Mandy > Mandy's Quotes

“She likes a quiet life, has few close friends, and makes new ones slowly. ...'I want to work on my next book... and try to be here to garden a little in the fall, and read. I'm married to the man I want to be married to, live in a certain way that I like living. It's very weird to succeed at thirty-nine years old and realize that in the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“I liked stability. I liked safety. I liked traditional and I liked being on time. And this Chip with the beet-red face wasn't any of those things. I did think he was kind of fascinating, though.”
― Joanna Gaines, The Magnolia Story

“Well, I'm mad, but I'm not primer-in-the-face mad.”
― Joanna Gaines, The Magnolia Story

“I sure hope no one from Child Protective Services reads this book. They can't come after me retroactively, can they?”
― Chip Gaines, The Magnolia Story

“I realized that my determination to make things perfect meant I was chasing an empty obsession all day long. Nothing was ever going to be perfect the way I had envisioned it in the past. Did I want to keep spending my energy on that effort, or did I want to step out of that obsession and to enjoy my kids, maybe allowing myself to get messy right along with them in the process? I chose the latter - and that made all the difference.”
― Joanna Gaines, The Magnolia Story

“It was such a blessing to find myself thriving in the middle of the pain. Unless you find a way to do that, there's always going to be this fake illusion that once you get there--wherever "there" is for you--you'll be happy. But that's just not life. If you can't find happiness in the ugliness, you're not going to find it in beauty, either.”
― Joanna Gaines, The Magnolia Story

“...He was succeeded by a gentleman who gazed at the Brussels sprouts and asked if the funny little knobs on the stalks were a form of disease. I told him yes. Eczema.”
― Beverley Nichols, Merry Hall

“Into the room, with great dignity, stalked One and Four. They had mud on their paws, and they naturally decided to sit on my lap. They smelt of moss and loam, and they both set up a slow, tranquil purr. Cats, I thought, are the best.”
― Beverley Nichols, Merry Hall

“By the way, the best place to find names for fictional characters, if you are ever foolish enough to write a novel, is in a Bradshaw or an ABC. All the nicest people always sound like railway stations.”
― Beverley Nichols, Merry Hall

“It is rather his mind has so wide a range, and so rich a retention, that he simply cannot understand that ordinary folk do not always follow him. 'I little imagined,' he said, 'that I should find you in the posture of Sir Isaac Newton.' Oh dear, I thought, here it comes again. What on earth was the meaning of *that*? So I just said No... and went fiddling with the oil-squirter, trying to remember things about Newton.”
― Beverley Nichols, Merry Hall

“We have already noticed two of Our Rose's most irritating affectations - her trick of calling inanimate objects 'he' or 'she,' and the way in which she says 'we' when she means 'you.' To these must now be added a third - her habit of looking rapturously into space and saying 'I see' this or that when, in fact, there is nothing there for her to see at all.”
― Beverley Nichols, Merry Hall

“It makes me happy to think that not one single suggestion of Our Rose's has ever been adopted. Needless to say, when the water garden was eventually made, she claimed that it was all her own idea, merely because of the 'gleam' which she had 'seen,' out on the bare earth, that desolate day in January. She even suggested that she should be photographed with it, stretching out her hands for a lily. But if Our Rose is ever photographed with my pool, she will be well inside it, and she will be stretching out her hands for help.”
― Beverley Nichols, Merry Hall

“...A thing that is worth doing at all is worth doing badly... le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.”
― Beverley Nichols, Merry Hall

“...the Indian boy is the result of a curious convolution of branches in an old chestnut; there are two perfectly formed legs, a long slim body, a small knotted head, and two branching arms... The only drawback is that in order to [see him] you have to be lying in the bath. Unless you are in a prone position, gazing out of one particular window, he refuses to materialize.... Very few other people have seen him. You cannot ask people to come up to the bathroom and lie flat on their backs in order to see the little Indian boy. It would make them gloomy and suspicious, particularly if they were females. 'If you come up and lie down in the bathroom I will show you my little Indian boy....' No. Definitely not. Out.”
― Beverley Nichols, Merry Hall

“...There are all sorts of people who will tell you that worms do not mind being cut in half at all because both halves go on living - that the worms laugh it off with an airy shrug of the shoulders, exclaiming 'Oh look! This funny man has cut me in half! How amusing! Now I can go away for a weekend with myself!”
― Beverley Nichols, Merry Hall

“...If you are picking a bunch of mixed flowers, and if you happen to see, over in a corner, a small, sad, neglected-looking pink or paeony that is all by itself and has obviously never had a chance in life, you have not the heart to pass it by, to leave it to mourn alone, while the night comes on. You have to go back and pick it, very carefully, and put it in the centre of the bunch among its fair companions, in the place of honour.”
― Beverley Nichols, Merry Hall

“One August day a few years back, my friend Dan Bogan and I spent a whole day up on a hill that was shaped like a woman's chest. We were hiding in the cleavage, out of sight.”
― Steven Rinella, Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter

“[LSSU] was the kind of school where students had a lot of pride. Not the raucous strain of sports pride... And not academic pride... It was more of a geographical pride. Kids were proud to live in that tough wilderness setting, and the best way to prove your mettle was through achievements in the wild.”
― Steven Rinella, Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter

“Anthropologists have always debated the forces that drove nomadic hunters to push themselves around the world... Imagine that you’re a hunter moving down the coastlines of Alaska and British Columbia, the first person to ever set foot on that land. …You come to the edge of a hundreds-of-feet-tall glacier that terminates at the ocean in a sheer cliff that’s calving house-sized chunks of ice. You have two options: one, turn back and make your home at the last place along your route that looked like a suitable habitat; or two, build a skin boat, load up your family, and paddle southward, trusting that there’s another side to the glacier. For thousands of years, this continent belonged to those people with the tenacity and curiosity to choose option number two.”
― Steven Rinella, Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter

“Twentysomething years later, I no longer hunt over bait at all. My reasons for this are not based entirely on ethics. Instead I am not interested in using artificial bait becsuse I am not interested in hunting animals that are doing artificial things. To go out and find a deer by solving the riddle of its natural patterns is far more enticing to me than finding a deer by interrupting those patterns. Baiting is not, in my opinion, a type of hunting that fosters an intelligent understanding of animals. But if you enjoy it, go ahead.”
― Steven Rinella, Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter

“The remainder of the lion... was still in my freezer that spring when I happened to turn up at the Rock Creek Lodge. This bar... is regionally famous for its annual Testicle Festival, a liquor-filled carnival where ranchers, hippies, loggers, bikers, and college kids get together in September in order to get drunk, shed clothes, dance, and occasionally fight... But on this day the Testicle Festival was still a half year away, and the bar was mostly empty except for a plastic bag of hamburger buns and an electric roasting pan that was filled with chipped meat and a tangy barbecue sauce. I was well into my third sandwich... when the owner of the place came out and asked how I liked the cougar meat. ...When I left the bar, the man called after me to announce a slogan that he'd just thought of: "Rock Creek Lodge: Balls in the fall, pussy in the spring!”
― Steven Rinella, Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter

“Maybe stalking the woods is as vital to the human condition as playing music or putting words to paper. Maybe hunting has as much of a claim on our civilized selves as anything else. After all, the earliest forms of representational art reflect hunters and prey. While the arts were making us sprititually viable, hunting did the heavy lifting of not only keeping up alive, but inspiring us. To abhor hunting is to hate the place from which you came, which is akin to hating yourself in some distant, abstract way.”
― Steven Rinella, Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter

“In this city today there are twenty men, all about your age, who have no family ties with me, who have never given me a cent, who had no special reason and certainly no obligation to help me or even to like me. And yet from every one of them I've gotten more kindness, advice, assistance, and just plain human consideration than I've ever gotten from you - and to every one of them I feel closer, infinitely closer, than I do to you. Now this is a fact, Dad: a simple fact.”
― Edwin O'Connor, I Was Dancing

“...I had deliberately let the relationship with Schulz wane until there was little left. We had been like the hot chocolate they sell at ski resorts. For your buck fifty, a machine first spews dark, thick syrup into a cup. This liquid gradually turns to a mixture of chocolate and hot water. Soon there is just a stream of hot water, and in a moment, drops. You wish the chocolate part would go on gushing forever, but it doesn't.”
― Diane Mott Davidson, Dying for Chocolate

“Darling, my friend has just been mugged and she needs better coffee than this. Was it made from ancient beans? Do us all a favor and make a fresh pot.”
― Diane Mott Davidson, Dying for Chocolate

“Want something hard enough and work for it, and you'll get it, but when you get it it will either prove to be not wholly what you wanted, or something will happen to soil it.”
― Paul Gallico, Mrs. 'Arris Goes to New York

“Nothing in life ever was a complete and one hundred per cent success, but often one could well afford to settle for less, and this would seem to be the greatest lesson one could learn in life.”
― Paul Gallico, Mrs. 'Arris Goes to New York

“Absurdly, dead fish by the hundreds were washing ashore, their peaceful world disrupted by man's squabble.”
― Max Allan Collins, Saving Private Ryan

“Zigzag... don't bunch up. Weave like a drunk on New Year's... Got it?”
― Max Allan Collins, Saving Private Ryan

“Three bodies were found in a completely dry storeroom. They were dressed in blue uniforms. The three had emergency rations stored at their battle station, and they had ample water, since they had removed the cover to an adjacent freshwater tank... Two of the men wore wristwatches, and one of them carried a wallet-size calendar, which had the days checked off from 7 December to 23 December. It was believed their deaths were due to lack of oxygen. The discovery of these three men in an unflooded compartment caused a profound sense of anguish among our divers. Especially shaken were Moon and Tony, who had sounded the West Virginia's hull on 12 December and reported no response from within the ship.”
― Edward C. Raymer, Descent Into Darkness: Pearl Harbor, 1941: A Navy Diver's Memoir