Robin > Robin's Quotes

“Politics is ugly. Never doubt what small men will do for great power.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl

“But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas have lasted thousands of years . . . I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope that I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.”
― Rick Bragg

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“I have walked a stair of swords,
I have worn a coat of scars.
I have vowed with hollow words,
I have lied my way to the stars
-Songs of Sapphique”
― Catherine Fisher, Incarceron

“Grief is not as heavy as guilt, but it takes more away from you.”
― Veronica Roth, Insurgent

“Walls have ears.
Doors have eyes.
Trees have voices.
Beasts tell lies.
Beware the rain.
Beware the snow.
Beware the man
You think you know.
-Songs of Sapphique”
― Catherine Fisher, Incarceron

“I remember a story of a girl in Paradise who ate an apple once. Some wise Sapient gave it to her. Because of it she saw things differently. What had seemed gold coins were dead leaves. Rich clothes were rags of cobweb. And she saw there was a wall around the world, with a locked gate.”
― Catherine Fisher, Incarceron

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“Use words to please, to instruct, to soothe. Then stop speaking.”
― Kate Horsley, Confessions of a Pagan Nun

“It is noble to pity a man who is cruel because he is weak, but it is idiotic and dangerous to allow him to have power.”
― Kate Horsley, Confessions of a Pagan Nun

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

“The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both. (Death)”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“I have to say that although it broke my heart, I was, and still am, glad I was there.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“People don't lose their lives, Your Majesty. Their lives are taken from them, or else they lay them down themselves."
And which will be your fate, Gabriel?"
I'll lay mine down, Lady.”
― Sherryl Jordan, Secret Sacrament

“When you get an idea into your head you find it in everything.”
― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

“Spira, spera.

(breathe, hope)”
― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

“His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not one's own.”
― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

“who am i, really? What does any of it mean? i'm so afraid someday everyone will see that i'm just an imposter, a fake, among all the real and gorgeous godheads.
-”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Bread We Eat in Dreams

“a true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“We are all mistaken sometimes; sometimes we do wrong things, things that have bad consequences. But it does not mean we are evil, or that we cannot be trusted ever afterward.”
― Alison Croggon

“Love is one of the true mysteries,' he said at last. 'The truest and the deepest of all. One thing, Maerad: to love is never wrong. It may be disastrous; it may never be possible; it may be the deepest agony. But it is never wrong.”
― Alison Croggon, The Riddle

“The question is not, -- how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education -- but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?”
― Charlotte Mason, School Education: Developing A Curriculum

“Mathematics is the language of science-- but it is also the hidden structure behind art… and its basis is the invisible Logos of God.”
― Stratford Caldecott, Beauty for Truth's Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education

“A university training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society…It is the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them and a force in urging them.”
― Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University

“The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
― Wendell Berry, The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses

“Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.”
― May Sarton