caffeinated reader > caffeinated reader's Quotes

“Life’s passing is but a fluttering in the great cosmos. We must try to live it well, I kept reminding myself that evening. It is the best we can do.”
― Carol McGrath, Mistress Cromwell: The breathtaking and absolutely gripping Tudor novel from the acclaimed author of the SHE-WOLVES trilogy

“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight—watching over nothing.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“The past is always tense, the future perfect.”
― Zadie Smith

“are you breathing, are you lucky enough
to be breathing”
― Hettie Jones

“Ideas are easy. It's the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats.”
― Sue Grafton

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.”
― Alan Alda

“Politicians are like mackerel,” he often observes, “a day out of water they begin to stink.”
― Jack Casey, Hamilton's Choice

“Morris shakes his head in disbelief. “Pickering will cleave our nation in half and Burr will rise as president of a northern confederacy while you’re home planting potatoes?” Morris’s jowls quiver. “This is not the man of action I once knew.”
― Jack Casey, Hamilton's Choice

“bent, torn. That life was delicate and fleeting, that we were all just one wrong step away from death, at any moment. And here we both were, standing together in the pouring rain, alive and breathing.”
― Jillian Cantor, Half Life

“this brilliant mind, and more resources here in Paris than we ever dreamed as girls. You cannot waste that.” She grabs my shoulders and holds on to them. “You cannot waste that.”
― Jillian Cantor, Half Life

“Is there no such thing as a loyal courtier? I think not.”
― Robin Maxwell, The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn

“How can this be so? How has it come to this, that all the Lords of England have embraced evil so fervently that they would execute one Lady so that her husband might marry another? It might be said that Henry is no ordinary husband. He is the King. The Sun. A God on earth. But I have known him, and the truth of it is Henry is a man, no more no less, placed upon the throne by other men, thro war and bloodshed and the love of power.”
― Robin Maxwell, The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn

“Why did Cromwell do it? Did he not twist and overwork the law and man’s reasoning beyond imagining to make my marriage to Henry possible?” “You forget he is a butterfly taken up by which ever wind is the strongest.” “Yes, and there is only one wind in England,” said I bitterly. “Its name is Henry.”
― Robin Maxwell, The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn

“Secretly, he began to smuggle the family library out of the country: about two-thirds of the fifty thousand volumes would be saved.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals. Or it’s all anarchic chaos, with the same consequence. It seems to me that there is—was—a chain of individual responsibilities, all of which were necessary, but not so long a chain that everybody can simply blame everyone else. But of course, my desire to ascribe responsibility might be more a reflection of my own cast of mind than a fair analysis of what happened. That’s one of the central problems of history, isn’t it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“As the war raced to its bloody finale, Ursula was swept up in an exhausting whirlwind of espionage, child-rearing, and housework: on any given day she might be coordinating intelligence gathered from her father, brother, Tom, the chemist, and others in her network, gathering intelligence from the Tool missions, while hanging out the washing, doing the dishes, and struggling to keep the domestic ship afloat at Avenue Cottage.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“the letter he left for the coroner he had explained his reasoning: that life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is a moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“He survived to tell the tale”—that’s what people say, don’t they? History isn’t the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“You still don’t get it. You never did, and you never will. So stop even trying.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“None of us have time. We only have moments. Strung on a string that can break at any minute.”
― Rochelle B. Weinstein, This Is Not How It Ends

“If I were writing a novel I would end it here: a novel, I used to think, has to end somewhere, but I’m beginning to believe my realism has been at fault all these years, for nothing in life now ever seems to end. Chemists tell you matter is never completely destroyed, and mathematicians tell you that if you halve each pace in crossing a room, you will never reach the opposite wall, so what an optimist I would be if I thought that this story ended here.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“St Augustine asked where time came from. He said it came out of the future which didn’t exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“Sunny. Proves rich or poor doesn’t matter, if you ask me. Some people are just born happy. I think that’s the luckiest thing. If you’re sunny inside, you never have to worry about the weather.”
― Nina de Gramont, The Christie Affair

“The age of disappearing women. It had been going on forever. Thousands of us vanished, with not a single police officer searching. Not a word from the newspapers. Only our long absences and quiet returns. If we ever returned at all.”
― Nina de Gramont, The Christie Affair

“It is progress.” Kurt’s continuing justifications filled the silence. “To eliminate weakness. To promote strength. For the greater good. Ultimately, it would have led to the improvement of the whole human race. One day the world will understand the wisdom of such actions.”
― Celia Rees, Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook

“I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people—his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Her voice is full of money,"...
That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money- that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it....High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl....”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby