Tom Gray > Tom's Quotes

“O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities:
For nought so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give,
Nor aught so good but strain’d from that fair use
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse:
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied;
And vice sometimes by action dignified.
Within the infant rind of this small flower
Poison hath residence and medicine power:
For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;
Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart.
Two such opposed kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will;
And where the worser is predominant,
Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we
are. They are different. ”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“His sins seemed to be so few that he was alarmed and groped anxiously for more, knowing he could not be without guilt.”
― Morley Callaghan, Such Is My Beloved

“The last confession he heard was from a young hysterical girl who seemed to him to be making up a chain of small sins so that she could imagine herself full of remorse.”
― Morley Callaghan, Such Is My Beloved

“He had seen how improbable it is that we should come from one another and how improbable it is that we do come from one another. Birth, succession, the generations, history—utterly improbable. He had seen that we don’t come from one another, that it only appears that we come from one another.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“am opposed to negro citizenship in any and every form. [Boo.] I believe this government was made on a white basis. [Boo.] I believe it was made for white men [Boo], for the benefit of white men [Boo], and their posterity for ever. [Boo.] I am in favor of confining citizenship to white men . . . instead of conferring it upon Negroes, Indians, and other inferior races. [Boo. Boo. Boo.]” Something”
― Philip Roth, I Married a Communist

“Anything to empty life of its incongruities, of its meaningless, messy contingencies, and to impose on it instead the simplification that coheres—and misapprehends everything.”
― Philip Roth, I Married a Communist

“acknowledging wholeheartedly, as the enigma that it is, the pointless meaningfulness of living—”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him.”
― George Orwell, The Complete Works of George Orwell: Novels, Poetry, Essays:

“All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“Archer’s New York tolerated hypocrisy in private relations; but in business matters it exacted a limpid and impeccable honesty. It was a long time since any well-known banker had failed discreditably; but every one remembered the social extinction visited on the heads of the firm when the last event of the kind had happened.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“New York was inexorable in its condemnation of business irregularities. So far there had been no exception to its tacit rule that those who broke the law of probity must pay; and every one was aware that even Beaufort and Beaufort’s wife would be offered up unflinchingly to this principle.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“What a mighty pleasant virtue toleration should be when we are right, to be so very pleasant when we are wrong, and quite unable to demonstrate how we come to be invested with the privilege of exercising it!”
― Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son

“The very houses seemed disposed to pack up and take trips. Wonderful Members of Parliament, who, little more than twenty years before, had made themselves merry with the wild railroad theories of engineers, and given them the liveliest rubs in cross-examination, went down into the north with their watches in their hands, and sent on messages before by the electric telegraph, to say that they were coming.”
― Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son

“That night Christine Hartmann went to bed with a book she had taken from among the many that lay strewn around the Manor. From an early age she had developed the art of being alone and generally preferred her own company to anyone else’s. She read books at enormous speed and judged them entirely on their ability to remove her from her material surroundings. In almost all the unhappiest days of her life she had been able to escape from her own inner world by living temporarily in someone else’s, and on the two or three occasions that she had been too upset to concentrate she had been desolate.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Girl At The Lion d'Or

“The adult world moved around us the way fetid water in a fish tank surrounds the little fish within.”
― Erica Jong, Sugar in My Bowl: Real Women Write About Real Sex – A Provocative Anthology Exploring Desire, Bedroom Lives, and Candor

“Paulie sat up behind me. “Why are you cleaning a rented house?” she called. My mother stopped. “Because that’s what life is, honey.”
― Ethan Canin, A Doubter's Almanac