Beata > Beata's Quotes

“I went to collect the few personal belongings which...I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.”
― Colette

“Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“These woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
― Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
― Anais Nin

“Shakespeare's plays often turn on the idea of fate, as much drama does. What makes them so tragic is the gap between what his characters might like to accomplish and what fate provides them.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.”
― Philip Larkin, High Windows

“What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this ? Do they somehow suppose
It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't remember
Who called this morning ? Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September ?
Or do they fancy there's really been no change,
And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming
Watching light move ? If they don't (and they can't), it's strange:
Why aren't they screaming ?
At death, you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It's only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here. Next time you can't pretend
There'll be anything else. And these are the first signs:
Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power
Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they're for it:
Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines-
How can they ignore it ?
Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting.
People you know, yet can't quite name; each looms
Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,
Setting down a Iamp, smiling from a stair, extracting
A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only
The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,
The blown bush at the window, or the sun' s
Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely
Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live:
Not here and now, but where all happened once.
This is why they give
An air of baffled absence, trying to be there
Yet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving
Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear
Of taken breath, and them crouching below
Extinction' s alp, the old fools, never perceiving
How near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet.
The peak that stays in view wherever we go
For them is rising ground. Can they never tell
What is dragging them back, and how it will end ? Not at night?
Not when the strangers come ? Never, throughout
The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well,
We shall find out.”
― Philip Larkin

“Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.”
― Susan Sontag

“What frustrated me was the thought that with three thousand years of history someone in China, some monk in a monastery halfway up a mountain, must have developed a magic kata, a physical expression of formae. Or at least have got close enough to explain all those legendary swordsmen and their inexplicable desire to roost on the tops of bamboo trees.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Broken Homes

“Fuck me,' I said to Toby. 'We're living in Isengard.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Broken Homes

“I texted Nightingale to let him know our change in disposition and then I picked up my Pliny, because nothing says stuck all alone in your flat like a Roman know-it-all”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Broken Homes

“My dad was a fairy," said Zach. "And by that I don't mean he dressed well and enjoyed musical theatre.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Whispers Under Ground

“Actually I'd always thought he sat in the library with a slim volume of metaphysical poetry until the commissioner called him on the bat phone and summoned him into action. Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale - to the Jag mobile.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Whispers Under Ground

“The media response to unusual weather is as ritualized and predictable as the stages of grief. First comes denial: "I can't believe there's so much snow." Then anger: "Why can't I drive my car, why are the trains not running?" Then blame: "Why haven't the local authorities sanded the roads, where are the snowplows, and how come the Canadians can deal with this and we can't?" This last stage goes on the longest and tends to trail off into a mumbled grumbling moan, enlivened by occasional ILLEGALS ATE MY SNOWPLOW headlines from the *Daily Mail....*”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Whispers Under Ground

“Not being invited in is one of the boxes on the “suspicious behavior” bingo form that every copper carries around in their head along with “stupidly overpowerful dog” and being too quick to supply an alibi. Fill all the boxes and you too could win an all-­expenses-paid visit to your local police station.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Whispers Under Ground

“Zap,’ I said. ‘That’s the technical term for it, is it? What do you call someone who’s been zapped?’

‘Mr. Crispy,’ said Kumar.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Whispers Under Ground

“This is why magic is worse even than quantum physics. Because, while both spit in the eye of common sense, I've never yet had a Higgs bosun turn up and try to have a conversation with me.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Whispers Under Ground

“Somebody doesn't know they're not in Kansas anymore,' said Stephanopoulos.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Whispers Under Ground

“For a terrifying moment I thought he was going to hug me, but fortunately we both remembered we were English just in time. Still, it was a close call.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Moon Over Soho

“What's the biggest thing you've zapped with a fireball?' I asked.
'That would be a tiger,'said Nightingale.
'Well don't tell Greenpeace,' I said. 'They're an endagered species.'
'Not that sort of tiger,' said Nightingale. 'A Panzer-kampfwagen sechs Ausf E.'
I stared at him. 'You knocked out a Tiger tank with a fireball?'
'Actually I knocked out two,' said Nightingale. 'I have to admit that the first one took three shots, one to disable the tracks, one through the driver's eye slot and one down the commander's hatch - brewed up rather nicely.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Moon Over Soho

“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.”
― W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

“The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even—if you will—eccentricity.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“He saw it for the first time: on the day he died he would be wearing unmatching socks, there would be unanswered e-mails, and in the hovel he called home there would still be shirts missing cuff buttons, a malfunctioning light in the hall, and unpaid bills, uncleared attics, dead flies, friends waiting for a reply and lovers he had not owned up to.”
― Ian McEwan, Solar

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”
― Angela Carter

“Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.”
― Angela Carter

“I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.”
― Angela Carter

“To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.”
― Czesław Miłosz

“You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail irreparable loss.”
― Isaiah Berlin