Bev > Bev's Quotes

“If history has taught us anything, Arthur muses, it is that men with mustaches must never achieve positions of power.”
― Tom Rachman, The Imperfectionists

“But my point, you see is that death is misunderstood. The loss of one's life is not the greatest loss. It is no loss at all. To others, perhaps, but not to oneself.”
― Tom Rachman, The Imperfectionists

“The greatest influence over content was necessity--they had holes to fill on every page and jammed in any vaguely newsworthy string of words, provided it didn't include expletives, which they were apparently saving for their own use around the office.”
― Tom Rachman, The Imperfectionists

“...he remembered his uncle saying once how little vocabulary man really needed to get comfortably and even efficiently through his life, how not only in the individual but within his whole type and race and kind a few simple cliches served his few simple passions and needs and lusts.”
― William Faulkner

“...no man can cause more grief than the one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancesters.”
― William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust

“Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them.”
― William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust

“There are good sailors. Well, some good sailors. In a way they are ideal as husbands. They drop in every six months for a wild celebration, then they drop out again before one gets bored with their company or annoyed with by their habits.”
― Kerry Greenwood, Queen of the Flowers

“When Mr. William Faraday sat down to write his memoirs after fifty-eight years of blameless inactivity he found the work of inscribing the history of his life almost as tedious as living it had been, and so, possessing a natural invention coupled with a gift for locating the easier path, he began to prevaricate a little upon the second page, working his way up to downright lying on the sixth and subsequent folios.”
― Margery Allingham, Dancers in Mourning

“But there are roughly two sorts of informed people, aren't there? People who start off right by observing the pitfalls and mistakes and going round them, and the people who fall into them and get out and know they're there because of that. They both come to the same conclusions but they don't have quite the same point of view.”
― Margery Allingham, Dancers in Mourning

“...so bear in mind that majorities, especially respectable ones, are nine times out of ten in the wrong; and that if you see man or boy striving earnestly on the weak side, however wrong-headed or blundering he may be, you are not to go and join the cry against him. If you can't join him and help him, and make him wiser, at any rate remember that he has found something in the world which he will fight and suffer for....”
― Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's Schooldays

“Human nature is the same in all professions.”
― Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

“If death, said my father, reasoning with himself, is nothing but the separation of the soul from the body;--and if it is true that people can walk about and do their business without brains,--then certes the soul does not inhabit there.”
― Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth the doing is what we do for others.”
― Lewis Carroll

“All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.”
― Isak Dinesen

“The real difference between God and human beings, he thought, was that God cannot stand continuance. No sooner has he created a season of a year, or a time of the day, than he wishes for something quite different, and sweeps it all away. No sooner was one a young man, and happy at that, than the nature of things would rush one into marriage, martyrdom or old age. And human beings cleave to the existing state of things. All their lives they are striving to hold the moment fast....Their art itself is nothing but the attempt to catch by all means the one particular moment, one light, the momentary beauty of one woman or one flower, and make it everlasting.”
― Karen Blixen, Seven Gothic Tales

“Let us accept truth, even when it surprises us and alters our views.”
― George Sand, Letters of George Sand

“Indeed such is Montagu’s enthusiasm, and so engaging is his undisguised admiration, that one is almost obligated to overlook the aside on page 311 where Montagu acknowledges indirectly that Tyson was almost entirely in error in all of his conclusions.”
― Richard T Nash, Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century

“Throughout his twenty-eight years on the island, goats are as wild as it gets.”
― Richard T Nash, Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century

“...what could be more vexing than to be feted on his birthday when he wants nothing so much as to retreat in solitude to ponder the approach of his own mortality?”
― Richard T Nash, Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century

“As so often happens when scientists quarrel, a lay audience is left to choose their preferred fairy tale”
― Richard T Nash, Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
― Groucho Marx

“One word
Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
That word is love.”
― Sophocles

“The only thing worse than a boy who hates you: a boy that loves you.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief