Bea > Bea's Quotes

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Providence looks after all the chumps of this world, and personally, I'm all for it.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and to be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“The upshot was that she lost her religion - with a vengeance - and walked out on him, taking these three daughters with her. Faith, Hope and Brenda.”
― Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!

“No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's . . ."
"And?"
"No damn cat, and no damn cradle.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“[She wasn't] a logically reasoning woman, but God is good, and hearts may count in heaven as high as heads.”
― Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

“Whenever a person says to you that they are as innocent as lambs in all concerning money, look well after your own money, for they are dead certain to collar it, if they can. Whenever a person proclaims to you 'In worldly matters I'm a child,' you consider that that person is only a crying off from being held accountable, and that you have got that person's number, and it's Number One. Now, I am not a poetical man myself, except in a vocal way, when it goes round a company, but I'm a practical one, and that's my experience. So's this rule. Fast and loose in one thing, Fast and loose in everything. I never knew it fail. No more will you. Nor no one.”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... Nothing outside you can give you any place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got.”
― Flannery O'Connor , Wise Blood

“I hadn't the heart to touch my breakfast. I told Jeeves to drink it himself.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“No one so dislikes being punished unjustly as the person who might have been punished justly on scores of previous occasions, if he had only been found out.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Tales of St. Austin's

“and Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.”
― Herman Melville

“I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way--either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was spilled for it.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. "Where is it? What death?" There was no fear because there was no death.

In place of death there was light.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“I don't want to wrong anybody, so I won't go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest of suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don't sometimes feel that the stars are God's daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves

“Give me my freedom for as long as I be.
All I ask of living is to have no chains on me.
All I ask of living is to have no chains on me,
And all I ask of dying is to go naturally.”
― Laura Nyro

“The exquisite code of politeness of the Woosters prevented me clipping her one on the ear-hole, but I would have given a shilling to be able to do it. There seemed to me something deliberately fat-headed in the way she persisted in missing the gist.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves

“A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.”
― Dorothy Sayers , Gaudy Night

“What are you to do with the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“The world says: "You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane...”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.”
― Raymond Chandler, Long Goodbye

“...you are strong only as long as you don't deprive people of everything. For a person you've taken everything from is no longer in your power. He's free all over again.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“Scout, I´m telling you for the last time, shut your trap or go home - I declare to the Lord you´re gettin´ more like a girl every day!”
With that, I had no option but to join them.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one'.... (The man who first said that) was probably a coward.... He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he's intelligent. He simply doesn't mention them.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms