Cb > Cb's Quotes

“One gives people in grief their own way.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell

“. . . humanity walks ever on a thin crust over terrific abysses.”
― Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives' Tale

“Under the volcano! It was not for nothing the ancients had placed Tartarus under Mt. Aetna, nor within it, the monster Typhoeus, with his hundred heads and—relatively—fearful eyes and voices.”
― Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

“The longer I live, the more I rebel. I'm not going to give in; I want to conquer the world!”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

“Never get mixed up in a Welsh wrangle. It doesn't end in blows like an Irish one, but goes on forever.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall

“...any one who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums, Paul learned, who find prison so soul destroying.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall

“And I love to listen to the stars at night. It is like listening to five hundred million little bells . . .”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“For now there is only the darkness expanding and deepening, deepening into light; there is only this final peace, this consciousness of being no more separate, this illumination . . .”
― Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza

“If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

“Be braver in your body, or your luck will leave you. . . . Listen for the voice of water.”
― D.H. Lawrence, The Virgin and the Gipsy

“An oblong puddle inset in the coarse asphalt; like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with quicksilver; like a spatulate hole through which you can see the nether sky. Surrounded, I note, by a diffuse tentacled black dampness where some dull dun dead leaves have stuck. Drowned, I should say, before the puddle had shrunk to its present size.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister

“I want my happiness! . . . Many, many years have I waited for it! It is late! It is late! I want my happiness!”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“Paradise . . . lies hidden within all of us . . . .”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“If I'd had a man of my own, I'd have followed him . . . down to hell.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Eugénie Grandet

“Life is a business transaction.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Eugénie Grandet

“It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer. ”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard

“I have noticed that when I am most serious people are apt to laugh at me, and indeed when after a lapse of time I have read passages that I wrote from the fullness of my heart I have been tempted to laugh at myself. It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine, unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant of an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“Enjoy yourself while you have the chance, I say; we shall all be dead in a hundred years and what will anything matter then?”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“I think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“You can't assume a goddamned thing in this Navy.”
― Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny

“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Just do your duty in silence. When in doubt, when flat on your back, you can look at the ceiling. Who knows what you may see, up there? Funeral wreaths and angels, constellations of dust, stellar or otherwise, the puzzles of spiders. There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Our big mistake was teaching them to read. We won't make that mistake again.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“My God, you big dark handsome brute! I ought to throw a Buick at you.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap.”
― Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark

“Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws . . . . THE RICH AND THE POOR.”
― Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, or the Two Nations

“Under those blue pajamas was a shape to set a man nuts . . . .”
― James M. Cain, Double Indemnity