Manta Ray > Manta's Quotes

“No, women like you don't write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“You want to know about anybody? See what books they read, and how they've been read...”
― Keri Hulme, The Bone People

“Killing don’t need no reason. This is ghetto. Reason is for rich people. We have madness.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“...Love isn’t saying, I love you but calling to say, did you eat”
― Marlon James

“See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of?? Losing weight and looking like the poor.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“I was looking for the key for years
But the door was always open”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“We creoles are so different, one from the other, that it's hard for us to mix properly amongst ourselves, let alone among Carib people who have a lot more things in common. Maybe its because Carib people remind us of what we lost trying to get up in the world. See, in the old days, according to Granny Straker, the more you left behind the old ways, the more acceptable you were to the powerful people in the government and the churches who had the power to change a black person's life.”
― Zee Edgell, Beka Lamb

“Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off.”
― Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance

“Jamaica never gets worse or better, it just finds new ways to stay the same.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“It’s bad enough . . . when a country gets colonized, but when the people do as well! That’s the end, really, that’s the end.”
― Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions

“You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things.”
― M. L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

“Maybe madmen always rule. Maybe that's all there are.”
― Mike McQuay, Memories

“The trouble with Clare was, not only that she wanted to have her cake and eat it too, but that she wanted to nibble at the cakes of other folk as well.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“I think being a mother is the cruelest thing in the world. ”
― Nella Larsen, The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories

“Distance was a dangerous thing, she knew. Distance changed people.”
― Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance

“Remember, be a good person, not a good girl. Good girls suffer a lot in this life.”
― Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, A Girl Is a Body of Water

“You can't lie to your soul.”
― Irvine Welsh, Porno

“We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it. We realise that we’re all going to die, without really finding out the big answers. We develop all those long-winded ideas which just interpret the reality of our lives in different ways, without really extending our body of worthwhile knowledge, about the big things, the real things. Basically, we live a short disappointing life; and then we die. We fill up our lives with shite, things like careers and relationships to delude ourselves that it isn’t all totally pointless.”
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“Caution is a spy’s best friend; paranoia is his enemy.”
― Jack Barsky

“...somehow one spy sensed the presence of another.”
― Jack Barsky

“In principle and reality, libraries are life-enhancing palaces of wonder.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Ninety-nine per cent of traditional English literature concerns people who never have to worry about money at all. We always seem to be watching or reading about emotional crises among folk who live in a world of great fortune both in matters of luck and money; stories and fantasies about rock stars and film stars, sporting millionaires and models; jet-setting members of the aristocracy and international financiers.”
― James Kelman

“There's a point, you know, where treachery is so complete and unashamed that it becomes statesmanship.”
― George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman and the Mountain of Light

“If anything she was a shade too plump, but she knew the ninety-seven ways of making love that the Hindus are supposed to set much store by―though mind you, it is all nonsense, for the seventy-fourth position turns out to be the same as the seventy-third, but with your fingers crossed.”
― George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman

“England was a menace to Scotland because Scotland was, by its separate existence, a constant anxiety to England.”
― George MacDonald Fraser, The Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers

“If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”
― Anthony Trollope

“What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?...Was ever anything so civil?”
― Anthony Trollope, The Warden

“To have her meals, and her daily walk, and her fill of novels, and to be left alone, was all that she asked of the gods.”
― Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds