Bart Emanuel > Bart's Quotes

“In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold and very well-made. I hate small portions of anything, particularly when they taste bad.”
― Ian Fleming, Casino Royale

“You never get real adventures without a bit of risk somewhere.”
― Ian Fleming, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

“I'm alone and outgunned, scared and inexperienced, but I'm right.”
― John Grisham, The Rainmaker

“Please give me fifty more years of work and fun, then an instant death when I'm sleeping.”
― John Grisham, The Rainmaker

“When witnesses concoct lies, they often miss the obvious.”
― John Grisham, The Testament

“Like every false rumor, it gained credibility while being repeated, and before long it was practically a fact.”
― John Grisham, The Accused

“The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“They say there's no harm in daydreaming, but there is.”
― Charlaine Harris, Club Dead

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
― St. Augustine

“When I left her office, I felt like she'd gut-punched me, brushed me off, slapped me back and forth, gave me a cool compress to put on my cheeks, cold-cocked me with a stiff uppercut to the jaw, picked me up, brushed me off again, then kicked me in the seat of my pants as she handed me a piece of cake and showed me the door.
Being a reporter isn't as easy as it looks.”
― Christopher Paul Curtis, The Madman of Piney Woods

“October is one of the loveliest months in Sicily. It’s when summer opens its fist again, letting a little breeze into the house and allowing you to breathe again; when the light becomes as mellow as my Aunt Caterina’s limoncello and you take a sweater along in the evenings, just to be on the safe side;”
― Mario Giordano, Auntie Poldi and the Vineyards of Etna

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“This is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks the heart again and again.”
― Alexander McCall Smith

“Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.

Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star.

But every one of those stars is a sun, often far more brilliant and glorious than the small, nearby star we call the Sun. And many--perhaps most--of those alien suns have planets circling them. So almost certainly there is enough land in the sky to give every member of the human species, back to the first ape-man, his own private, world-sized heaven--or hell.

How many of those potential heavens and hells are now inhabited, and by what manner of creatures, we have no way of guessing; the very nearest is a million times farther away than Mars or Venus, those still remote goals of the next generation. But the barriers of distance are crumbling; one day we shall meet our equals, or our masters, among the stars.

Men have been slow to face this prospect; some still hope that it may never become reality. Increasing numbers, however are asking; 'Why have such meetings not occurred already, since we ourselves are about to venture into space?'

Why not, indeed? Here is one possible answer to that very reasonable question. But please remember: this is only a work of fiction.

The truth, as always, will be far stranger.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

“Best way to predict your future is to create it.”
― Stephen R. Covey, First Things First

“I had this feeling suddenly. I get this feeling a lot, but I don’t know if there’s one word for it. It’s not nervous or sad or even lonely. It’s all of that, and then a bit more. The feeling is I don’t belong here. I don’t know how I got here, and I don’t know how long I can stay before everyone else realizes that I am an impostor. I am a fraud. I’ve gotten this feeling nearly everywhere I have ever been in my life. There’s nothing you can do about it except drink some water and hope that it subsides. Or you can leave.”
― Leila Sales, This Song Will Save Your Life

“the use of atbash in the Bible sensitized the monks and scribes of the Middle Ages to the idea of letter substitution. And from them flowed the modern use of ciphers—as distinct from codes—as a means of secret communication.”
― David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet

“years ago one of the translators working on the original Dead Sea scrolls, Professor Schonfeld, discovered a recurring cipher in some texts. A hidden language, if you like. He called it the Atbash Cipher. Ever heard of it?” Savage nodded. “Sure. I thought it was found in scrolls written in Hebrew.” “It seems it may occur in Aramaic texts too.”
― Glenn Meade, The Second Messiah

“In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I drink to make other people more interesting.”
― Hemingway, Ernest

“The finest of pleasures are always the unexpected ones.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“We meet fear. We greet the unexpected visitor and listen to what he has to tell us. When fear arrives, something is about to happen.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“The past was always there, lived inside of you, and it helped to make you who you were. But it had to be placed in perspective. The past could not dominate the future.”
― Barbara Taylor Bradford, Unexpected Blessings

“Never judge others. You both know good and well how unexpected events can change who a person is. Always keep that in mind. You never know what someone else is experiencing within their own life.”
― Colleen Hoover, Slammed

“Happiness is strange; it comes when you are not seeking it. When you are not making an effort to be happy, then unexpectedly, mysteriously, happiness is there, born of purity, of a loveliness of being.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“One person's craziness is another person's reality.”
― Tim Burton

“Sometimes all it takes is a tiny shift of perspective to see something familiar in a totally new light.”
― Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol

“Walls in people's heads are sometimes more durable than walls made of concrete blocks.”
― Willy Brandt, Erinnerungen