Tom > Tom's Quotes

“Other people’s tragedies should not be the subject of idle conversation.”
― Kate DiCamillo, Because of Winn-Dixie

“Ma had been very fashionable, before she married Pa, and a dressmaker had made her clothes.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder

“Come, friend; you are welcome, though your notions are a little blinded with reading too many books.”
― James Fenimore Cooper, The Prairie

“Friend, I am grieved when I find a venator or hunter of your experience and observation, following the current of vulgar error. The animal you describe, is in truth a species of the bos ferus or bos sylvestris, as he has been happily called by the poets, but, though of close affinity it is altogether distinct, from the common Bubulus. Bison is the better word, and I would suggest the necessity of adopting it in the future, when you shall have occasion to allude to the species.”
― James Fenimore Cooper, The Prairie

“I subscribe to Consumer Reports and as a consequence I own a first-class television set, an all but silent air conditioner and a very long lasting deodorant. My armpits never stink.”
― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

“The truth is I dislike cars. Whenever I drive a car, I have the feeling I have become invisible. People on the street cannot see you; they only watch your rear fender until it is out of their way.”
― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

“The only thrill, even of a common thriller, is concerned somehow with the conscience and the will; it involves finding out that men are worse or better than they seem, and that by their own choice.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton Volume 12: Father Brown Stories - Part I

“Our eyes meet. Am I mistaken or does the corner of her mouth tuck in ever so slightly and the petal of her lower lip curl out ever so richly? She is smiling-at me! My mind hits upon half a dozen schemes to circumvent the terrible moment of separation. No doubt she is a Texan. They are nearly always bad judges of men, these splendid Amazons. Most men are afraid of them and so they fall victim to the first little Mickey Rooney that comes along. In a better world I should be able to speak to her: come, darling, you can see that I love you. If you are planning to meet some little Mickey, think better of it. What a tragedy it is that I do not know her, will probably never see her again. What good times we could have!”
― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

“Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men's real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil?”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton Volume 12: Father Brown Stories - Part I

“I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton Volume 12: Father Brown Stories - Part I

“Reason and justice grip the remotest and the loneliest star. Look at those stars. Don't they look as if they were single diamonds and sapphires? Well, you can imagine any mad botany or geology you please. Think of forests of adamant with leaves of brilliants. Think the moon is a blue moon, a single elephantine sapphire. But don't fancy that all that frantic astronomy would make the smallest difference to the reason and justice of conduct. On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of pearl, you would still find a notice-board, 'Thou shalt not steal.'" Valentin”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown

“It's my world, and I don't want any other. What it hasn't got is not worth having, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing.”
― Kenneth grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working.”
― Kenneth Grahame (Wind in the Willows), The Wind in the Willows

“Look, Father, I don't think you're being straight with me. I want to join your Church and I'm going to join your Church, but you're holding too much back. I've had a long talk with a Catholic-a very pious, well-educated one, and I've learned a thing or two. For instance, that you have to sleep with your feet pointing East because that's the direction of heaven, and if you die in the night you can walk there. Now I'll sleep with my feet pointing any way that suits Julia, but d'you expect a grown man to believe about walking to heaven? And what about the Pope who made one of his horses a Cardinal? And what about the box you keep in the church porch, and if you put in a pound note with someone's name on it, they get sent to hell. I don't say there mayn't be a good reason for all this, but you ought to tell me about it and not let me find out for myself.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“Well, very long ago, on the spot where the Wild Wood waves now, before ever it had planted itself and grown up to what it now is, there was a city - a city of people, you know. Here, where we are standing, they lived, and walked, and talked, and slept, and carried on their business. Here they stabled their horses and feasted, from here they rode out to fight or drove out to trade. They were a powerful people, and rich, and great builders. They built to last, for they thought their city would last for ever.”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“Independence is all very well, but we animals never allow our friends to make fools of themselves beyond a certain limit.”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“As he hurried along, eagerly anticipating the moment when he would be at home again among the things he knew and liked, the Mole saw clearly that he was an animal of tilled field and hedgerow, linked to the ploughed furrow, the frequented pasture, the lane of evening lingerings, the cultivated garden-plot. For others the asperities, the stubborn endurance, or the clash of actual conflict, that went with Nature in the rough; he must be wise, must keep to the pleasant places in which his lines were laid and which held adventure enough, in their way, to last for a lifetime.”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“I am a man, and therefore have all devils in my heart.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton Volume 12: Father Brown Stories - Part I

“Good gracious, what a silly question, cat! The roosters would never get up at all in the morning if the hens started to crow. They'd loaf round and sleep all day. They do little enough as it is. But at least they're out of the hen house early in the morning so their wives can get some work done. H'm! Crow indeed!”
― Walter R. Brooks, Freddy Goes to Florida

“Where would a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. If there were no forest, he would make a forest. And if he wished to hide a dead leaf, he would make a dead forest.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton Volume 12: Father Brown Stories - Part I

“He conceived himself and his like as perpetually conquering peoples who were perpetually being conquered.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Volume 12: The Father Brown Stories, Volume I

“We may believe in the deity and the salvation of Christ, and acknowledge ourselves to be sinners in need of his salvation; but this does not make us Christians. We have to make a personal response to Jesus Christ, committing ourselves unreservedly to him as our Savior and Lord.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“A bureacrat armed with a computer is the unacknowledged legislator of our age, and a terrible burden to bear. We cannot dismiss the possibility that, if Adolf Eichmann had been able to say that it was not he but a battary of computers that directed the Jews to the appropriate crematoria, he may never have been asked to answer for his actions.”
― Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

“They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“You should dream more. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“Well, that is another hope gone. My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes. That's a sentence I read in a book once, and I say it over to comfort myself whenever I'm disappointed in anything.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.”
― Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School

“Textbooks, it seems to me, are enemies of education, instruments for promoting dogmatism and trivial learning. They may save the teacher some trouble, but the trouble they inflict on the minds of students is a blight and a curse.”
― Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School