Brittany > Brittany's Quotes

“We had to go back to the coffeehouse: the Wreck was there. Mel had walked over. Well, I don’t know about walked. He had come over without vehicular assistance anyway.”
― Robin McKinley, Sunshine

“I suspect this is all gonna end in screaming and drowning”
― Scott Lynch, Red Seas Under Red Skies

“There is not a moral to every story in animal behavior. Sometimes a snake is just a snake, and sometimes snake sex is only about sex in snakes, or sex in egg-laying reptiles. Although a biologist’s job in part is to interpret what organisms do in a broader context, that context does not, and should not, need to include a lesson for human beings. This is true regardless of whether the lesson is something we would like to teach, which means that using animals as vehicles for nonsexist thinking is just as out of bounds as using them to keep women barefoot and pregnant. ”
― Marlene Zuk, Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can't Learn about Sex from Animals

“Well, then,' said Peter, 'I guess we'll just have to find a cab.'

Peter said this in the manner of a cowboy telling the womenfolk that, because of the avalanche, they were going to have to take the pass through Indian country. In fact, as Holly and Peter both knew, nothing could have been easier than finding a free cab, for at this hour they flowed steadily down the avenue. But if Peter were to regain some face by wrangling one, the fiction had to be kept up that this would be a challenging task.

Will you try?' Holly asked

Sure,' said Peter. He stepped off the curb, raised his hand, and a taxi pulled up in front of them about five seconds later.

Thank goodness!' Holly said.”
― James Collins, Beginner's Greek

“Those single-track military minds never think to ask their cleaning staff for help in giant lethal marauding creature matters.”
― Robin McKinley, Sunshine

“It was Aileron who saw the light blaze in Arthur's face. The Warrior leaped from his horse down into the road and, at the top of his great voice, cried 'Cavall!'

Bracing his legs, he opened wide his arms and was knocked flying, nonetheless, by the wild leap of the dog. Over and over they rolled, the dog yelping in intoxicated delight, the Warrior mock growling in his chest. . . .
This is' asked Aileron with gentle irony, 'your dog?”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, The Wandering Fire

“Unless the perfidious wolves have the temerity to disobey the High King's plans, we should meet Shalhassan's forces by the Latham in mid-wood with the wolves between us. If they aren't,' Diarmuid concluded, 'we blame anyone and everything except the plan.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, The Wandering Fire

“I sew his ears on from time to time, sure.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“Touch and away, Jack?’ asked Stephen. ‘Touch and away? Do you not recall that I have important business there? Enquiries of the very first interest?’

To do with our enterprise? To do with this voyage?’

Perhaps not quite directly.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Blue at the Mizzen

“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.”
― Neal Stephenson

“The difference between stupid and intelligent people – and this is true whether or not they are well-educated – is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. ”
― Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

“Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Master & Commander

“They were looking after themselves, living with rigid economy; and there was no greater proof of their friendship than the way their harmony withstood their very grave differences in domestic behaviour. In Jack's opinion Stephen was little better than a slut: his papers, odd bits of dry, garlic'd bread, his razors and small-clothes lay on and about his private table in a miserable squalor; and from the appearance of the grizzled wig that was now acting as a tea-cosy for his milk-saucepan, it was clear that he had breakfasted on marmalade.
Jack took off his coat, covered his waistcoat and breeches with an apron, and carried the dishes into the scullery. 'My plate and saucer will serve again,' said Stephen. 'I have blown upon them. I do wish, Jack,' he cried, 'that you would leave that milk-saucepan alone. It is perfectly clean. What more sanitary, what more wholesome, than scalded milk?”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“Go and see whether the Doctor is about,’ said Jack, ‘and if he is, ask him to look in, when he has a moment.’
Which he is in the fish-market, turning over some old-fashioned lobsters. No. I tell a lie. That is him, falling down the companion-way and cursing in foreign.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Blue at the Mizzen

“Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“Show some fucking adaptability!”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon.

“Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.”
― Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor.”
― Neal Stephenson, Anathem

“...But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true - that the world had once been a splendid, orderly place...and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since.”
― Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

“That's funny because if anyone actually did prove the existence of God we'd just tell him 'nice proof, Fraa Bly' and start believing in God.”
― Neal Stephenson, Anathem

“I stood still, vision blurring, and in that moment, I heard my heart break. It was a small, clean sound, like the snapping of a flower's stem.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Dragonfly in Amber

“When the day shall come that we do part," he said softly, and turned to look at me, "if my last words are not 'I love you'-ye'll ken it was because I didna have time.”
― Diana Gabaldon

“Lying on the floor, with the carved panels of the ceiling flickering dimly above, I found myself thinking that I had always heretofore assumed that the tendency of eigh­teenth-century ladies to swoon was due to tight stays; now I rather thought it might be due to the idiocy of eighteenth-century men. ”
― Diana Gabaldon, Dragonfly in Amber

“No wonder men got impervious to superficial pain, I thought. It came from this habit of hammering each other incessantly.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Outlander

“While the Lord might insist that vengeance was His, no male Highlander of my acquaintance had ever thought it right that the Lord should be left to handle such things without assistance.”
― Diana Gabaldon, The Fiery Cross

“A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person.”
― Dave Barry

“I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me.”
― Dave Barry

“Have you noticed that whatever sport you're trying to learn, some earnest person is always telling you to keep your knees bent? ”
― Dave Barry