Maura Heaphy Dutton > Maura's Quotes

“Thus with a swipe of flesh on stone we carry our vertebrate pedigree back 525 million years ... A silvery sliver of a thing took us away from trilobites and snail onto our own special path: one which led to land, to Tyrannosaurus Rex, and The New York Times.”
― Richard Fortey, Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The Story of the Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind

“Too wistful. Too poignant. These walk-around-town-books, these day-in-the-life stories. I know writers love them. But I think it's hard to feel bad for this Swift fellow of yours. I mean, he has the best life of anyone I know.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less

“A white middle-aged American man walking around with his white middle-aged American sorrows?
Jesus, I guess so.
Arthur. Sorry to tell you this. It's a little hard to feel sorry for a guy like that.
Even gay?
Even gay.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less

“This is the real thing,' said Caroline. 'It's the deepest, the profoundist. It's the big bazonga, it's really existential.'

"OK," I said, watching a distant sweeper with a faulty program banging again and again into the information kiosk, 'just don't tell me it's a metaphor, OK?”
― Russell Hoban, Fremder

“Lots of noise but behind the hiss of purple rain the silence is cruising like a shark.”
― Russell Hoban, Fremder

“There is a tiger in my room,' said Frances.
'Did he bite you?' said Father.
'No,' said Frances.
'Did he scratch you?' said Mother.
'No,' said Frances.
'Then he is a friendly tiger,' said Father. 'He will not hurt you. Go back to sleep.”
― Russell Hoban, Bedtime for Frances: A Cozy Classic About a Badger's Funny Sleep Ritual for Kids

“Now she could only shape him to her own ideal. She preferred him as a father, tall and gentle-voiced. She tried him in good clothes. She sat him gravely in a parlor, amid the rustle of silk dresses. She heard the clink of silver on a china rim.”
― Karen Fisher, A Sudden Country

“... Lucy stood thinking how little point there seemed in any past so far away, and how little point there seemed in talking of the future over which they had not the least control, toiling as they were toward something she could scarcely imagine.”
― Karen Fisher, A Sudden Country

“So she fell into a black silence, she who had not been entitled to choose which home, which life. Who had gone out in a buggy a few times with a man of an age to be her father, ... agreed to marry. Who had accepted, not chosen. Because she was not a man.”
― Karen Fisher, A Sudden Country

“Ideas will not save us, he thought. Not right or wrong not peace or retribution. Our stories are all we have. The only thing that can ever save us is to learn each other's stories. From beginning to end.”
― Karen Fisher, A Sudden Country

“I'm deeply skeptical of any book that doesn't begin with a corpse.”
― Peter Swanson

“It takes more than knowing how to point the ship to be a captain," he said with more than a touch of black choler. "It takes knowing where and why to point it.”
― Michael Flynn, The Wreck of The River of Stars

“... but perhaps Richard could do a piece on the human angle? Did they mutter any tribal incantations while they did the killings, for example? Did they eat body parts like they did in the Congo? Was there a way of trying truly to understand the minds of these people?”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“We are all in this war and it is up to us to decide to become somebody else or not ...”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“To be honest, even if I were to look at the stars in the sky, I wouldn't be thinking about your philosophical questions. I have too much to worry about! I gotta pay the mortgage, save for the kids' college, and handle an endless stream of cases ... I'm a simple man without a lot of complicated twists and turns. Look down my throat and you can see out my ass ...”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Your charge is to exploit and create environmental problems to make the population loathe science and modern industry.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Everything that's happening is coordinated by someone behind the scenes with one goal: to completely ruin scientific research”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“The stars breathe?
It's only a metaphor ...”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance—without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you’d never find the end. On”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Life does not follow the narrative structures of Art. Corrupted by fiction, I anticipated change and plot developments; I overlooked the awesome power of things to stay the same.”
― Anna Lyndsey, Girl in the Dark

“Dancing was a hot affair. I danced twice with Anne Beddingfeld and she had to pretend she liked it. I danced once with Mrs Blair, who didn't trouble to pretend, and I victimized various other damsels who appearance struck me favourably.”
― Agatha Christie, The Man in the Brown Suit

“By the way, I should like to make it clear here and now that the story will not be a story of South Africa. I guarantee no genuine local colour -- you know the sort of thing -- half a dozen words in italic on every page. I admire it very much, but I can't do it.”
― Agatha Christie, The Man in the Brown Suit

“This crime is conditioned by the place. To understand the one you've got to study the other”
― Lorac E. C. R.

“Do you think we've got control of everything here, because this place is small and simple and we're in charge of it? It's so obvious we're in control, I guess we may have forgotten we're not in control. And I wonder if those people on the Earth, because it was so clear they weren't in control, forgot that they were.”
― Molly Gloss, The Dazzle of Day

“Sometimes we are reminded: All of us live steadfastly in that moment, the one between hope and the exercise of God's will.”
― Molly Gloss, The Dazzle of Day

“The living carry us inside them like pearls. We survive only as long as they remember us.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead

“Reading is too intimate," Spofforth said. "It will put you too close to the feelings and ideas of others. It will disturb and confuse you.”
― Walter Tevis, Mockingbird

“The very lamplighter, who ran on before, ... laughed out loudly as the Spirit passed, though little kenned the lamplighter that he had any company but Christmas!”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

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

“... the difficulty was in training the eye to see the whole world of usual forms -- patterns of brick, painted plaster, carved and carpentered wood -- not as "buildings" and "streets" but as an infinite series of free and arbitrary choices. There was no place in such a scheme for orders, styles, sophistication, taste. ("The Asian Shore")”
― Thomas M. Disch, Fundamental Disch