Kym Schwebach > Kym's Quotes

“     Illicit flight Alfa Bravo Charlie quickly reached a predetermined altitude and stopped dead. The passengers on board screamed the way people do on fairground rides. The shuttle hesitated momentarily and then shot forward accelerating rapidly to reach a blistering 145,222 miles per hour. They were in a Mach 22 situation. The cries from on-board could not be heard from the ground. Neither did anyone in the great metropolis of Llar witness the bright blue vapour trail the craft left behind in its wake. It was after all overcast and raining heavily.”
― A.R. Merrydew, Our Blue Orange

“You don't know what you can accomplish if you never try.”
― Dennis K. Hausker, Echo Three Tango

“What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney?”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“A good relationship has a pattern like a dance ... The joy of such a pattern is not only the joy of creation or the joy of participation, it is also the joy of living in the moment. Lightness of touch and living in the moment are intertwined.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“We don't have to accept blandness in life. God, who is the author of creativity, is ready to make a dull life adventuresome the moment we allow his Holy Spirit to go to work inside us.”
― Catherine Marshall, A Closer Walk

“I drink when I have occasion, and sometimes when I have no occasion.”
― Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, The History of Don Quixote, Volume 1, Part 04

“Memories are worse than bullets.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“...if I did not try to understand the psychology of people, well I think my ballads would be missing something. I think trying to become the characters…is the key to writing them…”
― Cade Mengler, The Companions

“What’s “ague?”‘ Raya asked.
‘Malaria.’ Oscar said.
‘Oh, great.’
‘Hey, you want plague? They got that too.’ Raya ignored
the cat.”
― Sara Pascoe, Being a Witch, and Other Things I Didn't Ask For

“Rafe smiled again. “I think Aleana can teach you how to work in a team and maybe you can teach her to be less reckless.”
So it was that Raimund found a new home in the Den of Thieves, and he and Aleana became partners and best friends.”
― Robert Reid, The Emperor

“Now I gazed out of my office window. Slowly the world was changing from old-gold to the deep purple which, in the words of that dreamy song Mum was fond of humming, bathes garden walls under the twinkle of starlight.”
― Michael Wyndham Thomas, The Erkeley Shadows

“I feel his love most strongly when I am confident in his love.”
― Ami Loper, Constant Companion: Your Practical Path to Real Interaction with God

“So, you know that group up there in the Planetarium then?’ The pistol continued. ‘Hey they say it’s a small world.’
     ‘Are they alright?’ asked Semilla darting forward.
     ‘Yeah, they’re all fine, apart from the President he’s rather dead actually, oh and one of the lampposts I’m afraid he copped it too.’
     Baz’s beacon flickered with emotion. ‘Which one?’ he asked.
     ‘There was only one President as far as I know,’ said the pistol indifferently.”
― A.R. Merrydew, Our Blue Orange

“College is the best thing that can ever happen to you," my father used to say, and he was right, for it was there that I discovered drugs, drinking, and smoking..”
― David Sedaris, Naked

“It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.”
― Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

“I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

“I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.”
― David Foster Wallace

“But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could. This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.”
― Mark Bowden, Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam