Mary > Mary's Quotes

“Simple pleasures are best.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“I remembered a piece of sisterly advice, which Feely once gave Daffy and me:
"If ever you're accosted by a man," she'd said, "kick him in the Casanovas and run like blue blazes!"
Although it had sounded at the time like a useful bit of intelligence, the only problem was that I didn't know where the Casanovas were located.
I'd have to think of something else.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“It is not unknown for fathers with a brace of daughters to reel off their names in order of birth when summoning the youngest, and I had long ago become accustomed to being called 'Ophelia Daphne Flavia, damn it.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“Whenever I'm with other people, part of me shrinks a little. Only when I am alone can I fully enjoy my own company.”
― Alan Bradley, A Red Herring Without Mustard

“As I stood outside in Cow Lane, it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

No ... eight days a week.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“Vaporized by the sun! Wasn't that what the universe had in store for all of us? There would come a day when the sun exploded like a red balloon, and everyone on earth would be reduced in less than a camera flash to carbon. Didn't Genesis say as much? For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. This was far more than dull old theology: It was precise scientific observation! Carbon was the Great Leveler--the Grim Reaper.

Diamonds were nothing more than carbon, but carbon in a crystal lattice that made it the hardest known mineral in nature. That was the way we all were headed. I was sure of it. We were destined to be diamonds!”
― Alan Bradley, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

“Do not try to make the Bible relevant. Its relevance is axiomatic. Do not defend God's word, but testify to it. Trust to the Word. It is a ship loaded to the very limits of its capacity. -Dietrich Bonhoeffer”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“...when someone asked Bonhoeffer whether he shouldn't join the German Christians in order to work against them from within, he answered that he couldn't. 'If you board the wrong train,' he said, 'it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“Death is only dreadful for those who live in dread and fear of it. Death is not wild and terrible, if only we can be still and hold fast to God’s Word. Death is not bitter, if we have not become bitter ourselves. Death is grace, the greatest gift of grace that God gives to people who believe in him. Death is mild, death is sweet and gentle; it beckons to us with heavenly power, if only we realize that it is the gateway to our homeland, the tabernacle of joy, the everlasting kingdom of peace.

How do we know that dying is so dreadful? Who knows whether, in our human fear and anguish we are only shivering and shuddering at the most glorious, heavenly, blessed event in the world? Death is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that we can transform death.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“the only fight which is lost is that which we give up.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“Bonhoeffer thought of death as the last station on the road to freedom.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God’s will:”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“Anyway, what do happiness and unhappiness mean? They depend so little on circumstances and so much more on what goes on inside us.”
― Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“Books are like oxygen to a deep-sea diver," she had once said. "Take them away and you might as well begin counting the bubbles.”
― Alan Bradley, I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“Excuse me,' I said. 'I've just remembered something.' It was true. What I'd remembered was this: While I was not in the least afraid of the dead, there were those among the living who gave me the creeping hooly-goolies...”
― Alan Bradley, I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“If I’m going to have regrets in this life, I’d rather them be for the chances I took and not the opportunities I let slip away.”
― Chanel Cleeton, When We Left Cuba

“There’s no point in denying it. Anger is my faithful companion.”
― Chanel Cleeton, When We Left Cuba

“The sight of their fervor disgusts me. These people don’t have to live under his regime. They are free here, are able to protest against their government. They celebrate the man who has taken such liberties away from us.”
― Chanel Cleeton, When We Left Cuba

“It’s funny how your sense of home can change, isn’t it?”
― Chanel Cleeton, When We Left Cuba

“Dreams never die all at once. They die in pieces, floating a little farther and farther away each day.”
― Chanel Cleeton, When We Left Cuba

“some things are perpetually out of our reach, and no matter how badly we wish it were otherwise, there are some battles whose outcomes are decided not in our hands, but in the stars.”
― Chanel Cleeton, When We Left Cuba

“The thing about people telling you you're beautiful your whole life, is the more that you hear it, the more meaningless it becomes. What does beautiful even mean, anyway? That your features are arranged in a shape someone, somewhere arbitrarily decided is pleasing? Beautiful never quite matches up to the other things you could be, smart, interesting, brave.”
― Chanel Cleeton, When We Left Cuba

“Artists flock to him, world leaders praise him, the intellectual set fawns over him, writers and poets dine at his table, but for all of their “enlightenment,” they do not bother to look beneath the green-fatigued facade. Is his uniform still so romantic when they learn how many men have seen those fatigues in the last moments of their lives, condemned to death without any semblance of justice? Would they still admire him if they heard the shots from the firing squads, the cries of the murdered, smelled the blood of their countrymen? Write a poem about that, our slow, never-ending death.”
― Chanel Cleeton, When We Left Cuba

“A lot of times when I think I’m being self-sufficient, I’m really just learning to live without the things that I need.”
― Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here

“Maybe raising children was just giving them the things you loved most in the world and hoping that they loved them too.”
― Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here

“Honestly, Bessie? People don't care about anyone but themselves. They don't notice anything. They are never looking at what's interesting. They're always looking at themselves.”
― Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here

“Things are bad and crazy and chaotic. But you ride it out and you don't let it hurt you, and then there's this stretch of time that is so calm and perfect. And that's what was always worth waiting for.”
― Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here

“And I knew a secret to caring for someone, had learned it just this moment. You took care of people by not letting them know how badly you wanted your life to be different.”
― Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here

“How did people protect themselves? How did anyone keep this world from ruining them?”
― Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero