Lee at ReadWriteWish > Lee at ReadWriteWish's Quotes

“To say that I met Nicholas Brisbane over my husband's dead body is not entirely accurate. Edward, it should be noted, was still twitching upon the floor.”
― Deanna Raybourn, Silent in the Grave

“I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time.”
― Iris Murdoch

“I don't want to be married just to be married. I can't think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can't talk to, or worse, someone I can't be silent with.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It's geometrically progressive - all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“Men are more interesting in books than they are in real life.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“Because there is nothing I would rather do than rummage through bookshops, I went at once to Hastings & Sons Bookshop upon receiving your letter. I have gone to them for years, always finding the one book I wanted - and then three more I hadn't known I wanted.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“There's no such thing as a kid who hates reading. There are kids who love reading, and kids who are reading the wrong books.”
― James Patterson

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“It's a corporate truth universally acknowledged that workers would rather eat rat skeletons than participate in group activities.”
― Sally Thorne, The Hating Game

“He did not smile back, and somehow I feel like he’s been carrying my smile around in his breast pocket ever since. He’s one up.”
― Sally Thorne, The Hating Game

“The Kissing Game goes like this, Shortcake. Press, retreat, tilt, breathe, repeat. Use your hands to angle just right. Loosen up until it’s a slow, wet slide. Hear the drum of blood in your own ears? Survive on tiny puffs of air. Do not stop. Don’t even think about it. Shudder a sigh, pull back, let your opponent catch you with lips or teeth and ease you back into something even deeper. Wetter. Feel your nerve endings crackle to life with each touch of tongue. Feel a new heaviness between your legs. The aim of the game is to do this for the rest of your life. Screw human civilization and all it entails. This elevator is home now. This is what we do now. Do not fucking stop. He”
― Sally Thorne, The Hating Game

“His scent is intensified in here perfectly, baked by summer, preserved by snow, sealed and pressurized inside glass and metal. I inhale like a professional perfumer. Top notes of mint, bitter coffee, and cotton. Mid notes of black pepper and pine. Base notes of leather and cedar. Luxurious as cashmere. If this is what his car smells like, imagine his bed. Good idea. Imagine his bed. He”
― Sally Thorne, The Hating Game

“I love the energy we create between us when we banter like this. It’s the most intense sensation of pleasure, knowing he’ll always have the perfect response ready. I’ve never known anyone like him; as addictive to talk to as he is to kiss. “Truth”
― Sally Thorne, The Hating Game

“If we leave my car here, Helene will know. She'll see it."
"Should we hide it under some branches in a forest?”
― Sally Thorne, The Hating Game

“I call the GPS woman the worst names I can think of. I beg her to stop. But she doesn't. Like a total bitch, she directs me to Josh's apartment building.”
― Sally Thorne, The Hating Game

“People say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. They say that when you been through something terrible ... But it doesn't. It breaks your bones, leaving everything splintered and held together with grubby bandages and yellowing sticky tape. Creaking along the fault lines, Fragile and exhausting to hold together. Sometimes you wish it had killed you.”
― Fiona Barton, The Child

“We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.”
― Georges Simenon

“I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.”
― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

“Why is it that people who wouldn't dream of stealing anything else think it's perfectly all right to steal books?”
― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

“It looks too new and pristine ever to have been read by anyone else, but it has been: it keeps falling open at the most delightful places as the ghost of its former owner points me to things I've never read before.”
― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

“Did I tell you I finally found the perfect page-cutter? It's a pearl-handled fruit knife. My mother left me a dozen of them, I keep one in the pencil cup on my desk. Maybe I go with the wrong kind of people but i'm just not likely to have twelve guests all sitting around simultaneously eating fruit.”
― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

“I liked reading about the nun who ate so dainty with her fingers she never dripped any grease on herself. I've never been able to make that claim and I use a fork.”
― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

“When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.”
― Connie Willis

“TO ALL THE
ambulance drivers
firewatchers
air-raid wardens
nurses
canteen workers
airplane spotters
rescue workers
mathematicians
vicars
vergers
shopgirls
chorus girls
librarians
debutantes
spinsters
fishermen
retired sailors
servants
evacuees
Shakespearean actors
and mystery novelists
WHO WON THE WAR.”
― Connie Willis, All Clear

“I’m not studying the heroes who lead navies—and armies—and win wars. I’m studying ordinary people who you wouldn’t expect to be heroic, but who, when there’s a crisis, show extraordinary bravery and self-sacrifice. Like Jenna Geidel, who gave her life vaccinating people during the Pandemic. And the fishermen and retired boat owners and weekend sailors who rescued the British Army from Dunkirk. And Wells Crowther, the twenty-four-year-old equities trader who worked in the World Trade Center. When it was hit by terrorists, he could have gotten out, but instead he went back and saved ten people, and died. I’m going to observe six different sets of heroes in six different situations to try to determine what qualities they have in common.”
― Connie Willis, Blackout

“I was never going to get any sleep. I was going to have Alice in Wonderland conversation after Alice in Wonderland conversation until I died of exhaustion. Here, in the restful, idyllic Victorian era.”
― Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog

“None of the things one frets about ever happen. Something one's never thought of does.”
― Connie Willis, Doomsday Book

“I remember an aunt saying sagely, "The good die young." Not exactly a motivation to behave yourself.”
― Connie Willis

“But if she'd come then, she would never have properly appreciated it. She'd have seen the happy crowds and the Union Jacks and the bonfires, but she'd have no idea of what it meant to see the lights on after years of navigating in the dark, what it meant to look up at an approaching plane without fear, to hear church bells after years of air-raid sirens. She'd have had no idea of the years of rationing and shabby clothes and fear which lay behind the smiles and the cheering, no idea of what it had cost to bring this day to pass--the lives of all those soldiers and sailors and airmen and civilians.”
― Connie Willis, All Clear