sslyb > sslyb's Quotes

“Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”
― John Muir

“No one expected me. Everything awaited me.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“If you're 50 years old or younger, give every book about 50 pages before you decide to commit yourself to reading it, or give it up.

If you're over 50, which is when time gets shorter, subtract your age from 100 - the result is the number of pages you should read before deciding whether or not to quit. If you're 100 or over you get to judge the book by its cover, despite the dangers in doing so.”
― Nancy Pearl

“Fox picked up the cup and blew across its surface. He knew it was going to be the cheapest brand of powdered instant; knew the cup wasn’t as clean as it could be. But he would remember the smell and the taste and the pattern on the saucer for the rest of his life.”
― Ian Rankin, The Complaints

“Everyone, it seemed to him, lived their lives out of little boxes, opening different ones for different occasions. Nobody ever gave their whole self away. Cops were like that, each box a safety mechanism. Most people you met in the course of your life, you never even learned their names. Everybody was boxed off from everybody else. It was called society.”
― Ian Rankin, The Hanging Garden

“Moonspinners. They’re naiads – you know, water nymphs. Sometimes, when you’re deep in the countryside, you meet three girls, walking along the hill tracks in the dusk, spinning. They each have a spindle, and on to these they are spinning their wool, milk-white, like the moonlight. In fact, it is the moonlight, the moon itself, which is why they don’t carry a distaff. They’re not Fates, or anything terrible; they don’t affect the lives of men; all they have to do is to see that”
― Mary Stewart, The Moon-Spinners

“Let us get this quite clear,” she said. “Are you suggesting that I am insane because I had a nervous breakdown five years ago?”
― E.C.R. Lorac, I Could Murder Her

“Everybody was furious, especially my Father, who still is. As soon as I became conscious of anything I was furious too, at having been born a girl; I have since discovered that it has certain advantages.”
― Nina Hamnett, Laughing Torso - Reminiscences of Nina Hamnett

“She is afraid of depression. It skulks around her house like a shadow: a giant, slow and remorseless. It will be like leaving the door wide-open if she keeps on like this, messing up her routines. So all the giant has to do is crouch down, step inside and get her.”
― Åsa Larsson, The Sins of our Fathers

“I can still see those penetrating landscapes of my youth. I well know that I belong to them, that what little of love and truth is in me comes to me from their tranquil delights.”
― Ernest Alfred Vizetelly, The Complete Works of Emile Zola

“lots of women buy their clothes in Paris, and have not, on that account, necessarily poisoned their husbands.”
― Agatha Christie, The Collection

“In the stinking dark forest of splintery posts under the pier lay pizza tins, beer cans, cigarette wrappers, condoms—the joyless detritus of American joy.”
― Joseph Hansen, Fadeout

“The truth was rarely told in its entirety. The full story of your origins did not spring up clean and cool out of the ground, but gurgled and spat and had to be picked clear of the mud like a stranded crayfish, its legs flailing in slow, spindly motion.”
― Charmaine Wilkerson, Deluge

“That so often in life, there is no either-or. That as much as the mind might fight the idea, the heart makes room for opposing truths.”
― Charmaine Wilkerson, Deluge

“The question of race was like the power of the moon in my house. It’s what made the river flow, the ocean swell, and the tide rise, but it was a silent power, intractable, indomitable, indisputable, and thus completely ignorable.”
― James McBride, The Color of Water

“The cold was a sea, the house a ship, and the winter an endless waiting.”
― Henning Mankell, A Treacherous Paradise

“To anyone who has ever felt unappreciated, uninvited, or invisible… Your voice is more powerful than you think. You are allowed to exist without explanation. Never let the world convince you that your struggles are invalid.”
― Lola Akinmade Åkerström, In Every Mirror She's Black

“Their faces were etchings from a Francis Bacon painting, shadowed by a memory that ten years from now would make them burst into tears at a baby shower, in the middle of the grocery store, after watching a commercial for an exercise bike.”
― S.A. Cosby, All the Sinners Bleed

“Who comes here? A grenadier. What d’ye want? A pint of beer. Where’s your money? I forgot. Get you, gone, you drunken sot.” Mother Goose’s Melodies.”
― James Kirke Paulding, JAMES KIRKE PAULDING: FIVE HISTORICAL NOVELS

“Hink, minx, the old witch winks, / The fat begins to fry; / There’s no one at home / But Jumping Joan, / Father, Mother and I.”
― Elspeth Barker, O Caledonia

“They rummage through my things, trying to find out who I am.”
― Claire Keegan, Antarctica

“that the yellow isn’t yellow at all, but white exhausted by stale breath and tobacco, by pot-noodle fumes and overcoats left to dry on radiators; and that the grey isn’t grey but black with the stuffing knocked out of it. But”
― Mick Herron, Slow Horses

“Joe sounded as if he could hardly believe what he was hearing. This was like the most dramatic form of television drama.”
― Ann Cleeves, The Dark Wives

“Loos hung over them, a word he felt sure would someday have black meaning, but now was only a whisper of dread in his stomach.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“Life is like a swamp, isn’t it. One can only get on by jumping from one solid patch to the next. If you stop to wonder if it will hold you it’s all up.”
― Moray Dalton, The Belgrave Manor Crime

“my parents wrapped up in their grief. Spider-bound: web-blind.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Movement is swift on the Border. Nothing endures for more than a generation. No family really takes root. Every man is on his way. Cities come and builders go. Unfinished edifices are left behind in order that something new and grander may be started. Some other field is better than the one we are reaping. I do not condemn this, I believe in it. It is America's genius. We are all experimenters, pioneers, progressives.”
― Hamlin Garland, A Daughter of the Middle Border

“The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them, and then they would call that the right thing. That’s how most people thought.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency, Volume 3

“But sleep did not come. Nance lay on the heather, cradled by her own exhaustion, her mind uneasy. Again, she had the sense that something terrible was happening. That in some irreparable way the world was changing, that it spun away from her, and that in the whirl of change she was being flung to some forsaken corner.”
― Hannah Kent, The Good People