Johnsie Bollom > Johnsie's Quotes

“And we are not pursuing military information on this trip. At least not about the Russian mafia exchanging Russian-Ukrainian tanks and electronics for their benefit in Syria.”
― Karl Braungart, Lost Identity

“Never Give Up!”
― Michael Parker

“Evil is not man-made. Evil is natural, like the sun rising each morning, the moon revolving around the earth, and the strong eating the weak.

Jeremiah Hobb”
― Frank Lambert, Cult of the Clan

“The point is to be compassionately, not cruelly, honest. Tell the person what you have heard that worries you. Allow him to respond. You may be surprised at how much sense his answers make.”
― Nancy O'Meara, The Cult around the Corner: A Handbook on Dealing with Other People's Religions

“Nathan had never wanted children of his own. Plenty of reasons. Babies screamed as soon as they were born – wasn’t that warning enough of what was to come? And when they grew into toddlers, and then young kids, they were far worse: tantrums, more screaming, whining. How many business trips, restaurant dinners, theatre visits, you name it, were ruined by one small, precocious loud brat and its doting, utterly useless parents? No discipline any more. Nathan had sure been disciplined.”
― Barry Kirwan, When the children come

“But  Phidias was better than most men since he made beautiful sculptures. He was even making one of her—well, he called it “Athena,” but anyone could see it looked like her.”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“I said to Hun Sen, “Thank you, Hun! You have also told me that there was a kidnapping incident which almost bankrupted your family! Can you please elaborate upon that?”

(A Gracious Enemy & After the War Volume Two)”
― Michael G. Kramer

“I'm so proud of you I could burst, but in the interest of saving the poor cleaning staff the hassle, I would, instead, like to take you to our room and lick you from stem to stern until you beg me to stop.”
― Therisa Peimer, Taming Flame

“sadness we did not have to work on. It came, as sadness usually does, as soon as I sat down and began to listen. The small press had a correspondingly”
― Rebecca Wells, Little Altars Everywhere

“I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsiblity on the West Coast.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“In the mind of a true snob there are certain limited criteria to denote the value of human existence. Jimmie's criteria were: home, hearth, wife, land. Those who possessed these had beatitude unchallengable. Other men had accidental, random life. Nothing better.”
― Thomas Keneally, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

“Chapter”
― James Herriot, Every Living Thing

“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”
― Charles Darwin

“Be you writer or reader, it is very pleasant to run away in a book.”
― Jean Craighead George, My Side of the Mountain

“Her husband's visage captivated her from the first moment she saw him step out of the royal carriage a hundred years ago. How could it not? Flaminius was utterly gorgeous. But once she fell in love with him, she became happily enslaved.”
― Therisa Peimer, Taming Flame

“On the end of my bed. He’s short, round and bald, with a tartan loin cloth, and what looks like a spout on the top of his head,’ Bryony said. ‘You flatter me,’ came the snide male voice. ‘But it’s a valve.”
― Sara Pascoe, Being a Witch, and Other Things I Didn't Ask For

“The awful daring of a moment's surrender which an age of prudence
can never retract.
by this, and only this, we have existed.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

“[J]e t'ai dressée à te soumettre, de même qu'une fleur subit le soleil et la pluie.”
― Pearl Buck

“The ones who are not soul-mated – the ones who have settled – are even more dismissive of my singleness: It’s not that hard to find someone to marry, they say. No relationship is perfect, they say – they, who make do with dutiful sex and gassy bedtime rituals, who settle for TV as conversation, who believe that husbandly capitulation – yes, honey, okay, honey – is the same as concord. He’s doing what you tell him to do because he doesn’t care enough to argue, I think. Your petty demands simply make him feel superior, or resentful, and someday he will fuck his pretty, young coworker who asks nothing of him, and you will actually be shocked.

Give me a man with a little fight in him, a man who calls me on my bullshit. (But who also kind of likes my bullshit.) And yet: Don’t land me in one of those relationships where we’re always pecking at each other, disguising insults as jokes, rolling our eyes and ‘playfully’ scrapping in front of our friends, hoping to lure them to our side of an argument they could not care less about. Those awful if only relationships: This marriage would be great if only… and you sense the if only list is a lot longer than either of them realizes.

So I know I am right not to settle, but it doesn’t make me feel better as my friends pair off and I stay home on Friday night with a bottle of wine and make myself an extravagant meal and tell myself, This is perfect, as if I’m the one dating me. As I go to endless rounds of parties and bar nights, perfumed and sprayed and hopeful, rotating myself around the room like some dubious dessert. I go on dates with men who are nice and good-looking and smart – perfect-on-paper men who make me feel like I’m in a foreign land, trying to explain myself, trying to make myself known. Because isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She gets me. Isn’t that the simple magic phrase?

So you suffer through the night with the perfect-on-paper man – the stutter of jokes misunderstood, the witty remarks lobbed and missed. Or maybe he understands that you’ve made a witty remark but, unsure of what to do with it, he holds it in his hand like some bit of conversational phlegm he will wipe away later. You spend another hour trying to find each other, to recognise each other, and you drink a little too much and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, That was fine. And your life is a long line of fine.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“I understood in a flash that I must keep my mind safe, whatever came next. I believe now that it was not only enormous luck that brought me this understanding the very first day, but also my habit of living closely with my own mind, alone with it while I practiced.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Shadow Land

“The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

“The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference