Oliver Boards > Oliver's Quotes

“Sometimes abiding by the strictest rules is folly. Give me flexibility, imagination, and audacity over caution any day.”
― John M. Vermillion, Pack's Posse

“People only tease those they love.”
― Nicole Schubert, Saoirse Berger's Bookish Lens In La La Land

“The boats raced towards each other like mounted knights bearing lances.
They would hit like Somalian pirates, swiftly and under the cover of darkness.”
― Marilyn Dalla Valle, Westwind Secrets

“I thought I would give you all a taste of how caring Uhna has been to us. I hope you enjoy it as much as we do.”
― S.G. Blaise, The Last Lumenian

“And now Anderson stood looking at his father. His hands were trembling with eagerness, extending toward him, wanting his father to embrace him. He wanted to love it back to life for all those lost times, for all those times of hope. “Permission to sit, sir?”
― Behcet Kaya, Murder on the Naval Base

“Be too anchored in the Now, to still be carrying the past”
― Daniel Mangena

“Sometimes, it’s not our choices that turn us into who we are. Sometimes, it’s fate. Circumstance. Sometimes, we are pricked by so many thorns that we forget the fact that everyone else is traveling down the same thorn-ridden path.”
― Ammar Habib, The Orphans of Kashmir

“I just wrote because I had got in the habit. You can build up an awful lot of habits in six years, and you can fill an awful lot of little black books in that time and put them in a safety-deposit box when they get full because they aren’t something to leave around and because they would be worth their weight in gold to some parties to get their hands on. Not that they ever got their hands on them, I never needed money that bad. But I had the habit of saving them. A man’s got to carry something besides a corroded liver with him out of that dark backwood and abysm of time, and it might as well be the little black books. The little black books lie up there in the safety-deposit box, and there are your works of days and hands all cozy in the dark in the little box and the world’s great axis grinds.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All The King's Men

“To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one will continue to exist in the best-possible substitute for this world, or that after living a starved and stunted life here one will be compensated with all the good things one has gone without: it is to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now.”
― T. S. Eliot

“If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever—something I couldn't afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they're seventeen.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“And for all I know he is sitting there still, under his favorite cork tree, smelling the flowers just quietly”
― Munro Leaf, The Story of Ferdinand

“With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed--he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Dog.”
― Graham Greene

“Wir sind verlassen wie Kinder und erfahren wie alte Leute, wir sind roh und traurig und oberflächlich - ich glaube, wir sind verloren.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Im Westen Nichts Neues

“There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“my”
― Andrew Clements, The Janitor's Boy

“La palabra que yo traduzco por la isla volante o flotante es en el idioma original laputa, de la cual no he podido saber nunca la verdadera etimología. Lap, en el lenguaje antiguo fuera de uso, significa alto, y untuh, piloto; de donde dicen que, por corrupción, se deriva laputa, de lapuntuh.”
― Jonathan Swift, Los viajes de Gulliver

“This is a battle, boys,' he cried. 'War! You are souls at a critical juncture. Either you will succumb to the will of academic hoi polloi, and the fruit will die on the vine— or you will triumph as individuals.”
― N.H. Kleinbaum, Dead Poets Society

“Mary’s childhood was rough. She was frequently beaten and chastised by the nuns who served as her protectors and brutalized by the older girls in the orphanage.

Oh how I wept those first few years of my life. My tears came like tropical storms. Every pore in my body wept. I heaved and shuddered and sighed. Everything around me seemed dark and terrifying.”
― Maria Nhambu, Africa's Child

“A Who's Who of pesticides is therefore of concern to us all. If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones - we had better know something about their nature and their power.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“You knew all along that your sanctioned world was only half the world, and you tried to suppress the other half the same way the priests and teachers do. You won't succeed. No one succeeds in this once he has begun to think.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“In old times when wishing still helped one, there lived a king whose daughters were all beautiful, but the youngest was so beautiful that the sun itself, which has seen so much, was astonished whenever it shone in her face.”
― Jacob Grimm, Grimm's Fairy Tales

“A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.”
― Oscar Wilde

“He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“Government is nothing more than the combined force of society or the united power of the multitude for the peace, order, safety, good, and happiness of the people... There is no king or queen bee distinguished from all the others by size or figure or beauty and variety of colors in the human hive. No man has yet produced any revelation from heaven in his favor, any divine communication to govern his fellow men. Nature throws us all into the world equal and alike...
The preservation of liberty depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the people. As long as knowledge and virtue are diffused generally among the body of a nation it is impossible they should be enslaved.
Ambition is one of the more ungovernable passions of the human heart. The love of power is insatiable and uncontrollable...
There is a danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living wth power to endanger public liberty.”
― David McCullough, John Adams