Collene Wilcoxson > Collene's Quotes

“But the outcome was inevitable: she assumed you would not take no for an answer; she could already see your charming smile morph into the grimace of a rabid dog. To”
― Isham Cook, Lust and Philosophy

“I bent down and felt her neck for a pulse, as I’d seen the paramedics do with Philip.”
― Mark Barkawitz, Full Moon Saturday Night

“It’s lonely,” she replied. “But a good kind of lonely. The kind that makes you stronger. I lived a solitary life here for years. That is how I’ve emerged as I am now. All great faiths are born in the desert.”
― J.S. Latshaw, A Gallery of Mothers

“See, the things we do, everything—the universe is watching. Good and bad. And that motherfucker is making a list like a goddammed accountant. And, in the end, all the accounts have to balance.”
― J.K. Franko, Tooth for Tooth

“Be happy.”
― Kiera Cass, The One

“You were saying you wanted to open the people's eyes. All right, you just go and open old uncle Anagnosti's eyes for him! You saw how his wife had to behave before him, waiting for his orders, like a dog begging. Just go now and teach them that women have equal rights with men, and that it's cruel to eat a piece of the pig while the pig's still raw and groaning in front of you, and that it's simple lunacy to give thanks to God because he's got everything while you're starving to death!...Let people be, boss: don't open their eyes. And supposing you did, what'd they see? Their misery! Leave their eyes closed, boss, and let them go on dreaming!”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

“How queer to think that the old lady in the black military cloak was the Miss Milly who went to the dancing class! It makes me wonder what I shall be like when I am old.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“Si los oías sólo dos veces, los recuerdos de Lou podían parecer monótonos. Si los oías muchas, se convertían en viejos amigos. Eran reconfortantes.”
― Tracy Kidder, Old Friends

“You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world. You also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.

I'm not saying you're more intelligent than Aristotle, or wiser. For all I know, Aristotle's the cleverest person who ever lived. That's not the point. The point is only that science is cumulative, and we live later.”
― Richard Dawkins

“Then she had been a fiancee, a young wife, and a mother, and she had discovered that these words were far too small ever to contain the experience.”
― Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter

“Harman was right: those pictures were worse. But, leaving aside the fact that photographs of death and nudity, however newsworthy, don't get much play in the press, the power of an image does not necessarily reside in what it depicts. A photograph of a mangled cadaver, or of a naked man trussed in torment, can shock and outrage, provoke protest and investigation, but it leaves little to the imagination. It may be rich in practical information while being devoid of any broader meaning. To the extent that it represents any circumstances or conditions beyond itself, it does so generically. Such photographs are repellent in large part because they have a terrible reductive sameness. Except from a forensic point of view, they are unambiguous, and have the quality of pornography. They are what they show, nothing more. They communicate no vision and, shorn of context, they offer little, if anything, to think about, no occasion for wonder. They have no value as symbols.

Of course, the dominant symbol of Western civilization is the figure of a nearly naked man being tortured to death⁠—or more simply, the torture implement itself, the cross. But our pictures of Christ's savage death are the product of religious imagination and idealization. In reality, with his battered flesh scabbed and bleeding and bloated and discolored beneath the pitiless Judean desert sun, he must have been ghastly to behold. Had there been cameras at Calvary, would twenty centuries of believers have been moved to hang photographs of the scene on their altarpieces and in their homes, or to wear an icon of a man being executed around their necks as as an emblem of peace and hope and human fellowship? Photography is too frank to allow for the notion of suffering as noble and ennobling...”
― Philip Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure

“She wanted to return to her dream. Perhaps it was still somewhere there behind her closed eyelids. Perhaps a little of its happiness still clung like gold dust to her lashes. Don't dreams in fairy tales sometimes leave a token behind?”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“The gates of Hell are open night and day; smooth the descent and easy is the way.”
― Publius Vergilius Maro, The Aeneid

“Between skin and skin there is only light. And there was my poetry.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“Don't waste your love on somebody, who doesn't value it.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“The center snaps the ball to the quarterback!"
"No he doesn't!"
"He doesn't?"
"NO! Secretly, he's the quarterback for the other team! He keeps the ball!"
"A traitor!"
"Calvin breaks for the goal."
"Wheeee! He's at the 30... the 20... the 10! Nobody can catch him!"
"Nobody wants to! Your running toward your own goal!"
"Huh?!"
"When I learned that you were a spy, I switched goals. This is your goal and mine's hidden!"
"Hidden?!"
"You'll never find it in a million years!"
"I don't need to find it as a traitor to your team, crossing my goal counts as crossing your goal!"
"Ah, so you might think so..."
"In fact, I know so!"
"But the place I hid my goal is right on top of your goal, so the points will go to me!"
"But the fact is, I'm really a double agent! I'm on your team after all, which means you'll lose points if I cross your goal! Ha ha!"
"But I'm a traitor too, so I'm really on your team! I want you to cross my goal! The points will go to your team, which is really my team!"
"That would be true... if I were a football player!"
"You mean...?"
"I'm actually a badminton player disguised as a double-agent football player!!"
"And I'm actually a volleyball-croquet-polo player!"
"Sooner or later, all our games turn into CalvinBall."
"No cheating!”
― Bill Watterson