Jane Valentini > Jane's Quotes

“The Black Prince is entombed at Canterbury Cathedral. His effigy reads: “Such as thou art, sometimes was I, Such as I am, such thou shalt be, I thought little on hour of death, So long as I enjoyed breath, On earth I had great riches, Land, houses, great treasure, Horses money and gold, But now a wretched captive am I, Deep in the ground, lo I lie, My beauty great, is all quite gone, My flesh is wasted to the bone.”
― Michael G. Kramer, Isabella Warrior Queen

“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

“This evening I spied her in the back orchard. I decided to sacrifice one of my better old shirts and carried it out to her. The weather’s been warm of late. Buds on the apple trees are ready to burst. Usually by this time of the year, at that time of day, the back orchard is full of screaming children. Damut’s boys were the only two. They were on the terrace below her, running through the slanted sunlight, chasing each other around tree trunks. She stood above them, like a merlin watching rabbits play.”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“After that, nothing was the same. The very notion of my having a family turned vague, hard to credit, even weirdly jokey.”
― Michael Wyndham Thomas, The Erkeley Shadows

“Should I surrender to this bliss? The love, the touch of a child!”
― Andri E. Elia, Yildun: Worldmaker of Yand

“From the vaulted arches several stories above us, entire, mature trees were growing, reaching leafy boughs down into the open air between the floor and ceiling. There was a full glade growing up there, oak, birch, maple, and elm, like someone had carved out a few acres of the park and fixed it there upside down.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sixth Borough

“Aurelia frowned. "Are you saying that you hang around the women at court to gather intel?" "Oh, Your Grace, you are quick on the uptake," he said with an impressed look on his face. "It's not fair. Flaminius always gets the hot ones. Does he have to get the smart ones too?”
― Therisa Peimer, Taming Flame

“There are certain phrases potent to make my blood boil -- improper influence! What old woman's cackle is that?"

"Are you a young lady?"

"I am a thousand times better: I am an honest woman, and as such I will be treated.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

“It was one of those ridiculous arrangements that couples make when they are separating, but before they are divorced - when they still imagine that children and property can be shared with more magnanimity than recrimination.”
― John Irving

“Never argue with an idiot. They will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.”
― Mark Twain

“He couldn’t have known it, but among the original run of The History of Love, at least one copy was destined to change a life.

This particular book was one of the last of the two thousand to be printed, and sat for longer than the rest in a warehouse in the outskirts of Santiago, absorbing the humidity. From there it was finally sent to a bookstore in Buenos Aires. The careless owner hardly noticed it, and for some years it languished on the shelves, acquiring a pattern of mildew across the cover. It was a slim volume, and its position on the shelf wasn’t exactly prime: crowded on the left by an overweight biography of a minor actress, and on the right by the once-bestselling novel of an author that everyone had since forgotten, it hardly left its spine visible to even the most rigorous browser. When the store changed owners it fell victim to a massive clearance, and was trucked off to another warehouse, foul, dingy, crawling with daddy longlegs, where it remained in the dark and damp before finally being sent to a small secondhand bookstore not far from the home of the writer Jorge Luis Borges.

The owner took her time unpacking the books she’d bought cheaply and in bulk from the warehouse. One morning, going through the boxes, she discovered the mildewed copy of The History of Love. She’d never heard of it, but the title caught her eye. She put it aside, and during a slow hour in the shop she read the opening chapter, called 'The Age of Silence.'

The owner of the secondhand bookstore lowered the volume of the radio. She flipped to the back flap of the book to find out more about the author, but all it said was that Zvi Litvinoff had been born in Poland and moved to Chile in 1941, where he still lived today. There was no photograph. That day, in between helping customers, she finished the book. Before locking up the shop that evening, she placed it in the window, a little wistful about having to part with it.

The next morning, the first rays of the rising sun fell across the cover of The History of Love. The first of many flies alighted on its jacket. Its mildewed pages began to dry out in the heat as the blue-gray Persian cat who lorded over the shop brushed past it to lay claim to a pool of sunlight. A few hours later, the first of many passersby gave it a cursory glance as they went by the window.

The shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was in the hope that the right reader might discover it.

And that’s what happened. One afternoon a tall young man saw the book in the window. He came into the shop, picked it up, read a few pages, and brought it to the register. When he spoke to the owner, she couldn’t place his accent. She asked where he was from, curious about the person who was taking the book away. Israel, he told her, explaining that he’d recently finished his time in the army and was traveling around South America for a few months. The owner was about to put the book in a bag, but the young man said he didn’t need one, and slipped it into his backpack. The door chimes were still tinkling as she watched him disappear, his sandals slapping against the hot, bright street.

That night, shirtless in his rented room, under a fan lazily pushing around the hot air, the young man opened the book and, in a flourish he had been fine-tuning for years, signed his name: David Singer.

Filled with restlessness and longing, he began to read.”
― Nicole Krauss

“He said he would come in,' the White Queen went on, `because he was looking for a hippopotamus. Now, as it happened, there wasn't such a thing in the house, that morning.'
Is there generally?' Alice asked in an astonished tone.
Well, only on Thursdays,' said the Queen.”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There

“We’re so very sorry about this latest murder. Ignore Simon’s levity.”
― Susan Rowland, Murder on Family Grounds

“Where’s my uncle?” she asked.
“I don’t know who your uncle is, but if it as the guy who owned this place before I bought it, then he’s pushing up daisies.”
“But it can’t be, he’s still young.”
― Max Nowaz, The Three Witches and the Master

“Hunger and a lack of blood-corpuscles take all the manhood from a man.”
― H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

“Where do you get your ideas? people ask. Sometimes they’re at the bottoms of cups of tea. Sometimes they’re lurking in my shower. Sometimes they’re waiting patiently in glass cases in museums.”
― Erin Morgenstern

“The happy people are failures because they are on such good terms with themselves they don't give a damn.”
― Agatha Christie

“We all know what the business of government is: making and enforcing regulations. Governments approach all problems as problems of making and enforcing regulations. They reduce all problems to things about which regulations can be made and enforced. This upstart citizen was trying to propose an approach to the problem that had nothing to do with regulations, and so she was ignored—and”
― Daniel Quinn, The Invisibility of Success

“When two people are meant to be together, they will be together. It's fate." - Jacob Jankowski, Water For Elephants”
― Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants

“Anja? What is to tell? Everywhere I look I'm seeing Anja... From my good eye, from my glass eye, if they're open or they're close, always I'm thinking on Anja.”
― Art Spiegelman, Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began

“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

“How power is used in organizations determines whether it unites us with trust or divides us with fear”
― Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, Seeking Fairness at Work: Cracking the New Code of Greater Employee Engagement, Retention & Satisfaction

“Buying loyalty can be as effective as fear when one’s rival is poorer than oneself.”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“Mr. Pugh turned bright red. His cheeks puffed up like the galls of shad from the nearby river. His green- monster eyes rolled around his face, and he pounded both fists down on the table, and through grinding teeth and snorting gasps hollered, “INDEED NOT, MISS KNAPP! Slaves are not allowed to read and write. We have you here with good and steady pay to instruct our children and nothing else. Going near that boy, or any other slave, with chalk or book learnin’ is strictly forbidden! Do you understand me?”
― Sheridan Brown, The Viola Factor

“The craggy lines that made up the character in his face now seemed like scars of defeat, inflicted on him over time.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“Move not unless you see an advantage; use not your troops unless there is something to be gained; fight not unless the position is critical.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“loan guarantees by the FHA and Veterans Administration (VA) were the most important single cause of postwar suburbanization, and more than 98% of the millions of home loans guaranteed by the FHA and VA after World War II were available only to whites.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“deer-lick was a place where the deer came to get salt. When they found a salty place in the ground they came there to lick it, and that was called a deer-lick. Pa had made one by sprinkling salt over the ground.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods

“When it came to my research, I never took any shortcuts. Over the past five years, I’d worked my way down the entire recommended gunter reading list. Douglas Adams. Kurt Vonnegut. Neal Stephenson. Richard K. Morgan. Stephen King. Orson Scott Card. Terry Pratchett. Terry Brooks. Bester, Bradbury, Haldeman, Heinlein, Tolkien, Vance, Gibson, Gaiman, Sterling, Moorcock, Scalzi, Zelazny.”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

“You know what Dad called me when I was growing up? ‘Five ninety-eight.’ That’s what all the chemicals in the human body would be worth if you bottled them raw and sold them. He told me that was all I’d ever be worth unless I worked every day to improve myself. Five ninety-eight.”
― N.H. Kleinbaum, Dead Poets Society