Wilson Chambliss > Wilson's Quotes

“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

“You can’t set fires, Anna. Never again. Promise.”
[Anna] aimed her defiance at Mary.
“And you? What’s your reason to hate me?”
Caroline spoke quietly. “We nearly died — in the fire in those mountains and at the house when Ravi had a gun pointed at us.” Her eyes were full of tears. “The fire you set at The Old Hospital could have killed me as well as Janet and Agnes.”
Anna muttered into the syrupy dregs of her tea. “Fire, you’re firing me?”
Mary grimaced. There had been too much fire.”
― Susan Rowland, The Alchemy Fire Murder

“Jeśli chcesz wychować zagorzałego ateistę, musisz udzielać mu surowych lekcji religii. To zawsze owocuje dobrymi skutkami.”
― N.H. Kleinbaum, Dead Poets Society

“Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.

“Synchronise watches at oh six hundred,” says the infantry captain, and each of his huddled lieutenants finds a respite from fear in the act of bringing two tiny pointers into jeweled alignment while tons of heavy artillery go fluttering overhead; the prosaic, civilian looking dial of the watch has restored, however briefly, an illusion of personal control. Good, it counsels, looking tidily up from the hairs and veins of each terribly vulnerable wrist; fine: so far, everything’s happening right on time…

“Oh, let me see now,” says the ancient man, tilting his withered head to wince and blink at the sun in bewildered reminiscence, “my first wife passed away the spring of -” and for a moment he is touched with terror. The spring of what? Past? Future? What is any spring but a mindless rearrangement of cells in the crust of the spinning earth as it floats in endless circuit of its sun? What is the sun itself but one of a billion insensible stars forever going nowhere into nothingness? Infinity! But soon the merciful valves and switches of his brain begin to do their tired work, and “The spring of Nineteen-Ought-Six,” he is able to say. “Or no, wait-” and his blood runs cold again as the galaxies revolve. “Wait! Nineteen-Ought — Four.”… He may have forgotten the shape of his first wife’s smile and the sound of her voice in tears, but by imposing a set of numerals on her death, he has imposed coherence on his own life and on life itself… “Yes sir,” he can say with authority, “nineteen-Ought-Four,” and the stars tonight will please him as tokens of his ultimate heavenly rest. He has brought order out of chaos.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“in the beginning all men are pure and driven by pure motivations. The men they believe in are also pure, in the beginning. But somewhere early in the journey all men come to that first moment of compromise.”
― Leon Uris, Armageddon

“Again time elapsed.”
― Carolyn Keene, The Secret of the Old Clock

“An overnight success is ten years in the making.”
― Tom Clancy, Dead or Alive

“Nothing could be taken for granted. Women who loved you tried to cut your throat, while women who didn't even know your name scrubbed your back. Witches could sound like Katharine Hepburn and your best friend could try to strangle you. Smack in the middle of an orchid there might be a blob of jello and inside a Mickey Mouse doll, a fixed and radiant star.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“You feel love because this is what rules your heart and nothing else.”
― Raz Mihal, Just Love Her

“The artillery fire which helped in holding off the enemy advance against the Australian positions appeared to be getting always closer. A radio operator called Vic Grice somehow replaced the antenna on Buick’s radio. That had been shot off, thus rendering the radio in-operational.”
― Michael G. Kramer, A Gracious Enemy

“I chase the wind and get lost in the clouds. I'm sweep into darkness in my search for the light.”
― Sherman Kennon, Chase The Wind: A Book Of Poetry

“As a place to start, let us use a model to explain precisely
what this ‘Great Year’ actually is. The year 2012 is the year
that marked the end of a 26,000-year cycle, ending in a
great galactic alignment that was calculated on the Mayan
calendar and results in the calendar ending on the winter
solstice (December 21st) of 2012. But what exactly is this
galactic alignment?”
― Jody Summers, The Mayan Legacy

“…. ‘George said he needed a break. And there was something about Jonathan taking over …’   ‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ said Maxwell, ‘It seems like there’s all kinds of goings on there now.’ ‘What did the agents say then?’ ‘Your brother … he must still have a key. I told them to check, I told them. I expect they overlooked it. Hugo’s been going in and there are some women there apparently, I mean at the Manor House, Jonathan’s up to his usual tricks taking in every Tom, Dick and Harry and giving all kinds of undesirables a home, and there’s something about them chasing Hugo and taunting him, yesterday the buyers were viewing again and measuring up for curtains and things, I said they could, and they saw something going on outside, some shouting and laughing …’   ‘Women! What women? Jonathan’s not like that …’   ‘Not like that huh! He’s flesh and blood like the rest of us.’  ‘That’s not what I meant. Please don’t be angry Max, it’s not my fault.’ ‘Jonathan this and Jonathan that. Why do people think he’s so bloody marvellous eh! What the hell does he think he’s doing. People spilling over into my garden and wrecking the peace and quiet. George was completely mad to do this …”
― Elizabeth Tebby Germaine, A MAN WHO SEEMED REAL: A story of love, lies, fear and kindness

“Gossip is like thread wound over a spindle of truth, changing its shape.”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“Sometimes truths are what we run from, and sometimes they are what we seek.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“You never fail until you quit trying.”
― Tom Sechrist

“People think of education as something that they can finish. And what’s more, when they finish, it’s a rite of passage. You’re finished with school. You’re no more a child, and therefore anything that reminds you of school - reading books, having ideas, asking questions - that’s kid’s stuff. Now you’re an adult, you don’t do that sort of thing any more.

You have everybody looking forward to no longer learning, and you make them ashamed afterward of going back to learning. If you have a system of education using computers, then anyone, any age, can learn by himself, can continue to be interested. If you enjoy learning, there’s no reason why you should stop at a given age. People don’t stop things they enjoy doing just because they reach a certain age.

What’s exciting is the actual process of broadening yourself, of knowing there’s now a little extra facet of the universe you know about and can think about and can understand. It seems to me that when it’s time to die, there would be a certain pleasure in thinking that you had utilized your life well, learned as much as you could, gathered in as much as possible of the universe, and enjoyed it. There’s only this one universe and only this one lifetime to try to grasp it. And while it is inconceivable that anyone can grasp more than a tiny portion of it, at least you can do that much. What a tragedy just to pass through and get nothing out of it.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Life is funny that way. Sometimes the dumbest thing you do turns out to be the smartest.”
― Robyn Mundell, Brainwalker

“There is no ache more Deadly than the striving to be oneself. —Yevgeniy Vinokurov”
― Judith Viorst, Necessary Losses: The Loves, Illusions, Dependencies, and Impossible Expectations That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Grow

“.byjadh heemyeh odh ubaech achoedzaY Foolishness may have golden offspring. I hope yours does.”
― Gail Carson Levine, Fairest