Paula Tohline Calhoun > Paula Tohline's Quotes

“To have endured horrors, to have seen the worst of humanity and have your life made unrecognizable by it, to come out of all that honorable and brave— that was magical.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was. Likewise, I never imagined that home might be something I would miss.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“When someone won't let you in, eventually you stop knocking.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“Because we weren’t like other people. We were peculiar.”
“Peculiar how?”
“Oh, all sorts of ways,” he said. “There was a girl who could fly, a boy who had bees living inside him, a brother and sister who could lift boulders over their heads.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“...so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn't become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I'd been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“The Muse visits during the process of creation, not before.”
― Roger Ebert

“At long last, you may no longer distinguish what binds you from what is you.”
― M.T. Anderson, The Pox Party

“...they told me of color, that it was an illusion of the eye, an event in the perceiver's mind, not in the object; they told me that color had no reality; indeed, they told me that color did not inhere in a physical body any more than pain was in a needle.

And then they imprisoned me in darkness; and though there was no color there, I still was black, and they still were white; and for that, they bound and gagged me.”
― M.T. Anderson, The Pox Party

“We must curb ourfury, and allow sadness to diminish, and speak our stories with coolness and deliberation.
”
― M.T. Anderson, The Pox Party

“I do not know what I regret. I sit with my pen, and cannot find an end to that sentence.”
― M.T. Anderson, The Pox Party

“Perhaps his gloom was due to his profession, that he lived among fallen empires, and in reading these languages that had not been spoken by the common man in centuries, he had all about him the ruin of language, evidence of toppled suburbs, grass growing among the mosaics, and voices that had been choked with poison, iron, age, or ash.”
― M.T. Anderson, The Pox Party

“...for reading, once begun, quickly becomes home and circle and court and family, and indeed, without narrative, I felt exiled from my own country. By the transport of books, that which is most foreign becomes one's familiar walks and avenues; while that which is most familiar is removed to delightful strangeness; and unmoving, one travels infinite causeways, immobile and thus unfettered.”
― M.T. Anderson, The Pox Party

“He was possessed of a belief that nothing existed, or to be more precise, that only when things were perceived could we be sure that they existed. He troubled himself in arguments, therefore, that when he was not in his chamber, and no one else was in his chamber, there was no one who could say beyond a shadow of a doubt that his desk still existed... or that the bed had not simply frayed into atoms...[Dr. 03-01] developed the habit of quietly leaving company quite suddenly and charging above-stairs to his bedchamber, throwing open the door, and crying "Ah ha!" He found, always, that matter had retained its dubious solidity in his absence; but this did not deter him.”
― M.T. Anderson, The Pox Party

“To participate, then, in the pomp of the orchestra, in the full scintillation thereof, was in the highest degree thrilling. Is this not the image of the perfect republic -- each instrument singing its wonted melody, endeavoring at once to express its part, and, in the same instance to conform its voice to the conversation of the whole?”
― M.T. Anderson, The Kingdom on the Waves

“In my fancy, you perch in the Cooperage & I smell the Peel of the Wood, & the Staves are around you & the white Hogsheads newly bound & the Shavings curled and looped upon the Floor, silver and gold--& you are eating a fat Mushroom.”
― M.T. Anderson, The Pox Party

“...I meditated on the passage of time, and how it may be found in both a dry and a wet or gaseous state; how, though lush, it might be dessicated for storage.”
― M.T. Anderson, The Pox Party

“In all things we become acclimated; this is our strength in wartime, and also our weakness. What is a principle, if it alter with circumstance?
But what is a man, if he cannot change to meet changed times?
And if he can change to meet changed times, is he a man, or several in succession?”
― M.T. Anderson, The Kingdom on the Waves

“Altruism is the kind of pie best eaten with a lot of gravy and little inspection of the kind of kidney it's stuffed with.”
― M.T. Anderson, The Kingdom on the Waves

“...all the beasts from sloth to pigmy shrew, arrayed silently in ordered cavalcade as if waiting admission to the Ark.”
― M.T. Anderson, The Kingdom on the Waves

“The hafts of the tools were stained black with th sweat of us all, our contributions, black and white alike.”
― M.T. Anderson, The Pox Party

“The times, the seasons, the signs may have been mythical; but the sufferings were not. I lay in the dark with the breathing of men around me and knew that then, at that selfsame moment, where dawn groped across the sea, my brethren lay bound in ships, one body atop another, smelling of their green wounds and faeces; I knew in dark houses, there was torture, arms held down, firebrands approaching the soft skin of the belly or arm; and still - there is screaming in the night; there is flight; mothers sob for children they shall not see again; girls feel the weight of men atop them; men cry for their wives; boys dangle dead in the barn; and we smoke their sorrow contentedly; and we eat their sorrow; and we wear their sorrow; and wonder how it came so cheap.
It was for this that we labored and fought, risking our very lives.”
― M.T. Anderson, The Pox Party

“ Hosiah Lister, now dead, rec'd his freedom. ”
― M.T. Anderson, The Pox Party

“Those accustomed to failure fear the novelty of success. Those taught the lessons of subordination are oft timid in the school of self-service.”
― M.T. Anderson, The Kingdom on the Waves

“He held out the written pass. "This is what they want us to be," he said. "They want us to be nothing but a bill of sale and a letter explaining where we is and instructions for where we go and what we do. They want us empty. They want us flat as paper. They want to be able to carry our souls in their hands, and read them out loud in court. All the time, they're on the exploration of themselves, going on the inner journey into their own breast. But us, they want there to be nothing inside of. They want us to be writ on. They want us to be a surface. Look at me, I'm mahogany."
I protested, "A man is known by his deeds."
"Oh, that's sure," said Bono. "Just like a house is known by its deeds. The deeds say who owns it, who sold it, and who'll be buying a new one when it gets knocked down.”
― M.T. Anderson, The Pox Party

“A man in a topiary maze cannot judge of the twistings and turnings, and which avenue might lead him to the heart; while one who stands above, on some pleasant prospect, looking down upon the labyrinth, is reduced to watching the bewildered circumnavigations of the tiny victim through obvious coils - as the gods, perhaps, looked down on besieged and blood-sprayed Troy from the safety of their couches, and thought mortals weak and foolish while they themselves reclined in comfort, and had only to snap to call Ganymade to theeir side with nectar decanted.
So I, now, with the vantage of my years, am sensible of my foolishness, my blindness, as a child. I cannot think of my blunders without a shriveling of the inward parts - not merely the disiccation attendant on shame, but also the aggravation of remorse that I did not demand explanation, that I did not sooner take my mother by the hand, and-
I do not know what I regret. I sit with my pen, and cannot find an end to that sentence.”
― M.T. Anderson, The Pox Party

“Prince," says I, "it will go down the easier if you Chew."
He did not respond; so I repeated my Instructions.
Said he, "We take in the Flesh of other Beasts. We pack ourselves full of them. We are their Burial Ground."
The Rest of us- his Mess- gaped.
He reached into his Mouth, & removed the Gobbet; and placed the Gobbet on his Plate. He regarded the Plate balanced upon his skinny Knees; & all the life left him as he beheld that Mound of Flesh.
Poor, unspeaking, tormented Creature.”
― M.T. Anderson, The Pox Party

“Hosiah Lister, now dead, rec'd his freedom."
Consider, then, the full measure of my sadness, reading this inscription; not merely for Hosiah Lister, but for all of us, consider the dear cost of liberty in a world so hostile, so teeming with enemies and opportunists, that one could not become free without casting aside all casualty, all choice, all will, all identity; finding freedom only in the spacious blankness of unbeing, the wide plains of nonentity, infinite and still.”
― M.T. Anderson, The Pox Party

“Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.”
― Desmond Tutu

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”
― Mark Twain