Donnette Riesgraf > Donnette's Quotes

“People in this country are still waiting for the war of their freedom to come from somewhere else, from the jungles, from the mountains, from China, from Pakistan. That will never happen. Every man must make his own Benaras.
The book of your revolution sits in the pit of your belly, young Indian. Crap it out, and read.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“although science interests me just because of its efforts to escape from anthropomorphic knowledge, I am nonetheless convinced that our imagination cannot be anything but anthropomorphic.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“Climb the day, Drop your dreams, Possess the day.”
― Gail Carson Levine, Fairest

“If you give people a firm opinion, you run the risk of being wrong. Guess what? People remember when you’re wrong a lot more often than when you’re right. So the tendency is to include all the possibilities. It’s intellectually honest, even.”
― Tom Clancy, The Sum of All Fears

“Notation on Quark Manipulation as Applied to the Time/Space Continuum.”
― Gabriel F.W. Koch, Steel Blood

“And she comes, she actually bloody well comes, bustling down between the beds, bless her heart, in her best coat and vile black straw hat, more fit for a funeral than anything. He’ll get her another, whatever she wants, the best money can buy. He’s so pleased to see her he could nearly bloody cry.”
― Lesley Glaister, Blasted Things

“There will be a time when I will answer everything, Avelyn. But it is far in the future for you.”
― Jack Borden, The Lost City: An Epic YA Fantasy Novel

“Oscar looked up from his plate, and if a cat could laugh, he would have. ‘Boy, that’s ugly, even for a jinn. Looks like a cross between a rat, a frog and a bottlebrush.”
― Sara Pascoe, Being a Witch, and Other Things I Didn't Ask For

“You must tell the true story of the Arkstone and the Toltecs — and the
Turanians. Through you and your tale those who are born into humankind
in later years will remember. You will stir their soul memories.”
― Candace L. Talmadge, Stoneslayer: Book One Scandal

“The best writers tend to look the roughest in photos. At least that's the excuse I use for why I look so bad in mine.”
― R.D. Ronald

“One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards will be at one's throat all the sooner.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“And yet it seems so full of comfort and of strength, the night. In its great presence, our small sorrows creep away, ashamed. The day has been so full of fret and care, and our hearts have been so full of evil and bitter thoughts, and the world has seemed so hard and wrong to us. Then night, like some great loving mother, gently lays her hand upon our fevered head, and turns our little tear-stained face upto hers, and smiles, and though she does not speak, we know what she would say, and lay our hot flushed cheek against her bosom, and the pain is gone.

Sometimes, our pain is very deep and real, and we stand before her very silent, because there is no language for our pain, only a moan. Night's heart is full of pity for us: she cannot ease our aching; she takes our hand in hers, and the little world grows very small and very far away beneath us, and borne on her dark wings, we pass for a moment into a mightier presence than her own, and in the wondrous light of that great presence, all human life's like a book before us, and we know that Pain and Sorrow are but the angels of God.”
― Jerome K. Jerome

“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.”
― Margaret Atwood

“I understand my parents quite well. They think of a wife as a man’s luxury, which he can afford only when he is making a comfortable living. I have a low opinion of this view of the relationship between man and wife, because it makes the wife and the prostitute distinguishable only insofar as the former is able to secure a lifelong contract from the man because of her more favourable social rank . . . Which”
― Robyn Arianrhod, Young Einstein: And the story of E=mc²

“I'm not close to him." He looked at me defiantly. "But he's put his whole life into this. He's no Freud or Jung or Pavlov or Watson, but he's doing something important and I respect his dedication - maybe even more because he's just an ordinary man trying to do a great man's work, while the great men are all busy making bombs.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“How could I live without dancing?”
― Maria Nhambu, America's Daughter