Kate Noblet > Kate's Quotes

“...we are all sorry when loss comes for us. The test of our character comes not in how many tears we shed but in how we act after those tears have dried.”
― Michelle Moran, Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution

“Elena gave a low laugh. "Maleeshka, little one, it's me you're talking to, not the Cossack. I am a whore and I know the smell of men and the smell of sex. You stink of both.”
― Kate Furnivall, The Girl from Junchow

“I'll pretend, I tell myself. Pretending is safer than believing.”
― Sarah Miller, The Lost Crown

“Behind every successful woman are several confused men who give her something to make fun of.”
― Sarah Miller

“Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.”
― Mark Twain

“Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
― Mark Twain

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Growing apart doesn't change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side; our roots will always be tangled. I'm glad for that.”
― Ally Condie, Matched

“In the end you can't always choose what to keep. You can only choose how you let it go.”
― Ally Condie, Crossed

“I like the places where one part meets another, I think, eyes to cheek, wrist to hands.”
― Ally Condie, Matched

“And I'll tell her that I don't want my life to be samples and scraps. A taste of everything but a meal of nothing.”
― Ally Condie

“Red is the first color of spring. It's the real color of rebirth. Of beginning.”
― Ally Condie, Matched

“I came up on the screen, too, Cassia. But he was the one you chose to see.”
― Ally Condie, Matched

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“It was like a Russian party, Arkady thought. People got drunk, recklessly confessed their love, spilled their festering dislike, had hysterics, marched out, were dragged back in and revived with brandy. It wasn't a French salon.”
― Martin Cruz Smith

“We should be used to it," Tatiana reasons. "There have always been lines separating us from the rest of the world, whether they were satin ribbons or iron rails.”
― Sarah Miller, The Lost Crown

“Why did you come in to-night with your heads in the air? 'Make way, we are coming! Give us every right and don't you dare breathe a word before us. Pay us every sort of respect, such as no one's ever heard of, and we shall treat you worse than the lowest lackey!' They strive for justice, they stand on their rights, and yet they've slandered him like infidels in their article. We demand, we don't ask, and you will get no gratitude from us, because you are acting for the satisfaction of your own conscience! Queer sort of reasoning!... He has not borrowed money from you, he doesn't owe you anything, so what are you reckoning on, if not his gratitude? So how can you repudiate it? Lunatics! They regard society as savage and inhuman, because it cries shame on the seduced girl; but if you think society inhuman, you must think that the girl suffers from the censure of society, and if she does, how is it you expose her to society in the newspapers and expect her not to suffer? Lunatics! Vain creatures! They don't believe in God, they don't believe in Christ! Why, you are so eaten up with pride and vanity that you'll end by eating up one another, that's what I prophesy. Isn't that topsy-turvydom, isn't it infamy?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“All we can know is that we know nothing. And that's the height of human wisdom.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Question for your life: If your face looked like your ass, and I’m not implying it doesn’t, would you consider invading Russia in the middle of winter wearing only shorts?”
― Jarod Kintz, $3.33

“There's no way out," he announced with satisfaction, "and no amount of wishful dreaming will produce one. The demon won't go back in its bottle, the face-off is for ever, the embrace gets tighter and the toys cleverer with every generation, and there's no such thing for either side as enough security. Not for the main players, not for the nasty little newcomers who each year run themselves up a suitcase bomb and join the club. We get tired of believing that, because we're human. We may even con ourselves into believing the threat has gone away. It never will. Never, never, never."

"So, who'll save us then, Walt?" Barley asked. "You and Nedsky?"

"Vanity, if anything will, which I doubt," Walter retorted. "No leader wants to go down in history as the ass who destroyed his country in an afternoon. And funk, I suppose. Most of our gallant politicians do have a narcissistic objection to suicide, thank God.”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“Back in Russia we were dirt-poor. Here in the West we are still poor but have risen above the dirt to tower alongside stalks of grass!”
― Vera Nazarian

“This marriage had resulted from impulse: he had seen her on a high-flying swing at Tsarkoe Selo and her skirt, flared by the breeze, had exposed her ankles; he had proposed the following day.”
― Robert K. Massie, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman

“I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.”
― Queen Elizabeth I

“Men only treat women like princesses when they want to use them like prostitutes.”
― Bauvard, Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic

“Just remember, what the French say. No, probably not the French, they've got a president or something. The Brits, maybe, or the Swedes. You know what I mean?"

"No, Matthew. What do they say?"

"The king is dead, that's what they say. The king is dead. Long live the king.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 10: The Wake

“Your king is SUPPOSED to explode? What kind of government system is that?”
― Jefferson Smith, Strange Places

“I respect you as my king, and I respect you as my father, but I do not respect you as a man!”
― Rebecca McKinsey, Anterria

“It has always struck me that one of the readiest ways of estimating a country's regard for law is to notice what arms the officers of the law are carrying: in England it is little batons, in France swords, in many countries revolvers, and in Russia the police used to have artillery.”
― Lord Dunsany, The Curse of the Wise Woman

“You never know what to expect on encountering royalty. I've seen 'em stark naked except for wings of peacock feathers (Empress of China), giggling drunk in the embrace of a wrestler (Maharani of the Punjab), voluptuously wrapped in wet silk (Queen of Madagascar), wafting to and fro on a swing (Rani of Jhansi), and tramping along looking like an out-of-work charwoman (our own gracious monarch).”
― George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman on the March

“In Russia, drunks are our kindest people. Our kindest people are also the most drunk.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky