Mary Paddock > Mary's Quotes

“Love is the answer to everything. It's the only reason to do anything. If you don't write stories you love, you'll never make it. If you don't write stories that other people love, you'll never make it.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Before such people can act together, a kind of telepathic feeling has to flow through them and ripen to the point when they all know that they are ready to begin. Anyone who has seen the martins and swallows in September, assembling on the telephone wires, twittering, making short flights singly and in groups over the open, stubbly fields, returning to form longer and even longer lines above the yellowing verges of the lanes-the hundreds of individual birds merging and blending, in a mounting excitement, into swarms, and these swarms coming loosely and untidily together to create a great, unorganized flock, thick at the centre and ragged at the edges, which breaks and re-forms continually like clouds or waves-until that moment when the greater part (but not all) of them know that the time has come: they are off, and have begun once more that great southward flight which many will not survive; anyone seeing this has seen at the work the current that flows (among creatures who think of themselves primarily as part of a group and only secondarily, if at all, as individuals) to fuse them together and impel them into action without conscious thought or will: has seen at work the angel which drove the First Crusade into Antioch and drives the lemmings into the sea.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“The bravest people are the ones who don’t mind looking like cowards.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“While there may not be a book in every one of us, there is so often a damned good short story.”
― Jeffrey Archer

“I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.”
― Jonathan Swift

“Danny strolled to the town common, sat on one of the benches in Teenytown and took one of the bottles out of the bag, looking down on it like Hamlet with Yorick's skull”
― Stephen King, Doctor Sleep

“Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“What if you kept coming back to the same place, as your mother did and her mother before her? What if four generations of women kept coming back and living their lives and depositing their stuff: old letters, telegraph receipts, photos, or dramatic stories of loving and drowning that got told and told again. Then, couldn’t it be that the house itself became the family story? Narratives bending, circling, and turning around the same set of rooms. She envisioned the rooms of Journey’s End as they encircled the central living room, layers of a family, intertwining and overlapping over time. Maybe, she thought, she was sunk in a lot deeper than she’d realized.”
― Nora Carroll, The Color of Water in July

“There must be a precise moment when wet cement turns dry, when it no longer accepts footprints or scratched-in declarations of love; an ordinary moment, unnoticed, just like any. But in that moment, the facts of a life can change.”
― Nora Carroll, The Color of Water in July

“The essential code must include . . . how to crawl from the wreckage when this life falters, how to plunge to the cellar of sorrow and grope for the ladder that might bring you back into some kind of light, no matter how dim or strange.”
― Jane Kirkpatrick, A Light in the Wilderness

“Harvey and I sit in the bars... have a drink or two... play the juke box. And soon the faces of all the other people they turn toward mine and they smile. And they're saying, "We don't know your name, mister, but you're a very nice fella." Harvey and I warm ourselves in all these golden moments. We've entered as strangers - soon we have friends. And they come over... and they sit with us... and they drink with us... and they talk to us. They tell about the big terrible things they've done and the big wonderful things they'll do. Their hopes, and their regrets, and their loves, and their hates. All very large, because nobody ever brings anything small into a bar. And then I introduce them to Harvey... and he's bigger and grander than anything they offer me. And when they leave, they leave impressed. The same people seldom come back; but that's envy, my dear. There's a little bit of envy in the best of us.”
― Elwood P. Dowd

“They were beautiful nothings”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“The daylight shouldered its way in like a squad of policemen and did a lot of what’s-all-thising around the room,”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“Since, he had thought of leaving Arnette, searching for something better, but small-town inertia held him—the low siren song of familiar places and familiar faces.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“The most tragic cause of social disharmony is when the speed with which people find mistakes of others outweighs their simple belief that they too are infallible!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes

“we limited loving to just the sane, undamaged people, the next generation would have about three people in it and presumably humanity would die out shortly afterward”
― T. Kingfisher, Paladin's Grace

“Still. If we limited loving to just the sane, undamaged people, the next generation would have about three people in it and presumably humanity would die out shortly afterward”
― T. Kingfisher, Paladin's Grace

“Psalm 15 A psalm of David. 1LORD, who may dwell in your sacred tent? Who may live on your holy mountain? 2The one whose walk is blameless, who does what is righteous, who speaks the truth from their heart; 3whose tongue utters no slander, who does no wrong to a neighbor, and casts no slur on others; 4who despises a vile person but honors those who fear the LORD; who keeps an oath even when it hurts, and does not change their mind; 5who lends money to the poor without interest; who does not accept a bribe against the innocent. Whoever does these things will never be shaken.”
― Anonymous, NIV, Once-A-Day: Bible for Women

“A few years ago, Jean-Guy might not have understood that. Now he could. Every parent, he was sure, became slightly insane the moment their children were born.”
― Louise Penny, The Madness of Crowds

“CHEE, WHO had always considered himself an excellent driver, drove now uneasily. The mixture of precise timing, skill, and confidence in their immortality that Los Angeles drivers brought to their freeway system moved Chee back and forth from anxious admiration to stoic resignation. But his luck had held so far, it should hold for another afternoon. He rolled his pickup truck through the endless sprawl of the city and the satellite towns that make Los Angeles County a wilderness of people.”
― Tony Hillerman, The Ghostway

“No dogs allowed.” He pointed to the sign on the door, which not only was facing the street, but was in a language Bummer did not read, which was all of them.”
― Christopher Moore, Secondhand Souls

“Let children grow up on Earth first, before sending them to Mars.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

“Luckier rain fell on upland sheep, or whispered gently over forests, or pattered somewhat incestuously into the sea. Rain that fell on Ankh-Morpork, though, was rain that was in trouble. They did terrible things to water, in Ankh-Morpork. Being drunk was only the start of its problems.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“The warmth from his hand is so loud that everything else in my brain feels quiet.”
― Elyse Myers, That's a Great Question, I'd Love to Tell You

“I would like to see anyone, prophet, king or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Gentleness is power that chooses to restrain itself. That is under control. Gentleness is someone strong who makes the choice to be careful with that strength.”
― Jim Butcher, Twelve Months

“Why do dachshunds wear their ears inside out?”
― P.G. Wodehouse