Rolf Stritzinger > Rolf's Quotes

“The coast is a transition zone, always changing. It keeps on changing its dynamics, perpetually, in both space and time.”
― Sally Ann Hunter, Transfigured Sea

“When you rebuild yourself to be the type of person you want to be, there are two versions of you that must be constructed: The “you” that exists within your own mind The “you” that exists in the minds of other people”
― Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life: A Guide to Creating Your Own Answers to Life’s Biggest Questions

“What was once a home she had taken apart one piece at a time, one day...She sold her belongings for money to buy food.  First the luxuries: a small statue, a picture.  Then the items with more utility: a lamp, a kettle.  Clothes left the closet at a rate of a garment a day…she burned everything in the basement first; then everything in the attic.  It lasted weeks, not months.  Though tempted, she left the roof alone.  She stripped the second floor, and the stairs.  She extracted every possible calorie from the kitchen.  she wasn’t working alone, because neighbourhood pirates simultaneously stole anything of value outside: door and window frames, fencing, stucco.  They pillaged her yard.  Breaking in was a boundary her neigbours had not yet crossed.  But the animals had.  Rats and mice and other vermin found the cracks without much effort.  Like her, they sought warmth and scraps of food.  With great reluctance, she roasted the ones she could catch.  She spent her nights fighting off the ones that escaped.”
― John Payton Foden, Magenta

“And so the Dark Angel once more embeds herself in Jeremiah’s’ mind. If not for the gardener he might believe each appearance an apparition for she does not belong amongst the sombre apothecaries and their fledgling apprentices, musing on herbs as if they are already in phials and not aligned for appreciating beauty. No, such a woman - any woman for that matter - did not belong in the Physic Gardens; though with this particular woman, Jeremiah cannot discern quite where she belonged. ”
― Kate Rose, The Angel and the Apothecary

“Leave it to a girl to take all the fun out of sex discrimination.”
― Bill Watterson, The Essential Calvin and Hobbes: A Calvin and Hobbes Treasury

“I need to feel strongly, to love and to admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe. A letter from a friend, a Balthus painting on a postcard, a page of Saint-Simon, give meaning to the passing hours. But to keep my mind sharp, to avoid descending into resigned indifference, I maintain a level of resentment and anger, neither too much nor too little, just as a pressure cooker has a safety valve to keep it from exploding.”
― Jean-Dominique Bauby

“This is the hardest time, Starling. Use this time and it will temper you. Now's the hardest test - not letting rage and frustration keep you from thinking. It's the core of whether you can command or not. Waste and stupidity will get you the worst.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“Be who you were meant to be and not what you've allowed yourself to become," Kate said to Mavis as she wavered over following her dream.
from 'Lifesong”
― Christine M. Knight

“
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“Looking over the Ethan's bowed head, amidst the tangled forest of Wilderness littered with the bodies of men dead and dying, Victor saw the serene image of his mother.  She smiled at her son, her unbound black hair blowing wildly in the breeze.  She reached a hand out towards him, and this time, he went with her.”
― Barbara Sontheimer, Victor's Blessing

“Let me ask you another question, if I may,” Jake says. “Have you ever been in love?”

“Yes. Sure, I have,” she answered defensively.

“No. I mean really in love. The kind of love that makes you abandon all reason and throw caution to the wind. The kind of love that makes you trade logic for passion?”
― Diane Merrill Wigginton, A Compromising Position

“Even though it's only a minority of men who are violent or predatory, I don't know if men realise that girls are trained our entire lives to minimise the danger from you - and blamed if we don't.”
― Sara Pascoe

“This world would be a pleasant place if people didn’t inhabit it.”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“The revelation that I’m destined to meet many virgins from the East and the promise of limitless love they hold in their bosoms gives me strength, fortitude, and tenacity—and the wisdom to know that all three are synonyms.”
― Merlin Franco, Saint Richard Parker

“I'm being followed so much I'm causing traffic jams.”
― John Grisham, The Firm

“You want car?' Rena said. 'Artist college? You think I don't know? How you think you pay? So this dress. Pretty dress. Someone gave. But money is . . .' She stopped, struggling to find the words, what money was. Finally, she threw her hands up. 'Money. You want remember, so just remember.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“Foreign opium imported into China was chiefly produced in British India and shipped solely from British ports.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“I can see you have a great deal of water in your personality. Water never waits. It changes shape and flows around things, and finds the secret paths no one else has thought about -- the tiny hole through the roof or the bottom of the box. There's no doubt it's the most versatile of the five elements. It can wash away earth; it can put out fire; it can wear a piece of metal down and sweep it away. Even wood, which is its natural complement, can't survive without being nurtured by water. And yet, you haven't drawn on those strengths in living your life, have you?”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Never leave a friend behind. Friends are all we have to get us through this life--and they are the only things from this world that we could hope to see in the next.”
― Dean Koontz, Fear Nothing

“Perhaps, the beginning is just to say nice things are going to happen until you make them happen.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

“Still, Fritz was an optimist, and Karl was a pessimist, and that makes all the difference in the world.”
― Philip Pullman, Clockwork

“I have my own soul. My own spark of divine fire.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion / My Fair Lady

“What tale do you like best to hear?' 'Oh, I have not much choice! They generally run on the same theme - courtship; and promise to end in the same catastrophe - marriage.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past.”
― Ernest J. Gaines

“Death in Venice, The Wings of the Dove, The Aspern Papers, Don’t Look Now, Summertime, Across the River and Into the Trees, The Comfort of Strangers.”
― John Berendt, The City of Falling Angels

“I’m not denying there’s got to be a notion of right to get business done, but by God, any particular notion at any particular time will sooner or later get to be just like a stopper put tight in a bottle of water and thrown in a hot stove the way we kids used to do at school to hear the bang. The”
― Robert Penn Warren, All The King's Men

“Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Every human relationship begins with a coincidence. Even the most fundamental relationship - that of parent and child - begins entirely with a coincidence. The child is produced by whatever serendipity brought its parents together, and the fact that the child was born to its particular parents instead of to another couple is pure happenstance. Thus, children have no choice over the relationship that is most important to their existence.
By contrast, friends and lovers choose each other, but even these choices are reactions to whatever random coincidence made the resulting relationship possible.”
― Zack Love, Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC

“People are always ruining things for you.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“I guess I can put two and two together.” “Sometimes the answer’s four,” I said, “and sometimes it’s twenty-two.”
― Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man