Dholsten > Dholsten's Quotes

“This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us--mostly from the earth. To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him fro ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often for ever.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“I walked past the stable and carriage house. The path took me cross the whole map of the world I knew. I hadn't yet seen the spinning globe in the house that showed the rest of it. p7”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings

“The pear trees were bare, their limbs spread open like the viscera of a parasol. Stretching into the darkness beyond, the single houses, double houses, and villas were lined up in cramped, neat rows which ran toward the tip of the peninsula. p94”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings

“It was the time of year when migrating crows wheeled across the sky, thunderous flocks that moved like a single veil, and I heard them, out there in the wild chirruping air. Turing to the window, I watched the birds fill the sky before disappearing, and when the air was still again, I watched the empty place where they had been.”
― Sue Monk Kidd

“...it's so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle." p28”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“I remember a story I read once, a soldier, was it at Shiloh? He was talking to me but not with his whole attention. Gettysburg? a soldier so mad with shock that he started burying birds and squirrels on the battlefield. You had lot of little things killed too, in the crossfire, little animals. Many tiny graves. p128”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Minie balls and repeating rifles. That was why the body count was so high. We had trench warfare in America way before WW1. p128”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms, on the way to death. p136”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“...for Hobie, who sorrowed over these elegant old remnants as if they were underfed children or mistreated cats, it was a point of duty to rescue what he could and then with his gifts as carpenter and joiner to recombine them into beautiful young Frankensteins that were in some cases plainly fanciful but in others such faithful models of the period that they were all but indistinguishable from the real thing. p452”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“One eats in holiness and the table becomes an altar. Martin Buber”
― Sylvia Shaw Judson, The Quiet Eye: A Way of Looking at Pictures

“Great peace is found in little busy-ness. Chaucer”
― Sylvia Shaw Judson, The Quiet Eye: A Way of Looking at Pictures

“--here, now, always-- T.S. Eliot”
― Sylvia Shaw Judson, The Quiet Eye: A Way of Looking at Pictures

“The setting of the sun is a difficult time for all fish.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“If you'd told me even a year before...that I'd wind up whispering my sins in the confessional or on my knees saying the rosary, I would've laughed myself cockeyed. More likely pastime?Pole dancer. International spy. Drug mule. Assassin.

I drive under a sky black as graphite to meet my new spiritual director...a bulky Franciscan nun named Sister Margaret, patiently going blind behind fish-tank glasses that magnify her eyes like goggles.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we're formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“She wanted to stay out there, to hang on her branch in the world until the cold had burned down to her bones. She could leave her whitened bones scattered on the snow and depart like light. Whitened bones. A whited sepulcher.”
― Adam Foulds, The Quickening Maze

“The world is a room of heavy furniture. Eventually you are allowed to leave.”
― Adam Foulds, The Quickening Maze

“Death had size an color and shape, texture and grace. There was something concrete to it. In that room, Death had come and gone, swept by, and left behind a mirage of life--it was possible, he realized, to find life in Death.

You are going to see what it is like, someday soon, being in a room full of the dying. They're always waiting, and in their sleep they are waiting most of all. When you're around them, you're waiting too, measuring all the time their breaths, their sighs.”
― Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife

“...fear and pain are immediate, and that, when they're gone, we're left with the concept, but not the true memory--why else...would anyone give birth more than once?”
― Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife

“Honk if you love Jesus, text while driving if you want to meet up.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

“The density of the butterflies in the air now gave her a sense of being underwater, plunged into a deep pond among bright fishes.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

“On the hill behind her crows flew one by one into the bare trees, arranging their dark blots in the scrim of branches and adding their warnings to the drear sounds of this day. Gone, gone, they rasped. Here was a dead world learning to speak in dissonant, unbearable sounds.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

“In the middle of the night she woke up dreaming of huge white heads like turnips, that came trailing after her, at the end of interminable necks, and with vast black eyes. But being a sensible woman, she subdued her terrors and turned over and went to sleep again.”
― H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man

“Kemp: I demonstrated conclusively this morning that invisibility--
I.M: Never mind what YOU'VE DEMONSTRATED!--I'm starving, said the voice, and the night is--chilly for a man without clothes.”
― H.G. Wells

“An invisible man is a man with power.”
― H.G. Wells