies down with all members of the congregation equally, tells them each in turn they are his beloved, while he is already attending to the next assignation in his relentless rendezvous with the consumption of souls.
He will inhale you, devour you, eat the pulp of your soul and spit out the husk. Behind his eyes lies nothing save the fevered light of unholy candles. He is black magic without redemption, without even the nethermost quality that could be termed human, or rather, he is not that at all; he is all that is estimated human, the sum total of those values that achieve the color that is the presence of all colors: black. He lacks a center—each of you is his center—and he has sucked the marrow dry of each of those he has visited. Beware of the son of Moloch that paces to and fro in that barred room.
This unholy creature is none other than the author of this narrative, Truman Ferris Pinter”
― Les Edgerton, The Rapist

“For that matter, rape itself is instrumental in propagating the species in that many of these so-called perverse acts result in pregnancy. The rapist should be applauded, not reviled”
― Les Edgerton, The Rapist

“He knew what was going to happen next. He’d answer her silly-ass question, take her drunken ass out on the dance floor, and an hour later they’d be doing the horizontal cha-cha. Not bad work if you could get it though, he thought...
“How’d I lose my eye?”
― Les Edgerton, The Perfect Crime

“Come on, big boy,” she said. “I guess it don’t matter what it cost since you didn’t ask, but that forty, that’s for head. You want to put it in, that’s forty more.”
― Les Edgerton, The Perfect Crime

“He was slowwalking somebody for a carton of butts and the guy came by and threw acid in his face. He lay in his cell and screamed all night. The hack downstairs just kept on reading his magazine. .... In the morning, after we went out for chow they came and got Melrose who was down to a little occasional whimper by then. None of us heard anything we said, when they asked. When Melrose got out of the hospital, he had pink blotches all over his face, looked like bubble gum. Permanent blotches. Also, he lost an eye.”
― Les Edgerton, Just Like That

“His father, on the other hand, had never met a pause he didn’t need to fill,”
― Brian Freeman, The Voice Inside

“Frank Macy looked surprised.

That was what Cab thought as he studied the dead man’s eyes. Surprised that he had been conned. Surprised that a man who was smart, cool, and lethal could be played for a fool.”
― Brian Freeman, Season of Fear

“The knife was warm, heated by the dying man's severed entrails.”
― Brian Freeman, Season of Fear

“Do you always carry a gun?’ Peach asked.
***
‘It’s Florida,’ Annalie said. She hefted her purse up and down as if she were working out with weights. ‘Even Mickey Mouse probably carries a piece.”
― Brian Freeman, Season of Fear

“Tarla answered the door in a black silk nightgown and robe. Her feet were bare. Her bed hair was mussed. She was beautiful, but he could see a hint of age in her face, as if it were the first time he’d noticed that she was growing older.”
― Brian Freeman, Season of Fear

“He felt satisfaction that the attack had gone as he anticipated, but he also felt oddly empty about the experience. He’d expected adrenaline. He’d expected the high of being back in the game. Instead, the violence itself had done nothing for him. Watching her realize that he’d won, watching the light go out of her eyes, had been a hollow victory.

Maria Lopes would be different.”
― Brian Freeman, The Voice Inside

“The old man wasn’t quite gone yet. His lungs gurgled.

Rudy was hungry. He checked the refrigerator and found a recent deli bag of sliced turkey. He sat on the bed, finished the turkey, and watched the traffic crawling on the street outside as he waited for Keyes to die.”
― Brian Freeman, The Voice Inside

“I've long maintained that women are born knowing things it takes men a whole lifetime to figure out. This was simply one more case in point.”
― J.A. Jance, Justice Denied