Favorite QuotesI congratulate myself on not having arrived into the world until the present time. For the strength of the pack is the wolf, He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror. One should die proudly, Be free always, because of all things, Love is at once an affirmation and a transcendence of who we are. Economists are generally wrong with complicated models but right about concepts... By analogy, a mechanic knows that changing your oil is good for your engine, but he can't tell you what problems you will have with your car next year. You shouldn't ignore the mechanic's advice on changing oil just because he doesn't know when your battery will die. We all know that it is women who take the decisions, Imagine a world... Away with the whims of governmental administrators, There is no kind of freedom and liberty other than Fairy tales are more than true. Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. They that can give up essential liberty The living is not perfect because it is liable to change; The price of liberty is, and always has been, blood. I do not take a single newspaper... Not all those who wander are lost. No being is so important that he can usurp the rights of another. Sometimes the only thing more dangerous than a question is an answer. There are no evil thoughts He who breaks a thing to find out what it is, Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt's eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina. I often think of that when I hear people say that they haven't time to read. I am a grown woman - mostly - and I can guzzle champagne with whomever I chose. ~ Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, p. 60 Marriages are made in heaven. But, then again, so are thunder, lightning, tornadoes and hail. ~ Unknown James: There is more than one person involved. So, more than one set of interests. So, invariably, somewhat more than one plot. How much more, we have yet to learn. There's a double meaning in that! Your beauty, ladies, hath deformed us. For Scotland has a double dose of the poison called heredity; the sense of blood in the aristocrat, the sense of doom in the Calvinist. I am a man, and therefore have all devils in my heart. He was ambitious, and had no intention of continuing indefinitely to be private secretary to anybody. But he was also reasonable; he knew that the best way of ceasing to be a secretary was to be a good secretary. Doyle: I'd choose the pleasures of the flesh over duty and honor any day of the week. Wesley: Excellent, a police radio. Where did you get a police radio? A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned. Friends bail you out of jail... Real friends are sitting right next to you in the cell. In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell. PoetryThis is the way the world ends Whenever I'm alone with you The day is cold, and dark and dreary; I wandered lonely as a cloud Continuous as the stars that shine For oft, when on my couch I lie If thou’rt of air let grey mist fold thee Alexander McCall Smith QuotesI am easily persuaded to continue to have fun. Reality television, which turned its eye on people who were doing nothing but being themselves, was the perfect expression of this trend [of narcissism]. Let's look at ourselves, it said. Aren't we fascinating? Dogs are in on our human silliness; lions are not. Whatever Scotland was, it was not a matriarchy; whereas the United States was a profoundly matriarchal society - and much more feminine than would be suggested by all that male bravado. That was a front, and a misleading one at that; underneath the male swagger lay a passive acceptance of female dominance - a fact not always appreciated by outsiders. I have always taken the view that one should never hold against a man anything he says after twelve o'clock at night or after a glass or two of anything. She would now be able to say of him, I ken his faither. This was a useful thing to be able to say in Scotland, as it could be used with devastating effect to cut somebody down to size. And cutting others down to size, Matthew knew, was at the heart of Scottish culture. What better way of suggesting that the other person was just a jumped-up wee boy than to say one kent his faither? Lou knew that joy unshared was a halved emotion, just as sadness and loss, when borne alone, were often doubled. One feature of the standardised coffee shops was the absence of conversation between staff and customer, and indeed between customer and customer. Nobody spoke in such places...There was something about plastic surroundings that subdued the spirits, that cudgelled one into silence. There were so many things that were just not being taught any more. Poetry, for example. Children were no longer made to learn poetry by heart. And so the deep rhythms of the language, its inner music, was lost to them, because they had never had it embedded in their minds. And geography had been abandoned too - the basic knowledge of how the world looked, simply never instilled; all in the name of educational theory and of teaching children how to think. But what, she wondered, was the point of teaching them how to think if they had nothing to think about? We were held together by our common culture, by our shared experience of literature and the arts, by scraps of song that we all knew, by bits of history half-remembered and half-understood but still making up what it was we thought we were. If that was taken away, we were diminished, cut off from one another because we had nothing to share. "The Culture of Complaint... We live in a culture of complaint because everyone is always looking for things to complain about. It's all tied in with the desire to blame others for misfortunes and to get some form of compensation into the bargain." Sean Connery looked out from one of them rather forbiddingly, but then he was perhaps a touch disapproving, which was why people in Scotland were so proud of him. Scots heroes were not meant to be benign in their outlook; they needed to be at least a little bit cross about something, preferably an injustice committed against them, individually or nationally, some time ago.
Quotes about Books and Reading (for Sandman Book Co t-shirts; quotes in italics are not directly related to books but are still good candidates)Fairy tales are more than true. There are no evil thoughts When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left over I buy food and clothes. I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. The World is Made Up of Stories, Not Atoms. A room without books is like a body without a soul. You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. There is no friend as loyal as a book. Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that Reading keeps you from going gaga. Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books. My library was dukedom large enough. Aziraphale collected books. If he were totally honest with himself he would have admitted that his bookshop was simply somewhere to store them. He was not unusual in this. In order to maintain his cover as a typical second-hand bookseller, he used every means short of actual violence to prevent customers from making a purchase. Unpleasant damp smells, glowering looks, erratic opening hours - he was incredibly good at it. Never judge a book by its movie. another list of quotes about literature |
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