Robbie Siemsen > Robbie's Quotes

“You are one, and we are many, We are everywhere and nowhere at the same time. We are the face of justice.”
― J.B. Lion, The Seventh Spark: Volume One – Knights of the Trinity

“But there was definitely something going on. Helen had agreed. With Harry and Sly taking off before they even ate dinner that night before, there had to be. I’m glad I have Joanie and the others. I need the support, and the calming influence. They are just the ones to give me peace.
Just as she was about to drift off with that comforting thought, the front door flew open and Joan burst in breathless.
“Annie!” she said, turning to her. “I think that Nazi guy is right here in town!”
― Cece Whittaker, Glorious Christmas

“Embedded in their psyche was the story of what had happened to the world, and the boys felt glorious to be on the other side of the madness”
― Pernell Plath Meier, In Our Bones

“The Goddess has a fourth face. It is secret, and you should prey, as I do, as I do Igraine, that Morgause will never wear that face.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“Lincoln?” she asked.
“Yes?”
“Do you believe in love at first sight?”
He made himself look at her face, at her wide-open eyes and earnest forehead. At her unbearably sweet mouth.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Do you believe in love before that?”
Her breath caught in her throat like a sore hiccup.
And then it was too much to keep trying not to kiss her.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Attachments

“Little Engine That Could - "I think I can. I think I can. I think I can. I know I can.”
― Watty Piper, The Little Engine That Could

“We live in deeds, not years.”
― Ammar Habib, Mary Edwards Walker: America's Only Female Medal of Honor Recipient

“...it should be remembered that men always prize that most which is least enjoyed.”
― James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans

“He knew by heart every individual clump of bunch grass in the miles of red shaggy prairie that stretched before his cabin. He knew it in all the deceitful loveliness of its early summer, in all the bitter barrenness of its autumn. He had seen it smitten by all the plagues of Egypt. He had seen it parched by drought, and sogged by rain, beaten by hail, and swept by fire, and in the grasshopper years he had seen it eaten as bare and clean as bones that the vultures have left. After the great fires he had seen it stretch for miles and miles, black and smoking as the floor of hell.”
― Willa Cather, The Troll Garden and Selected Stories

“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

- The Hollow Men”
― T.S. Eliot, Poems: 1909-1925

“She was daily surprised by the things he knew and the things he did not know; both, at the time, added to his attraction.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self. Don't turn away from possible futures before you're certain you don't have anything to learn from them.
You're always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

“The wish of death had been palpably hanging over this otherwise idyllic paradise for a good many years.

All business and politics is personal in the Philippines.

If it wasn't for the cheap beer and lovely girls one of us would spend an hour in this dump.

They [Jehovah's Witnesses] get some kind of frequent flyer points for each person who signs on.

I'm not lazy. I'm just motivationally challenged.

I'm not fat. I just have lots of stored energy.

You don't get it do you? What people think of you matters more than the reality. Marilyn.

Despite standing firm at the final hurdle Marilyn was always ready to run the race.

After answering the question the woman bent down behind the stand out of sight of all, and crossed herself.

It is amazing what you can learn in prison. Merely through casual conversation Rick had acquired the fundamentals of embezzlement, fraud and armed hold up.

He wondered at the price of honesty in a grey world whose half tones changed faster than the weather.

The banality of truth somehow always surprises the news media before they tart it up.

You've ridden jeepneys in peak hour. Where else can you feel up a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl without even trying? [Ralph Winton on the Philippines finer points]

Life has no bottom. No matter how bad things are or how far one has sunk things can always get worse.

You could call the Oval Office an information rain shadow.

In the Philippines, a whole layer of criminals exists who consider that it is their right to rob you unhindered. If you thwart their wicked desires, to their way of thinking you have stolen from them and are evil.

There's honest and dishonest corruption in this country.

Don't enjoy it too much for it's what we love that usually kills us.

The good guys don't always win wars but the winners always make sure that they go down in history as the good guys.

The Philippines is like a woman. You love her and hate her at the same time.

I never believed in all my born days that ideas of truth and justice were only pretty words to brighten a much darker and more ubiquitous reality.
The girl was experiencing the first flushes of love while Rick was at least feeling the methadone equivalent.

Although selfishness and greed are more ephemeral than the real values of life their effects on the world often outlive their origins.

Miriam's a meteor job. Somewhere out there in space there must be a meteor with her name on it.

Tsismis or rumours grow in this land like tropical weeds.

Surprises are so common here that nothing is surprising.

A crooked leader who can lead is better than a crooked one who can't.

Although I always followed the politics of Hitler I emulate the drinking habits of Churchill.

It [Australia] is the country that does the least with the most.

Rereading the brief lines that told the story in the manner of Fox News reporting the death of a leftist Rick's dark imagination took hold.

Didn't your mother ever tell you never to trust a man who doesn't drink?

She must have been around twenty years old, was tall for a Filipina and possessed long black hair framing her smooth olive face. This specter of loveliness walked with the assurance of the knowingly beautiful. Her crisp and starched white uniform dazzled in the late-afternoon light and highlighted the natural tan of her skin. Everything about her was in perfect order. In short, she was dressed up like a pox doctor’s clerk. Suddenly, she stopped, turned her head to one side and spat comprehensively into the street. The tiny putrescent puddle contrasted strongly with the studied aplomb of its all-too-recent owner, suggesting all manner of disease and decay.”
― John Richard Spencer

“Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back--your
old self rejects you, and shuts you out. ~Lilly Bart”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“آدم هاي خوشگل يا آدمهايي که خيال مي کنند خيلي زرنگند هميشه از آدم تقاضاي لطف بزرگي دارند. آنها چون براي خودشان مي ميرند خيال مي کنند ديگران هم برايشان مي
ميرند. خيلي بامزه است”
― J.D.Salinger

“The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six , result happiness.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“in the dark you have to describe yourself. In the daylight other people describe you.”
― Fynn, Mister God, This is Anna

“Let the dead bury the dead.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.”
― Junot Diaz

“Why should the wealth of the country be stored in banks and elevators while the idle workman wanders homeless about the streets and the idle loafers who hoard the gold only to spend it in riotous living are rolling about in fine carriages from which they look out on peaceful meetings and call them riots?”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“that the infection was propagated insensibly, and by such persons as were not visibly infected, who neither knew whom they infected or who they were infected by.”
― Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year

“I am writing this book because we're all going to die - In the loneliness of my own life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother faraway, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our deaths, sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid: with just this one pride and consolation: my broke heart in the general despair and opened up inwards to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream”
― Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody

“The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon.”
― Michael Crichton, The Lost World

“Tired of feeling tired? Take Liftoff, the new energy pill. Liftoff is made entirely from chemicals, with no naturally occurring ingredients. Designed to shock the nervous system into involuntary spasms, Liftoff can energize your day. Or, it can kill you. Sometimes, death comes slowly and painfully. Other times, it comes rapidly and painfully. Side effects include, but are not limited to, swelling of the throat, gagging, asphyxiation, abnormal bleeding, normal bleeding, uncontrollable laughter, uncontrollable sobbing, the desire to poke someone with a foreign object, the desire to poke oneself with a foreign object, and bed-wetting.”
― Steve Bates, Back To You

“Millions more people in Africa, Asia, South America, and the rest of the world have also had the benefit of racist European “cleansing” and “civilising” in which Christian religious orders played a heinous role that contradicted every godly thing they preached about and claimed to stand for. When Europe’s imperial powers sought new geographic regions to expand their spheres of influence in the nineteenth century, Africa — with its wealth of natural resources — became a prime target for colonisation in which Christianity played a major role as one of Colonialism’s “Three Cs”: Civilisation, Christianity, and Commerce.”
― William Hanna, The Grim Reaper

“Love is the Answer, God is the Cure!”
― Aimee Cabo Nikolov, Love is the Answer God is the Cure

“And he never asked you about it?”
“No, he never asked. If he had, I’m still not sure I would have told him.”
“Told him what?”
“That is was his baby.”
― Behcet Kaya, Body In The Woods

“Yes, we've given them the benefit of the doubt. But, isn't it time (for once in our lives) to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt?”
― Janine Myung Ja, Adoption Stories