OffBeatBooks > OffBeatBooks's Quotes

“I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty; I woke, and found that life was duty.”
― Terry Hayes, I Am Pilgrim

“Of course, in a novel, people’s hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us. There is a most busy and important round of eating, drinking, dressing, walking, visiting, buying, selling, talking, reading, and all that makes up what is commonly called living, yet to be gone through…”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

“In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time...I don't know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well...I guess the time gets spread very thin like butter all over the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.”
― Emma Donoghue, Room

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“This is the even-handed dealing of the world!" he said. "There is noth-ing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes tocondemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“Death rarely changes how we feel about someone. Heightens it, more often than not.”
― Jane Harper, The Dry

“You’re wishin’ too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Personally, I mistrust all handsome men. The superficial pleasures of this life come too easily to them, and they seem to walk the world as though they themselves were personally responsible for their own good looks. I don't mind a woman being pretty. That's different. But in a man, I'm sorry, but somehow or other I find it downright offensive.”
― Roald Dahl, Skin and Other Stories

“O, it is excellent
To have a giant's strenght, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.”
― William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

“Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines -- it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“What do you seek in these shelves?”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle; Corrections And Editor Edgar W. Smith; Illustrators, The Hound of the Baskervilles

“They seem to be in a conspiracy to persecute you,” she said. “What does it mean?”

“Only the protest of the world, Miss Verinder — on a very small scale — against anything that is new.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

“Poirot said "you will find,M.le docteur,if you have much to do with cases of this kind,that they all resemble each other in one thing."
"what is that?" I asked curiously
"everyone concerned in them has something to hide”
― Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd / Murder on the Orient Express / Ten Little Niggers / At Bertram's Hotel / Pieces

“Fortunately words, ingeniously used, will serve to mask the ugliness of naked facts.”
― Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

“Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks…”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say 'See!' to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply 'Here!' to a body's cry of 'Where?' till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game. We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of the human progress these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition, a close interaction of the social machinery than that which now jolts us round and along; but such completeness is not to be prophesied, or even conceived as possible. Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; part and counterpart wandered independently about the earth in the stupidest manner for a while, till the late time came. Out of which maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointments, shocks, catastrophes -- what was called a strange destiny.”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“...we often mistake love for fireworks - for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still. It's boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm - and constant.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

“We're all crazy, I believe, just in different ways.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

“be a person with knowledge not just opinions”
― Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other

“gender is one of the biggest lies of our civilization”
― Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other

“Let us wonder at how X was just a rare letter until algebra came along and made it something special that can be unravelled to reveal inner value.”
― Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other

“his bredren and sistren could damned well speak up for themselves why should he carry the burden of representation when it will only hold him back? white people are only required to represent themselves, not an entire race”
― Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

“She is merely acclimatizing herself, in accordance with a natural law, like an animal which changes its coat for the winter. Thousands of people like Frl. Schroeder are acclimatizing themselves. After all, whatever government is in power, they are doomed to live in this town.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin

“The Nazis may write like schoolboys, but they're capable of anything. That's just why they're so dangerous. People laugh at them, right up to the last moment...”
― Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin

“It is white people’s responsibility to be less fragile; people of color don’t need to twist themselves into knots trying to navigate us as painlessly as possible.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism