Margot Jennifer > Margot Jennifer's Quotes

“These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you're making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“The way Misha tells it, he drove like a blind man, giving the car almost full independence to feel its way along, bumping off things, only giving the wheel a spin with the tips of this fingers when the situation verged on life threatening.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“Like all really strong-minded women, on whom everybody flops, she adored being bossed about. It was so restful.”
― Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm

“Sneezes pent but set like traps, the boys crouched, stood, lay sweating a cool and constant brine.”
― Ray Bradbury

“When I was old enough to take baths in the bathtub, and to know I had a penis and a scrotum and everything, I asked her not to sit in the room with me. "Why not?" "Privacy." "Privacy from what? From me?" I didn't want to hurt her feelings, because not hurting her feelings is another of my raisons d'etre. "Just privacy," I said...She agreed to wait outside, but only if I held a ball of yarn, which went under the bathroom door and was connected to the scarf she was knitting. Every few seconds she would give it a tug, and I had to tug back--undoing what she had just done--so that she could know I was OK.”
― jonathan safran foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“We cracked up together, which was necessary, because she loved me again.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer

“If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.”
― George Eliot

“Those bitter sorrows of childhood!-- when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“It is true of course, that I have a will of iron, but it can be switched off if the circumstances seem to demand it.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves in the Morning

“Happiness is the twinkle in your grandmother's eye as you reverse the tractor off her legs.”
― Hugh Laurie

“Death and disaster are at our shoulders every second of our lives, trying to get at us. Missing, a lot of the time. A lot of miles on the motorway without a front wheel blow-out. A lot of viruses that slither through our bodies without snagging. A lot of pianos that fall a minute after we've passed. Or a month, it makes no difference. So unless we're going to get down on our knees and give thanks every time disaster misses, it makes no sense to moan when it strikes.”
― Hugh Laurie, The Gun Seller

“This was the tricky bit. The really tricky bit, trickiness cubed.”
― Hugh Laurie, The Gun Seller

“The words came so fast they seemed to roll down hill. Nobody ever calls it all that; it's just spring wheat, but I like the words. They heap up and make a picture of a spring that's slow to come, when the ground stays frozen late into March and the air is raw, and the skies are sulky and dark”
― Mildred Walker, Winter Wheat

“That explains a lot,' he said. 'I suppose it's also why we've never glimpsed that giant compass in the corner of the Atlantic. I have to say, I'm a little disappointed.”
― Gideon Defoe, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists

“It has been my experience that guilt can burst through the smallest breach and cover the landscape, and abide in it in pools and danknesses, just as native as water.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“Adulthood is a wonderful thing, and brief. You must be sure to enjoy it while it lasts.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“Unless society came out past Flat Rock Crossroads, kept on past Booker T. High School, hung two rights, a left, turned in on Milk Farm Road and found Roland plowing a tobacco field, jerked him off the tractor, warped him and set him back up there without anybody riding by and noticing, blame can't be laid on society.”
― Kaye Gibbons, A Virtuous Woman

“Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“It was The Gospel From Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space...[who] made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low. But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes. The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought...: "Oh, boy - they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!" And that thought had a brother: "There are right people to lynch." Who? People not well connected. So it goes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally.”
― Marilynne Robinson

“A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“I don't know exactly what covetous is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else's virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“Housework can kill you if done right.”
― Erma Bombeck

“Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“I mentally shake hands with you for your answer, despite its inaccuracy." Mr. Rochester”
― Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

“The stars were so many and so white they looked like chips of ice, hammered through the fabric of the sky.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace