Synthia Laurion > Synthia's Quotes

“He summoned you into the circle, Scott. For whatever reason, I don't know. But now you've left, you've become a loose thread. He won't sit back with the possibility you might cause his whole world to unravel around him.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“A magic Adam never knew existed, yet he must somehow control it to survive.”
― Max Nowaz, Get Rich or Get Lucky

“Ivan, the Russian sharpshooter, was sitting, gun in hand, behind one of Borg’s men on a motorbike further down South Eaton Place. The wooden barriers, the parked lorry and the elderly gentleman with the stick were all part of Isaac Walsh’s plan, aimed at hampering the policemen and giving Abbott a chance to escape.”
― Mark Ellis, Death of an Officer

“Truthfully, Professor Hawking? Why would we allow tourists from the future muck up the past when your contemporaries had the task well in Hand?"
Brigadier General Patrick E Buckwalder 2241C.E.”
― Gabriel F.W. Koch, Paradox Effect: Time Travel and Purified DNA Merge to Halt the Collapse of Human Existence

“Whither be the heart of Justice?
            Lo, in stone, child. Lo, in stone.
            Whither be the heart of Justice?
            Lo, tis fast in stone.”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.”
― William Faulkner

“She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“that precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last—the power to refuse our consent.”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

“I was also part of a post-Vietnam generation that had learned to question its own government and saw how - from the rise of McCarthyism to support for South Africa's apartheid regime - Cold War thinking had often led America to betray its ideals. This awareness didn't stop me from believing we should contain the spread of Marxist totalitarianism. But it made me wary of the notion that good resided only on our side and bad on theirs, or that a people who'd produced Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky were inherently different from us. Instead, the evils of the Soviet system struck me as a variation on a broader human tragedy: The way abstract theories and rigid orthodoxy can curdle into repression. How readily we justify moral compromise and relinquish our freedoms. How power can corrupt and fear can compound and language can be debased. None of that was unique to Soviets or Communisists, I thought; it was true for all of us. The brave struggle of dissidents behind the Iron Curtain felt of a piece with, rather than distinct from, the larger struggle for human dignity taking place elsewhere in the world - including America.”
― Barack Obama, A Promised Land

“What's all this about sin, eh?'
'That,' I said, very sick. 'Using Ludwig van like that. He did no harm to anyone. Beethoven just wrote music.' And then I was really sick and they had to bring a bowl that was in the shape of like a kidney.
'Music,' said Dr. Brodsky, like musing. 'So you're keen on music. I know nothing about it myself. It's a useful emotional heightener, that's all I know. Well, well. What do you think about that, eh, Branom?'
'It can't be helped,' said Dr. Branom. 'Each man kills the thing he loves...”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“George’s utterance of the nest and the trap belonged to a bigger mystery she did not yet understand. One day I will, she promised herself. She would stake her life that those last words from her son would be solved by her. They were steppingstones into… whatever the wind and the stars and the valiant trees held for her.”
― Susan Rowland, Murder on Family Grounds

“Like a gloomy and sinister paradox since its apparition until now, socialism suffered terrible and terrifying metamorphoses. With the name of the most human doctrine—Socialism—the most ominous and naughty crimes against humanity were done. The National Socialism of Hitler created Auschwitz and Majdanek and the People’s socialism of Stalin — Gulag and Kolima! And both of them buried more than fifty million people! That’s monstrous!”
― Todor Bombov, Socialism Is Dead! Long Live Socialism!: The Marx Code-Socialism with a Human Face

“He craned his neck and sniffed at the puffball. “It is a dog,” he confirmed. “Hey! Come on, time to go,” he barked at the animal, foraging in its woolly thicket of fur and finding a leg to pull.
“How dare you!” squealed a thin voice. “How dare you insult the great, the magnificent, the incomparable Pom.”
― Graham Pryor, Cerberus

“I can't say." Miranda mimicked a very grown-up sound with her imperious tone. "I wasn't at the morgue. I was in school.”
― Theasa Tuohy, Mademoiselle le Sleuth

“He desperately tried to think of a story to explain his involvement in her sudden appearance, without mentioning the book of magic in his possession.
 ”
― Max Nowaz, The Three Witches and the Master

“Satan’s breath be damned, the nasty beast is still in there.”
― Gabriel F.W. Koch, Steel Blood

“Padre Crittle: … we heard on a radio jettisoned by one of the forestry men, the broadcast of Sir Reginald Dormal-Smith, the Governor of Burma. Speaking from Delhi he told the world just how well everything had been organized and how magnificently everyone had stuck to their posts. We who were in the middle of the chaos were “not amused” and loud were the jeers with which his speech was greeted: officers and civilians alike united in making caustic comments on British propaganda …”
― Elizabeth Tebby Germaine, EXTRAORDINARY TRUE STORIES OF SURVIVAL IN BURMA WW2: tens of thousands fled to India from the Japanese Invasion in 1942

“She knew how people slipped through cracks—not all at once, but in layers.”
― D.L. Maddox, The Dog Walker: The Prequel

“Faith, that faculty which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

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― Robert Fulghum, Ohňostrojení

“There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book.

The reason for that is that in adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness. Adult writers who deal in straightforward stories find themselves sidelined into a genre such as crime or science fiction, where no one expects literary craftsmanship.

But stories are vital. Stories never fail us because, as Isaac Bashevis Singer says, "events never grow stale." There's more wisdom in a story than in volumes of philosophy. And by a story I mean not only Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk but also the great novels of the nineteenth century, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Bleak House and many others: novels where the story is at the center of the writer's attention, where the plot actually matters. The present-day would-be George Eliots take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They're embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do.

But what characterizes the best of children's authors is that they're not embarrassed to tell stories. They know how important stories are, and they know, too, that if you start telling a story you've got to carry on till you get to the end. And you can't provide two ends, either, and invite the reader to choose between them. Or as in a highly praised recent adult novel I'm about to stop reading, three different beginnings. In a book for children you can't put the plot on hold while you cut artistic capers for the amusement of your sophisticated readers, because, thank God, your readers are not sophisticated. They've got more important things in mind than your dazzling skill with wordplay. They want to know what happens next.”
― Philip Pullman

“The harshest people I’ve met over the years have had two things in common: they don’t fully trust anybody, and they view relationships as a means to an end.”
― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

“Her eyes were olive green―incisive and clear.”
― Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

“Finding someone you love and who loves you back is a wonderful, wonderful feeling. But finding a true soul mate is an even better feeling. A soul mate is someone who understands you like no other, loves you like no other, will be there for you forever, no matter what. They say that nothing lasts forever, but I am a firm believer in the fact that for some, love lives on even after we're gone.”
― Cecilia Ahern, P.S. I Love You