Willis Curl > Willis's Quotes

“Buying loyalty can be as effective as fear when one’s rival is poorer than oneself.”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“He grabbed at Rupert’s earphones and gave his colleague a very serious look. ‘What do you know about share dealing?’
Rupert placed a finger on his chin and mulled over the question with a studious look. ‘Now you come to mention it,’ he said, ‘I know absolutely nothing.’
Norman grabbed his arm and began dragging his bewildered companion to the nearest lift. ‘Then we need to find out, and find out fast.”
― A.R. Merrydew, Our Blue Orange

“Swamp.”
“Yeah, Hiker?”
“What’s bothering you besides this new case?”
I looked at him. How did he know? My recollections of my days at the naval academy came flooding back.
“Bothering me?”
“Yeah. Don’t make me repeat myself.”
― Behcet Kaya, Uncanny Alliance

“If your world is out there and you are in here then the only things that will gather within these walls are time and bitterness. Eventually, that bitterness will eat away at you and leave nothing behind but resentment and hate.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Zombie Room

“Traditions are born by the power of an initial thrust that hurls acts and ideas across the centuries”
― Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev

“Traditionally we are taught, and instinctively we long, to give where it is needed—and immediately.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea: 70th Anniversary Edition

“If God had wanted somebody with St. Francis's consistently winning personality for the job in the New Testament, he'd've picked him, you can be sure. As it was, he picked the best, the smartest, the most loving, the least sentimental the most unimitative master he could possibly have picked. And when you miss seeing that, I swear to you, you're missing the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. The Jesus Prayer has one aim, and one aim only. To endow the person who says it with Christ-consciousness. Not to set up some little cozy, holier-than-thou trysting place with some sticky, adorable divine personage who'll take you in his arms and relieve you of all your duties and make all your nasty weltschmerzen and Professor Tuppers go away and never come back. And by God, if you have intelligence enough to see that—and you do—and yet you refuse to see it, then you're misusing the prayer, you're using it to ask for a world full of dolls and saints and no Professor Tuppers.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“God is a mean-spirited, pugnacious bully bent on revenge against His children for failing to live up to his impossible standards.”
― Walt Whitman

“Sometimes I want to scream at him, Just let me go. Let me go. Let me breathe. So I can't sleep, and I'm angry. I feel as though we're having fight already, even though the fight's only in my imagination. And in my head, thoughts go round and round and round. And I feel like I'm suffocating.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train

“May no Evil Eye peek thru window, keyhole or gunsight at his white haired face!”
― Allen Ginsberg, The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-1971