Robert > Robert's Quotes

“Behind them lay pain and death and fear; ahead of them lay doubt, and danger, and fathomless mysteries.”
― Philip Pullman, Northern Lights

“After all, I was once like you are, but being the right sort I got where I am.”
― Petronius, The Satyricon

“So the starry sky turns round like a millstone, always bringing some trouble, and men being born or dying.”
― Petronius, The Satyricon

“It's the old headpiece that makes a man, the rest is all rubbish.”
― Petronius, The Satyricon

“It's easier to get philosophers to agree than clocks.”
― Seneca, Apocolocyntosis

“It was a passage made by dwarves, at the height of their wealth and skill: straight as a ruler, smooth-floored and smooth-sided, going with a gentle never-varying slope direct to some distant end in the blackness below.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“Here I was alone, and could take my own time. In other parts of the world one always seems to be in a great hurry, tearing from one spot to the other at a gallop, but out yonder, perhaps because distances are so great, time don't seem to matter; you can jog along, breathing fresh air and enjoying the scenery and your own thoughts about women and home and hunting and booze and money and what may lie over the next hill.”
― George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman and the Redskins

“You like it in jail?"
"It's not too bad. You don't meet the best people, but who the hell wants to?”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“But as human happiness is of a very short duration, so in those days were human fashions upon which it entirely depends.”
― Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub

“And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
― Mark Twain

“There ain't a thing left here,' said Merry, still feeling round among the bones, 'not a copper doit nor a baccy box. It don't look nat'ral to me.'
'No, by gum, it don't,' agreed Silver; 'not nat'ral, nor not nice, says you. Great guns! messmates, but if Flint was living, this would be a hot spot for you and me. Six they were, and six are we; and bones is what they are now.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island