Mary > Mary's Quotes

“Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.”
― Isabelle Eberhardt, The Nomad: Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt

“Julian tried to keep a pleasant smile on his face, though already it felt strained. He was uncomfortable with people who used the word blessed as a part of their everyday speech. The implication was that God was intervening in the minutiae of their lives, hanging around and helping them with their jobs or children or household chores as though He had nothing better to do.
Maybe it was true, Julian thought wryly. Maybe that was why there were wars and murders and earthquakes and hurricanes. God was too busy helping real estate agents find new listings to deal with those other issues.”
― Bentley Little, The Haunted

“A light wind blew through here that carried with it scents of sadness and loss, not recognizable odors but smells that corresponded to nothing, chimerical fragrances able to evoke melancholic memories.”
― Bentley Little, The Vanishing

“He'd gotten this far on bravado and the time honored tradition of ignoring any inconvenient nagging thoughts, but it wasn't working so well now.”
― Michael Langlois, Walker

“Fear crawled up Daniel's spine at the realization that Vincent's humanity was only and affectation to be discarded like a mask when it was no longer useful, revealing the polished bone remnants of his personality, left after the softer emotions had been scoured off after a century or more of power and command.”
― Michael Langlois, Walker

“There's an old saying about the checks one might write with one's mouth, verses the actual purchasing power of one's ass.”
― Michael Langlois

“I sat on my Dad's bed and flipped through the page after empty page. No stamps. No exotic locales. No travel-worn smudges or creases. Just the ID information and my mother's black and white photo which if it where used in a psychology textbook on the meaning of facial expressions would be labelled: Obscenely, heartbreakingly hopeful”
― Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness

“Main Street is as dead as ever. There's a blinding white light at the water-tower end of it and Jesus standing in the centre of it in a pale blue robe with his arms out, palms up, like he's saying how the hell would I know? I'm just a carpenter.”
― Miriam Toews

“From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Tales of H.P. Lovecraft

“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

“Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.”
― Sir Francis Bacon

“A trap is only a trap if you don't know about it. If you know about it, it's a challenge.”
― China Miéville, King Rat

“What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.”
― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

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

“I will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air
Alive
with closed eyes
to dash against darkness”
― E.E. Cummings, Poems, 1923-1954

“Just remember, kid, you can quicker get back a million dollars that was stole than a word that you gave away.”
― Arthur Miller, A View from the Bridge: A Play in Two Acts

“A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.”
― Socrates

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
― Doris Lessing

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

“In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!”
― Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Selected Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay

“Tis the night—the night
Of the grave's delight,
And the warlocks are at their play;
Ye think that without,
The wild winds shout,
But no, it is they—it is they!”
― Arthur Cleveland Coxe, Halloween: A Romaunt

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
― St. Augustine

“To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.”
― Abraham Maslow

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds... Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You

“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes

“If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”
― George S. Patton

“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye