Callie > Callie's Quotes

“Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“These were the distractions I had to choose from. There were no other lights burning downtown after nine o'clock. On starlight nights I used to pace up and down those long, cold streets, scowling at the little, sleeping houses on either side, with their storm-windows and covered back porches. They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe. Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness some of them managed to contain! The life that went on in them seemed to me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip. This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution.
The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark. The growing piles of ashes and cinders in the back yards were the only evidence that the wasteful, consuming process of life went on at all. On Tuesday nights the Owl Club danced; then there was a little stir in the streets, and here and there one could see a lighted window until midnight. But the next night all was dark again.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“Dandy," Martin replied, once again pleased with his response. A girl can make a guy feel good, great, and even fabulous, but how often does a lady hear that her man is feeling dandy?

Not often, he guessed.”
― Matthew Dicks, Something Missing

“We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand).”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“To us, it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England's policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg was wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have the with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolensk and Moscow and were killed by them.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.”
― Amos Bronson Alcott, Tablets

“Ivy Hisselpenny was the unfortunate victim of circumstances that dictated she be only-just-pretty, only-just-wealthy, and possessed of a terrible propensity for wearing extremely silly hats.”
― Gail Carriger, Soulless

“The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn't really over, so you're relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“If I had a view like this to look down on every day, I would have the energy and inspiration to conquer the world. The trouble is, when you most need such a view, no one gives it to you.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“Today is declared an unscheduled holiday.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“Of course they needed to care. It was the meaning of everything.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.”
― E.B. White

“Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“And to be merry best becomes you; for, out of question, you were born in
a merry hour.

No, sure, my lord, my mother cried; but then there
was a star danced, and under that was I born.”
― William Shakespeare

“It's turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“I lay in the dark thinking about the difficulties of family, how crazy and crooked the stories of a bloodline can be.”
― Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers

“You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“You think, as you walk away from Le Cirque des Rêves and into the creeping dawn, that you felt more awake within the confines of the circus.
You are no longer quite certain which side of the fence is the dream.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“I mean only that I hope they find darkness or paradise without fear of it, if they can.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“...with every step I thought of my mother's courage as she faced her judges. With every step I thought of her cleaving to the truth even as she fell the short distance of the rope. With every step I thought of her pride, her strength, her love. And with every step I thought, I am my mother's daughter, I am my mother's daughter...”
― Kathleen Kent, The Heretic's Daughter

“Like the brief doomed flare of exploding suns that registers dimly on blind men's eyes, the beginning of the horror passed almost unnoticed; in the shriek of what followed, in fact, was forgotten and perhaps not connected to the horror at all.”
― William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist

“It always seems impossible until it's done.”
― Nelson Mandela

“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“Marley was dead: to begin with.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“Christmas time! That man must be a misanthrope indeed, in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused— in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened— by the recurrence of Christmas.”
― Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz