Jack > Jack's Quotes

“He needs to be corrected, if you don’t mind me saying so. He needs a good talking-to, and perhaps a bit more. My own girls, sir, didn’t care for the Overlook at first. One of them actually stole a pack of my matches and tried to burn it down. I corrected them. I corrected them most harshly. And when my wife tried to stop me from doing my duty, I corrected her.”
― Stephen King, The Shining

“Across the room was a mirror, and deep down in its silver bubble a single word appeared in green fire and that word was: REDRUM.”
― Stephen King, The Shining

“He'd lived so long in anticipation of his own death that to contemplate his future was like standing at the edge of a cliff, staring into a vertiginous rush of open sky.”
― Helene Wecker, The Golem and the Jinni

“These were the world’s first people. Everything they did, every action and decision, was entirely new, without precedent. They had no larger society to turn to, no examples of how to behave. They only had the Almighty to tell them right from wrong. And like all children, if His commands ran counter to their desires, sometimes they chose not to listen. And then they learned that there are consequences to one’s actions.”
― Helene Wecker, The Golem and the Jinni

“And indeed, who can doubt that everything would be different and better, if only England were ruled by village idiots and their drunken friends?”
― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

“[The princess] looks out and sees the humble musician with his lute. But unless the musician turns out to be a prince in disguise, this story cannot end well.”
― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

“You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.”
― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

“He needs guilty men. So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged.”
― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

“It is better not to try people, not to force them to desperation. Make them prosper; out of superfluidity, they will be generous. Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.”
― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

“We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“How often is immense sadness mistaken for courage?”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“Work isn't meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“No one ever remembered a nice day. But no one ever forget the feel of paralyzed fish, the thud of walnut-sized hail against a horse's flank, or the way a superheated wind could turn your eyes to burlap.”
― Erik Larson, Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

“a butterfly in a West African rain forest, by flitting to the left of a tree rather than to the right, possibly set into motion a chain of events that escalates into a hurricane striking coastal South Carolina a few weeks later?”
― Erik Larson, Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

“People seemed to believe that technology had stripped hurricanes of their power to kill. No hurricane expert endorsed this view.”
― Erik Larson, Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

“Time lost can never be recovered...and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere.”
― Erik Larson, Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

“You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing! Depart, I say, and let us have done with you! In the name of God, go!”
― Erik Larson, The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz