Rosalyn > Rosalyn's Quotes

“The light shifts around the dais to the scratching of the chalk on the page, each line careful, considered, the result of a singular communion between the eye and the hand.”
― Sarah Dunant, The Birth of Venus

“Children brought up in the company of adults learn better than most the power of solitude.”
― Sarah Dunant, The Birth of Venus

“They do not come as words, but like dreams, rising as scent from the rain-wet earth. This, I say. This and this. The way his hair looked in summer sun. His face when he ran. His eyes, solemn as an owl at lessons. This and this and this. So many moments of happiness, crowding forward.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“When you're twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It's only when you get to be twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect that you've been looking at the map upside down, and not until you're forty are you entirely sure. By the time you're sixty, take it from me, you're fucking lost.”
― Stephen King, Joyland

“When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.”
― Stephen King, Joyland

“I had known contentment before, brief snatches of time in which I pursued solitary pleasure: skipping stones or dicing or dreaming. But in truth, it had been less a presence than an absence, a laying aside of dread:”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Staying had to do with other things that I couldn't even begin to sort out, because they were piled helter-skelter in an untidy stack and bound with the rough twine of intuition.”
― Stephen King, Joyland

“Once he began to speak, the sound of it was so compelling that you focused all your thoughts upon the words, and not upon the man who uttered them. It was a voice full of light and dark. Light not only as it glimmers, but also as it glares. Dark not only as it brings cold and fear, but also as it gives rest and shade.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders

“He turned his eyes on me then, and spoke to me in a silken whisper that seemed to fall upon my grief like a comforting shawl.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders

“His greatest gift was resilience rather than brilliance, which just happened to be the quality of mind and heart that the American cause required.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789

“The Citizens of America, placed in the most evitable conditions, as the Sole Lords and Proprietors of a vast tract of Continent, comprehending all the various Soils and climates of the World, and abounding with all the necessaries and conveniences of life, are now by the late satisfactory pacification, acknowledged to be possessed of absolute freedom and Independency. They are, from this period, to be considered as Actors on a most conspicuous Theatre, which seems to be peculiarly designed by Providence for the display of human greatness and felicity.31”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789

“The Constitution was intended less to resolve arguments than to make argument itself the solution.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789

“Mr. Henry had without a doubt the greatest power to persuade, [but] Mr. Madison had the great power to convince.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 by Joseph J. Ellis

“She had an urge to confess everything: tell him about the splinters on Rupert’s neck; the nursery; the garret; the handprint; the eyes. But to speak of such things made them a farce. You could not explain fear; you could only feel it, roaring through the silence and striking your heart still.”
― Laura Purcell, The Silent Companions

“In the glacier of words grinding toward the twentieth century, Prendergast’s card was a single fragment of mica glinting with lunacy, pleading to be picked up and pocketed.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood.

Daniel H. Burnham”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

“They saw even more ungodly things—the first zipper; the first-ever all-electric kitchen, which included an automatic dishwasher; and a box purporting to contain everything a cook would need to make pancakes, under the brand name Aunt Jemima’s. They sampled a new, oddly flavored gum called Juicy Fruit, and caramel-coated popcorn called Cracker Jack. A new cereal, Shredded Wheat, seemed unlikely to succeed—“shredded doormat,” some called it—but a new beer did well, winning the exposition’s top beer award. Forever afterward, its brewer called it Pabst Blue Ribbon.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“Night is the magician of the fair.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

“Let our hopes and aspirations awaken forces which in all time to come shall influence the welfare, the dignity, and the freedom of mankind. - Grover Cleveland”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

“I think I should never willingly cease drifting in that dreamland. I find it all infinitely sad, but at the same time so entrancing, that I often feel as if it would be the part of wisdom to fly at once to the woods or mountains where one can always find peace. - Dora Root”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

“The frontier may indeed have closed at last, as Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed in his history-making speech at the fair, but for that moment it stood there glittering in the sun like the track of a spent tear.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

“Bless that good, good woman who hung the crucifix round my neck! for it is a comfort and a strength to me whenever I touch it. It is odd that a thing which I have been taught to regard with disfavour and as idolatrous should in a time of loneliness and trouble be of help. Is it that there is something in the essence of the thing itself, or that it is a medium, a tangible help, in conveying memories of sympathy and comfort?”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“Chicago has disappointed her enemies and astonished the world”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“And after that, and also for each word, there should be sentences that show the twists and turns of meanings—the way almost every word slips in its silvery, fishlike way, weaving this way and that, adding subtleties of nuance to itself, and then perhaps shedding them as public mood dictates.”
― Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

“Any grand new dictionary ought itself to be a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct.”
― Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

“The language should be accorded just the same dignity and respect as those other standards that science was then also defining.”
― Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman

“I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth, and that things are sons of heaven.”
― Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

“I was not happy as a child, although from time to time I was content. I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I wondered how I looked to her, in that place, and knew that even in a place that was nothing but knowledge that was the one thing I could not know. That if I look inward I would see only infinite mirrors staring into myself for eternity.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“At five in the morning the Loire is still and sumptuous with mist. The water is beautiful at that time of the day, cool and magically pale, the sandbanks rising like lost continents. The water smells of night, and here and there a spray of new sunlight makes mica shadows on the surface.”
― Joanne Harris, Five Quarters of the Orange