mark… > mark…'s Quotes

“Like all good lawyers, Mort pretends he’s agreeing with her, while he’s actually disagreeing. It’s patronizing, but it works. “In general, Your Honor, that’s true. On the other hand, when a video has been tampered with as this one has, or there is a substantial likelihood that it could be taken out of context, it could be unfairly damaging evidence.”
― Sheldon Siegel, Special Circumstances

“Greta coined the phrase, “You are who you eat with.”
― Jane Stanton Hitchcock, Bluff

“There is no point in dwelling on dashed hopes or what might have been. I knew I had to clear my mind, learn from my mistakes, make peace with fate’s little merry pranks, and forge ahead. The great truth of poker—and of life—can be summed up in two words: “Next hand.”
― Jane Stanton Hitchcock, Bluff

“Let me begin afresh. Perhaps, this time, to tell the truth. For in the biting hush of ink on paper, where truth ought raise its head and speak without fear, I have long lied.”
― Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink

“And so we’ve had another night Of poetry and poses And each man knows he’ll be alone When the sacred ginmill closes. —DAVE VAN RONK”
― Lawrence Block, When the Sacred Ginmill Closes

“I wasn’t sure I liked him, but I was just as happy not to like the men I worked for. It bothered me less that way if I felt I was giving them less than full value.”
― Lawrence Block, When the Sacred Ginmill Closes

“The Matthew Scudder novels are among the finest detective books penned in this century.”
― Lawrence Block, When the Sacred Ginmill Closes

“The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, 'Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.'

A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.”
― David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

“Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde

“
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“Girls were born knowing how destructive the truth could be. They learned to hold it in, tamp it down, like gunpowder in an old fashioned gun. Then it exploded in your face on a November day in the rain.”
― Janet Fitch, Paint it Black

“Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.”
― Mark Twain

“The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.”
― Mark Twain

“Get busy living or get busy dying.”
― Stephen King, Different Seasons

“It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“Have a care you mistake not the deadly Nightshade for this; if you know it not, you may let them both alone, and take no harm.” of Nightshade”
― Susan Fletcher, The Highland Witch

“Some things are hard, even if they are right. Even if you know they are the proper, decent way. I was glad to have left herbs for those men whose lungs and minds had not known Highland winters before. It was kindness. And kindness is worth showing.”
― Susan Fletcher, The Highland Witch

“It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down....”
― Kate Morton, The House at Riverton

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“We take pictures because we can't accept that everything passes, we can't accept that the repetition of a moment is an impossibility. We wage a monotonous war against our own impending deaths, against time that turns children into that other, lesser species: adults. We take pictures because we know we will forget. We will forget the week, the day, the hour. We will forget when we were happiest. We take pictures out of pride, a desire to have the best of ourselve preserved. We fear that we will die and others will not know we lived.”
― Michelle Richmond, The Year of Fog

“You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this:
“Rejoice evermore.
Pray without ceasing.
In everything give thanks.”
I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.”
― Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“Over the years
a great deal has to be thrown out.
The notion, for instance,
that happiness is mild and enduring,
something like a southern climate
instead of a bolt of lightning
that leaves scars
cherished a lifetime.”
― Hanny Michaelis, Verzamelde gedichten

“But you can't give up on people. It's one of the three keys of friendship. You gotta listen, you gotta care, and most importantly, you gotta keep trying.”
― Kelly Yang, Three Keys

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
― Rudyard Kipling

“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”
― Henry James

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
― Anais Nin