George > George's Quotes

“What feminism means for me is simply that women, like men, are complete human beings with limitless possibilities.”
― Fahmida Riaz

“Of all the skills necessary for her work, what she was perhaps worst at was being polite to inanimate things.”
― China Miéville, Kraken

“Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange.
Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never could.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“Everybody, professors and students and Proctors the same, knew that if the sign said 'do not walk on the grass', one hopped. Anybody who didn't had failed to understand what Oxford was.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“People shouldn't be throwing away their history when it's still doing archery practice forty miles up the road.”
― Natasha Pulley

“Michel’s death made my father question his faith, but it had the opposite effect on me. Amidst all the searing emotional pain I was feeling, I had a moment of revelation: despite all the torment and confusion we suffer in this valle lacrimarum, a divine sense of the universe exists, one we cannot comprehend. With this revelation came an oddly empowering sense that my life, like everyone else’s, is in God’s hands. This awareness hasn’t absolved me of the need to struggle for a better world and a better self, but it has helped me deal with things I cannot change, including death. It also helped reaffirm the core of the Christian beliefs I retain to this day.”
― Justin Trudeau, Common Ground

“Many immigrant families I met in Papineau brought with them lingering animosities from their country of origin, but they accepted that Canada was a place where people come to escape old-world feuds, not to nurture them. So what does multiculturalism mean to these people—and to me? It means a presumption that society will accommodate forms of cultural expression that do not violate our society’s core values. These include the right of a Jew to wear his kippa, a Sikh to wear his turban, a Muslim to wear her headscarf, or a Christian to wear a cross pendant.”
― Justin Trudeau, Common Ground

“William had played [rugby] at Eton when it first became popular, and now he only spoke of it in a reverent tone he normally saved only for women and rifles. . . . .
[in contrast] Cricket had rules: one was not allowed to stamp on the head of another player and pass it off as enthusiasm.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“I have to remember, too, that sex is one of those areas—like religion and politics—where otherwise decent and rational people may have intense, irrational feelings.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life

“This drove home to me how barbaric our own medicine and our own customs are in the “civilized” world, where we put ill or demented people away and try to forget them.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life

“The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other. It takes me to another place—irrespective of my subject—where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting thoughts, worries, preoccupations, or indeed the passage of time. In those rare, heavenly states of mind, I may write nonstop until I can no longer see the paper. Only then do I realize that evening has come and that I have been writing all day. Over a lifetime, I have written millions of words, but the act of writing seems as fresh, and as much fun, as when I started it nearly seventy years ago.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life

“Deaf, signing parents will “babble” to their infants in sign, just as hearing parents do orally; this is how the child learns language, in a dialogic fashion. The infant’s brain is especially attuned to learning language in the first three or four years, whether this is an oral language or a signed one. But if a child learns no language at all during the critical period, language acquisition may be extremely difficult later. Thus a deaf child of deaf parents will grow up “speaking” sign, but a deaf child of hearing parents often grows up with no real language at all, unless he is exposed early to a signing community.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life

“I sometimes wonder why I pushed myself so relentlessly in weight lifting. My motive, I think, was not an uncommon one; I was not the ninety-eight-pound weakling of bodybuilding advertisements, but I was timid, diffident, insecure, submissive. I became strong—very strong—with all my weight lifting but found that this did nothing for my character, which remained exactly the same.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life

“Edelman, who once planned to be a concert violinist, uses musical metaphors as well. In a BBC radio interview, he said: Think: if you had a hundred thousand wires randomly connecting four string quartet players and that, even though they weren’t speaking words, signals were going back and forth in all kinds of hidden ways [as you usually get them by the subtle nonverbal interactions between the players] that make the whole set of sounds a unified ensemble. That’s how the maps of the brain work by reentry. The players are connected. Each player, interpreting the music individually, constantly modulates and is modulated by the others. There is no final or “master” interpretation; the music is collectively created, and every performance is unique. This is Edelman’s picture of the brain, as an orchestra, an ensemble, but without a conductor, an orchestra which makes its own music.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life

“We can never be gods, after all--but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

“Fortunately, where reason failed, blind panic served well enough.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

“The priest's lesson: beware the Nightlord, for his pleasure is a mortal's doom. My grandmother's lesson: beware love, especially with the wrong man.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

“Dust webbed the window and the showtrays. Dust darkened the toiling fingers with their vulture nails. Dust slept on dull coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on rubies, leprous and winedark stones.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Go then, there are other worlds than these.”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger

“[From p. 70 of the Midnight Ink paperback.]

"You have to have a corpse by page fifty-seven. Page seventy at the absolute outside."
"Says who?'
"Why, so says everyone. It's the industry standard."

[There has been, as yet, no corpse.]”
― G.M. Malliet, Death and the Lit Chick

“The weapon is poison,' Kit said. 'I believe that the cause we carry it in is just, but that will not protect you. It is not only death to those whose skin it cuts; it holds a deeper violence within it. If you carry it-just that, carry it and nothing more-the poison will still affect you. In time, you will grow ill from it, and eventually, inevitably, it will kill you.'

'It's a sword, Kit,' Marcus said, lifting the green scabbard from it's place. They're all like that.”
― Daniel Abraham, The Tyrant's Law

“They say of me, and so they should,
It's doubtful if I come to good.
I see acquaintances and friends
Accumulating dividends
And making enviable names
In science, art and parlor games.
But I, despite expert advice,
Keep doing things I think are nice,
And though to good I never come
Inseparable my nose and thumb.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Those of us who have had the misfortune to be caught in a net in the execution of our military duty, and to be dragged away by the enemy with all the helpless buoyancy of captive balloons, will be able to appreciate the sensations of the four children to whom this gloomy catastrophe had occurred.

Wet Magic, beginning of Chapter 10.”
― E. Nesbit

“My instructions are disobeyed, my reputation has been irreversibly damaged, and my office wallpaper has been ruined.”
― Christopher Fowler, Ten Second Staircase

“On discovering a fire, the instructions ran, shout Fire and try to put it out. It was useful, heart-of the matter advice, and could be extended almost indefinitely in any direction. On discovering your husband's guests are arseholes, shout Arseholes and try to put them out.”
― Mick Herron, Down Cemetery Road

“... the police holding back protesters chanting angry slogans of love and acceptance.
--Ch. 12, last page”
― Dan Stout, Titan's Day

“The wallpaper was aggressively patterned, as was the carpet: together they gave the same effect as when you rub your eyes too hard with the heels of your hands.

Ch. 7”
― Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, Hard Going

“Some bodies were meant for Speedo. His was black.”
― Carrie Vaughn, Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand

“Fenki: 'It would be rude to interrupt the Night Worms when they feast on your tasty blood ...”
― Michael Moorcock, Elric in the Dream Realms

“A man should be proud of his heritage—not arrogant, as if it made him superior, but happy to own it and live up to the best in its promise. Monk”
― Anne Perry, Revenge in a Cold River