Ava > Ava's Quotes

“The interpreter, however, is the shadow. The key is to be invisible. She is the only one in the room who hears the truth, a keeper of secrets.”
― Suki Kim, The Interpreter

“My aunt, who disapproved of gaiety on principle, made a moue of disdain.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The Glass-Blowers

“Where do they go, Sophie, those younger selves of ours? How do they vanish and dissolve?’ ‘They don’t,’ I said. ‘They’re with us always, like little shadows, ghosting us through life.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The Glass-Blowers

“He had only recently learned the word dramaturge and had been looking for opportunities to use it. He had eventually summoned up the courage to try it on Big Lou, but her espresso machine had hissed at a crucial moment and she had not heard him.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The World According To Bertie

“Do you think your dog might have been drunk when he bit these people, Mr Lordie?”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The World According To Bertie

“Modern sentences are short. In Proust, we encounter sentences which appear interminable, meandering on and on in a way which suggests that the author had no desire to bring a satisfying or intriguing line of thought to any form of conclusion, wishing rather to prolong the pleasure, as one might wish if one were an author like Proust, who spent most of his time languishing in bed–he was a chronic hypochondriac–rather than experiencing life–an approach which encouraged him to produce sentences of remarkable length, the longest one being that sentence which, if printed out in standard-size type, would wind round a wine bottle seventeen and a half times, or so we are told by Alain de Boton in his How Proust Can Change Your Life, a book which has surely been read by most of those who have bought it, so light and amusing it is.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The World According To Bertie

“Abby had a little trick that she used any time Red acted like a cranky old codger. She reminded herself of the day she had fallen in love with him. “It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon,” she’d begin, and it would all come back to her—the newness of it, the whole new world magically opening before her at the moment when she first realized that this person that she’d barely noticed all these years was, in fact, a treasure. He was perfect, was how she’d put it to herself. And then that clear-eyed, calm-faced boy would shine forth from Red’s sags and wrinkles, from his crumpled eyelids and hollowed cheeks and the two deep crevices bracketing his mouth and just his general obtuseness,”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“I’m very glad that Matthew phoned,” he said. “I’ve been out of touch, you know. It’s like that out here. You get caught up in your own life and you forget about family back home.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Unbearable Lightness of Scones

“Master Nathaniel Chanticleer, the actual head of the family, was a typical Dorimarite in appearance; rotund, rubicund, red-haired, with hazel eyes in which the jokes, before he uttered them, twinkled like a trout in a burn.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“I’m not the same as you, father,” he said quietly. And then once more he was shaken by great sobs, and screamed out in a voice of anguish, “I have eaten fairy fruit!”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“The Academy represented to the ladies of Lud all that they knew of romance. They remembered the jokes they had laughed at within its walls, the secrets they had exchanged walking up and down its pleached alleys, far more vividly than anything that had afterwards happened to them.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“Master Clement, how far dost thou make it to Higham-on-the-Way?" "A matter of forty miles," said the Chapman; "because, as thou wottest, if ye ride south from hence, ye shall presently bring your nose up against the big downs, and must needs climb them at once; and when ye are at the top of Bear Hill, and look south away ye shall see nought but downs on downs with never a road to call a road, and never a castle, or church, or homestead: nought but some shepherd's hut; or at the most the little house of a holy man with a little chapel thereby in some swelly of the chalk, where the water hath trickled into a pool; for otherwise the place is waterless." Therewith he took a long pull at the tankard by his side, and went on:”
― William Morris, The Well at the World's End

“She had still had the loved child's belief that it would not be allowed for anything too bad to happen to her.”
― Zen Cho, The Terracotta Bride

“Resignation to unhappiness didn't come naturally—she had to learn it.”
― Zen Cho, The Terracotta Bride

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou