Murphy > Murphy's Quotes

“...and of course reconcilliation with England--the country that from the first should have been, given her parallel territorial ambitions, our closest ally--so that some day in the future we can act as one. It remains a mystery to me why that last relationship never worked out. How many more bombs would we have had to drop on their cities before they realized that we were their friends?”
― Timur Vermes

“It is on!" Aech shouted into his comlink. "it is on like Red Dawn!”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

“What do you believe, Aunt Elizabeth?'
'I believe. . . I am comfortable with reading the Bible figuratively rather than literally. For instance, I think the six days in Genesis are not literal days, but different periods of creation, so that it took many thousands --- or hundreds of thousands of years --- to create. It does not demean God; it simply gives Him more time to build this extraordinary world.'
'And the ichthyosaurus and plesiosaurus?'
'They are creatures from long, long ago. They remind us that the world is changing. Of course it is. I can see it change when there are landslips at Lyme that alter the shoreline. It changes when there are earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and floods. And why shouldn't it?”
― Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures

“How come when it’s us, it’s an abortion, and when it’s a chicken, it’s an omelette?”
― George Carlin

“No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.”
― Margaret Sanger

“No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”
― Margaret Sanger

“I cannot understand anti-abortion arguments that centre on the sanctity of life. As a species we've fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don't believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain and life-long poverty shows us that, whatever we tell ourselves, we've made only the most feeble of efforts to really treat human life as sacred.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

“The Vatican won't prosecute pedophile priests but I decide I'm not ready for motherhood and it's condemnation for me? These are the same people that won't support national condom distribution that PREVENTS teenage pregnancy.”
― Sonya Renee Taylor

“Reproductive freedom is critical to a whole range of issues. If we can’t take charge of this most personal aspect of our lives, we can’t take care of anything. It should not be seen as a privilege or as a benefit, but a fundamental human right.”
― Faye Wattleton

“Here is the trap you are in.... And it's not my trap—I haven't trapped you. Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you—because you know how to perform them—have no choice, either. What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too. If abortion was legal, a woman would have a choice—and so would you. You could feel free not to do it because someone else would. But the way it is, you're trapped. Women are trapped. Women are victims, and so are you.”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

“In my view, the pro-life movement at this point should focus on seeking to reduce the number of abortions. At times it will require political education and legal fights, at times it will require education and the establishment of alternatives to abortion, such as adoption centers. Unfortunately, such measures are sometimes opposed by so-called hard-liners in the pro-life movement. These hard-liners are fools. Because they want to outlaw all abortions, they refuse to settle for stopping some abortions; the consequence is that they end up preventing no abortions.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, Letters to a Young Conservative

“He had heard her say, so many times, that a society that approved of making abortion illegal was a society that approved of violence against women; that making abortion illegal was simply a sanctimonious, self-righteous form of violence against women- it was just another way of legalizing violence against women, Nurse Caroline would say.”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

“If we lived in a culture that valued women's autonomy and in which men and women practiced cooperative birth control, the abortion issue would be moot.”
― Christiane Northrup, Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom: Creating Physical and Emotional Health and Healing

“[] it is unthinkable to allow complete strangers, whether individually or collectively as state legislators or others in government, to make such personal decisions for someone else.”
― Sarah Weddington, A Question of Choice

“To speak behind others' backs is the ventilator of the heart.”
― Marjane Satrapi, Embroideries

“Our sweet illusions are half of them conscious illusions, like effects of colour that we know to be made up of tinsel, broken glass and rags.”
― George Eliot, The Lifted Veil

“It is an old story, that men sell themselves to the tempter, and sign a bond with their blood, because it is only to take effect at a distant day; then rush on to snatch the cup their souls thirst after with an impulse not the less savage because there is a dark shadow beside them forevermore. There is no short cut, no patent tram-road to wisdom: after all the centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through the thorny wilderness which must be still trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time.”
― George Eliot, The Lifted Veil

“But I hasten to finish my story. Brevity is justified at once to those who readily understand, and to those who will never understand.”
― George Eliot

“People above you, they never want to share power with you. Why you look to them? They give you nothing. People below you, you give them hope, you give them respect, they give you power, cause they don't think they have any, so they don't mind giving it up.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“You are not doing this for her. You're doing it for yourself. Your life is not just about the people you love. It's also about the people you hate.”
― Tom Rob Smith

“A gift by women, for women.”
― Nevil Shute

“I suppose it is because I have lived rather a restricted life myself that I have found so much enjoyment in remembering what I have learned in these last years about brave people and strange scenes. I have sat here day after day this winter, sleeping a good deal in my chair, hardly knowing if I was in London or the Gulf country, dreaming of the blazing sunshine, of poddy-dodging and black stockmen, of Cairns and of Green Island. Of a girl that I met forty years too late, and of her life in that small town that I shall never see again, that holds so much of my affection.”
― Nevil Shute

“People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had," she said quietly, staring into the embers. "They don't know what it was like, not being in a camp.”
― Nevil Shute, A Town Like Alice

“Stan got the message. He allowed the chicken assignations. What did that make him? A chicken pimp. Better than dead.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“Somewhere along the way we identified ourselves with them, and came to associate birds with the realm of spirits, as opposed to that of bodies and their carnal appetites.”
― Graeme Gibson, The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany

“Some people blamed his oddities on his dyslexia, which was so severe that one giddy pediatrician called it a gift: While he might never learn how to spell or read better than the average fourth grader, he’d always see things the rest of us couldn’t.”
― Jim Lynch, Border Songs

“Know something?” Brandon said. “I think the most interesting people I’ll meet these days will be criminals—or people about to become criminals.”
― Jim Lynch, Border Songs

“The more Wayne inhabited Edison, the more he wondered how a man cultivates a stubborn streak so pronounced that it transforms a daily barrage of failures into stimulants.”
― Jim Lynch, Border Songs

“One of them would hurl a rock, then a few more. Suddenly it’s raining rocks. Ya with me? That’s their cover, see, because no matter how big a weapon you come out the door with, you still don’t want to catch a rock in the face. A sawed-off won’t stop a rock, follow?”
― Jim Lynch, Border Songs

“Was it even a Cutlass? He could tell trucks from cars and sedans from compacts, but beyond that he was guessing.”
― Jim Lynch, Border Songs