I don't give my name to strangers on the internet > I don't give my name to strangers on the internet's Quotes

“Thomas, first Baron Wharton of Wharton, sat in his chair. “Boy,” he said. “Listen to me, and learn the first lesson of man, the political animal. When you wage war, you wage it for ever. When war is over, it has never existed...”
― Dorothy Dunnett, Checkmate

“If love is whatever we can still betray, remember that I betrayed you on a lot of days.”
― John le Carré, A Perfect Spy

“Come home and shout at me. Come home and fight with me. Come home and break my heart, if you must.”
― Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing

“Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.”
― Oscar Wilde, Selected Poems of Oscar Wilde including the Ballad of Reading Gaol

“Francis Crawford’s face in this fleeting moment of privacy was filled with ungovernable feeling: of shock and of pain and of a desire beyond bearing: the desire of the hart which longs for the waterbrook, and does not know, until it sees the pool under the trees, for what it has thirsted.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, Pawn in Frankincense

“You haven’t enough artillery, have you?’

‘Against you or the Germans?’ said Lymond.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, Checkmate

“I am glad then,’ said Catherine, ‘that there was nothing between us, rather than mediocrity.’

And from the homes … of Unicornes …

‘There was kindness,’ he said. ‘And that was a great deal.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, Checkmate

“I know. You know I know. I know you know I know. We know Henry knows, and Henry knows we know it. We're a knowledgeable family.”
― James Goldman, The Lion in Winter

“He came down from the North to Paris with a mind like Aristotle's and a form like mortal sin. We shattered the Commandments on the spot.”
― James Goldman, The Lion in Winter

“I even made poor Louis take me on Crusade. How's that for blasphemy? I dressed my maids as Amazons and rode bare-breasted halfway to Damascus. Louis had a seizure and I damn near died of windburn... but the troops were dazzled.”
― James Goldman , The Lion in Winter

“The easiest lies to tell are the ones you want to be true.”
― Holly Black, White Cat

“We are, largely, who we remember ourselves to be. That's why habits are so hard to break. If we know ourselves to be liars, we expect not to tell the truth. If we think of ourselves as honest, we try harder.”
― Holly Black, White Cat

“She says that what you did was a cry for help."

"It was," I say. "That's why I was yelling 'Heeeelp!' I don't really go in for subtlety.”
― Holly Black, White Cat

“I can't trust the people I care about not to hurt me. And I'm not sure I can trust myself not to hurt them, either.”
― Holly Black, White Cat

“No sight so sad as that of a naughty child," he began, "especially a naughty little girl. Do you know where the wicked go after death?"

"They go to hell," was my ready and orthodox answer.

"And what is hell? Can you tell me that?"

"A pit full of fire."

"And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever?"

"No, sir."

"What must you do to avoid it?"

I deliberated a moment: my answer, when it did come was objectionable: "I must keep in good health and not die.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“You know how it is when one talks of liberty. Everything seems beautifully simple. One expects every gate to open and every wall to fall flat.”
― Robert Graves, Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina

“Most men—it is my experience—are neither virtuous nor scoundrels, good-hearted nor bad-hearted. They are a little of one thing and a little of the other and nothing for any length of time: ignoble mediocrities.”
― Robert Graves, Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina

“Another leading senator that I degraded was Caligula’s horse Incitatus who was to have become Consul three years later. I wrote to the Senate that I had no complaints to make against the private morals of this senator or his capacity for the tasks that had hitherto been assigned to him, but that he no longer had the necessary financial qualifications. For I had cut the pension awarded him by Caligula to the daily rations of a cavalry horse, dismissed his grooms and put him into an ordinary stable where the manger was of wood, not ivory, and the walls were whitewashed, not covered with frescoes. I did not, however, separate him from his wife, the mare Penelope: that would have been unjust.”
― Robert Graves, Claudius the God: And His Wife Messalina

“He was always boasting of his ancestors, as stupid people do who are aware that they have done nothing themselves to boast about.”
― Robert Graves, I, Claudius

“To recommend a monarchy on account of the prosperity it gives the provinces seems to me like recommending that a man should have liberty to treat his children as slaves, if at the same time he treats his slaves with reasonable consideration.”
― Robert Graves, I, Claudius

“I’ll tell you a story. There was once a badly wounded man lying on the battle-field waiting for the surgeon to dress his wound, which was covered with flies. A lightly wounded comrade saw the flies and was going to drive them away. ‘Oh, no,’ cried the wounded man, ‘don’t do that! These flies are almost gorged with my blood now and aren’t hurting me nearly so much as they did at first: if you drive them away their place will be taken at once by hungrier ones, and that will be the end of me.”
― Robert Graves, I, Claudius

“Who can say if the thoughts you have in your mind as you read these words are the same thoughts I had in my mind as I typed them? We are different, you and I, and the qualia of our consciousnesses are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe.

And yet, whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilization to your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me. Our minds managed to touch, if but briefly and imperfectly.

Does that thought not make the universe seem just a bit kinder, a bit brighter, a bit warmer and more human?

We live for such miracles.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“We are defined by the places we hold in the web of others’ lives.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“We spend our entire lives trying to tell stories about ourselves—they’re the essence of memory. It is how we make living in this unfeeling, accidental universe tolerable.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“The character for ‘mob’ is formed from the character for ‘nobility’ on one side and the character for ‘sheep’ on the other. So that’s what a mob is, a herd of sheep that turns into a pack of wolves because they believe themselves to be serving a noble cause.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“But being the mirrors for each other's souls has a cost: by the time they part from each other, the individuals in the mating pair have become indistinguishable. Before their merger, they each yearned for the other; as they part, they part from the self. The very quality that attracted them to each other is also, inevitably, destroyed in their union.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“The Allatians believe that they have a writing system superior to all others. Unlike books written in alphabets, syllabaries, or logograms, an Allatian book captures not only words, but also the writer’s tone, voice, inflection, emphasis, intonation, rhythm. It is simultaneously a score and a recording. A speech sounds like a speech, a lament a lament, and a story re-creates perfectly the teller’s breathless excitement. For the Allatians, reading is literally hearing the voice of the past.

But there is a cost to the beauty of the Allatian book. Because the act of reading requires physical contact with the soft, malleable surface, each time a text is read, it is also damaged and some aspects of the original irretrievably lost. Copies made of more durable materials inevitably fail to capture all the subtleties of the writer’s voice, and are thus shunned.

In order to preserve their literary heritage, the Allatians have to lock away their most precious manuscripts in forbidding libraries where few are granted access. Ironically, the most important and beautiful works of Allatian writers are rarely read, but are known only through interpretations made by scribes who attempt to reconstruct the original in new books after hearing the source read at special ceremonies.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“Whatever role you play, play it to the hilt.”
― Lynn Flewelling, Shadows Return

“It is better to lack the semblance of honor but possess it than to possess the semblance and lack the honor.”
― Lynn Flewelling, Traitor's Moon

“I want to come with you, but first you’ve got to give me a few straight answers.” “It’s against my nature, but I’ll try.”
― Lynn Flewelling, Luck in the Shadows