Connie Waitman > Connie's Quotes

“Part of the hem floated loose. She spun around again—the fabric tightened like wool on a spindle. She breathed in fear. The boat was farther away. She swung her head around—so was the shore.”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“I thought the force of my wanting must wake ye, surely. And then ye did come. . ." He stopped, looking at me with eyes gone soft and dark. "Christ, Claire, ye were so beautiful, there on the stair, wi' your hair down and the shadow of your body with the light behind ye…." He shook his head slowly. "I did think I should die, if I didna have ye," he said softly. "Just then.”
― Diana Gabaldon

“They attend with Pharisaical strictness to the outward forms of religion, and at the same time neglect the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“I like it better here where I can sit just quietly and smell the flowers.”
― Munro Leaf, The Story of Ferdinand

“oldened”
― William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

“It's a lot like nuts and bolts - if the rider's nuts, the horse bolts! ”
― Nicholas Evans

“Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“Tightening his embrace around his wife and little Theo, he vowed, "I will do everything in my power to continue being worthy of the faith you have in me.”
― Therisa Peimer, Taming Flame

“I really like Matilda and that's not a clever book, is it? It's for children. But she's my favourite main character because she comes from an awful family and likes reading, like I do. Those special powers must've made her life a lot easier, though. She wouldn't be working in a pub at thirty-two.”
― Sara Pascoe, Weirdo

“On an impulse he went into the room and stood before the window, pushing aside the sheer curtain to watch the snow, now nearly eight inches high on the lampposts and the fences and the roofs. It was the sort of storm that rarely happened in Lexington, and the steady white flakes, the silence, filled him with a sense of excitement and peace. It was a moment when all the disparate shards of his life seemed to knit themselves together, every past sadness and disappointment, every anxious secret and uncertainty hidden now beneath the soft white layers. Tomorrow would be quiet, the world subdued and fragile, until the neighborhood children came out to break the stillness with their tracks and shouts and joy. He remembered such days from his own childhood in the mountains, rare moments of escape when he went into the woods, his breathing amplified and his voice somehow muffled by the heavy snow that bent branches low, drifted over paths. The world, for a few short hours, transformed.”
― Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter

“Unlike other commodities, however, fast food isn’t viewed, read, played, or worn. It enters the body and becomes part of the consumer. No other industry offers, both literally and figuratively, so much insight into the nature of mass consumption.”
― Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal

“As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.”
― Michael Ondaatje

“You think I'm a fool?" demanded Harry.
"No, I think you're like James," said Lupin, "who would have regarded it as the height of dishonor to mistrust his friends.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. Happiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven. She is a divine dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth bloom and golden fruitage of Paradise.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Villette

“We are born faithful and afraid, when it should be the opposite; it is life that teaches us how much we stand to lose.”
― Justin Cronin, The City of Mirrors

“He charged again. She jabbed the cleat into his ribs,
then brought it up under his jaw with a savage upper-
cut. He reeled, blood now pouring from his nose, but he
didn’t go down.”
― D.L. Maddox, Secrets

“In a popular state the inhabitants are divided into certain classes,” Montesquieu affirmed in a Marxian manner a century before Marx! So, the popular state is a fiction; it is transient, fleeting, and for this reason — imaginable only. In its rigorous scientific sense of a class instrument, it is practically an empty matter sophism, a complete commonplaceness, an offspring of mental weakness. There is no such state! If it is a state, it is not popular! If it is popular, it is not a state yet! The State is a violent institution for social injustice generated by two main classes, which are main ones because they are at enmity… Any people closed in a state, are divided into classes. “For indeed any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich.”(Plato, The Republic).  Not Marx, still Plato said the truth!”
― Todor Bombov, Socialism Is Dead! Long Live Socialism!: The Marx Code-Socialism with a Human Face

“… Exhausting climbs lay ahead. It was Sunday … May 17th … The path seemed to climb from dawn till dusk, the rain poured down nearly all day. The mud was worse than ever, and more slippery. Maggie, the elephant, was heavily laden, and at one time it seemed hopeless to expect her to struggle up those towering hills … as the light was going we reached the camp, we found it only a huddle of shelters already occupied on a hill-top 4000 ft high, across which a cold wind swept … Dr Russell”
― Elizabeth Tebby Germaine, EXTRAORDINARY TRUE STORIES OF SURVIVAL IN BURMA WW2: tens of thousands fled to India from the Japanese Invasion in 1942

“He had an intrusive gaze and quietly confident manner, that seemed to strip away the layers of protective deception Scott would usually adopt around strangers.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“vorremmo anche far parte, per quanto è possibile, delle forze che guidano il treno del tempo. Si tratta di un ruolo assai poco chiaro, e quando si guarda fuori dal finestrino dopo un intervallo più lungo del solito, si ha l’impressione che il paesaggio sia mutato. Ciò che fugge via, continua a fuggire solo perché non potrebbe fare altrimenti, mentre in noi, che pure siamo rassegnati, si fa sempre più intensa la spiacevole sensazione di avere come oltrepassato la meta o imboccato la linea sbagliata. E un bel giorno siamo pervasi da un bisogno irresistibile: scendere, saltar giù! Un desiderio di esser trattenuti, di non progredire, di restar fermi, di tornare indietro al punto che precede la diramazione sbagliata. E, nel buon tempo antico, quando esisteva ancora l’Impero austriaco, in un caso del genere si poteva scendere dal treno del tempo, salire su un normale convoglio di una normale ferrovia e ritornare in patria.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“From this view of the subject, it may be concluded that a pure Democracy, by which I mean, a Society, consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the Government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of Government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party, or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is, that such Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of Government, have erroneously supposed, that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.”
― Founding Fathers, The Penguin Guide to the United States Constitution: A Fully Annotated Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and Amendments, and Selections from The Federalist Papers

“there are only two kinds of flights: ones in which you die and ones in which you do not.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“All these things are miracles. It is a miracle if you can find true friends, and it is a miracle if you have enough food to eat, and it is a miracle if you get to spend your days and evenings doing whatever it is you like to do.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Lump of Coal