Al Aubel > Al's Quotes

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  • #1
    Yvonne Korshak
    “On the Acropolis, he’d thought she’d seen too much sun for a woman but in the courtyard, under the moon, her face, neck, and arms were as pale as the moon goddess. Allowing himself to imagine it was the moon goddess leading him upward was a way of climbing to the second story.”
    Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

  • #2
    Max Nowaz
    “I’m fucking asking you!” The man stood his ground.
    From the corner of his eye Adam could see the other man getting up from his chair. It was time to go. Adam head-butted the first man who was blocking his way, and then kneed him in the groin for good measure. As the man doubled up, Adam pushed past him.”
    Max Nowaz, Get Rich or Get Lucky

  • #3
    Esther Forbes
    “Human relations never seem to stand completely still. This apple, for instance. It might ripen into something better than it now was, or, unromantically, it might rot away in his pocket.”
    Esther Forbes, Johnny Tremain

  • #4
    Charles Frazier
    “That's not a thing any of us are granted. To go back. Wipe away what later doesn't suit us and make it the way we wish it. You just go on”
    Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

  • #5
    Barack Obama
    “For half of the world's population, roughly three billion people around the world living on less than two dollars a day, an election is at best a means, not an end; a starting point, not deliverance. These people are looking less for an "electocracy" than for the basic elements that for most of us define a decent life--food, shelter, electricity, basic health care, education for their children, and the ability to make their way through life without having to endure corruption, violence, or arbitrary power.”
    Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

  • #6
    Christopher Hitchens
    “Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don't introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar.”
    Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

  • #7
    Barbara Kingsolver
    “Some of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don't; but we wear it all the same”
    Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

  • #8
    Samuel Beckett
    “I weep without interruption. It's an unbroken flow of words and tears. With no pause for reflection. But I speak softer, every year a little softer. Perhaps. Slower too, every year a little slower. Perhaps. it is hard for me to judge. If so the pauses would be longer, between the words, the sentences, the syllables, the tears, I confuse them, the words and tears, my words are my tears, my eyes my mouth.”
    Samuel Beckett, Stories and Texts for Nothing

  • #9
    Greg Mortenson
    “Haji Ali taught me to...slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects.”
    Greg Mortenson, Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time

  • #10
    Robert A. Heinlein
    “God created men to test the souls of women.”
    Robert A. Heinlein, Job: A Comedy of Justice

  • #11
    Christopher Paolini
    “Better to see widely than to see too closely and allow some feature of place or situation to catch you unawares. Do you understand?”
    Christopher Paolini, Inheritance

  • #12
    Abraham Lincoln
    “I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside me.”
    Abraham Lincoln

  • #13
    Gayle Forman
    “In Rome, I really wanted an Audrey Hepburn Roman Holiday experience, but the Trevi Fountain was crowded, there was a McDonald's at the base of the Spanish Steps, and the ruins smelled like cat pee because of all the strays. The same thing happened in Prague, where I'd been yearning for some of the bohemianism of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But no, there were no fabulous artists, no guys who looked remotely like a young Daniel Day-Lewis. I saw this one mysterious-looking guy reading Sartre in a cafe, but then his cell phone rang and he started talking in aloud Texan twang.”
    Gayle Forman, Just One Day

  • #14
    Ken Kesey
    “Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.”
    Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

  • #15
    Max Nowaz
    “Stand in the machine there, let’s see what state your internal organs are in. The images
will be projected on screen, and I can go through the diagnosis with you, step by step.”
Brown did as he was told and soon images of his vital organs appeared on the screen.
 As you can see, your heart is slightly enlarged and your lungs and kidneys are not in
good shape either. Have you been experiencing any pain lately?”
“Not that I can think of. What can you do to help?”
“Difficult to say, you see you are dying” said the Doctor. You can see the
discolouration in your kidneys.” Brown strained his eyes.”
    Max Nowaz, The Arbitrator

  • #16
    Susan  Rowland
    “He says it was tourists being careless, where I see a fiendishly clever murder attempt.”
    “Mr. McCarthy, you’d better explain.”
    “Patrick, please. You’ll be tempted to laugh. It was a banana skin.”
    Susan Rowland, Murder on Family Grounds

  • #17
    Ammar Habib
    “Let the generations know that women in uniform also guaranteed their freedom.”
    Ammar Habib, Mary Edwards Walker: America's Only Female Medal of Honor Recipient

  • #18
    Angie Thomas
    “Now I am that person, and I’m too afraid to speak.”
    Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

  • #19
    Tom Clancy
    “Each of a hundred ships, built by the same men at the same yard to the same plans, will have her own special characteristics--most of them bad, really, but after her crew becomes accustomed to them they are spoken of affectionately, particularly in retrospect.”
    Tom Clancy, The Hunt for Red October

  • #20
    Frances Hodgson Burnett
    “the gray rain-storm which looked as if it would go on forever and ever. She watched it so long and steadily that the grayness grew heavier and heavier before her eyes and she fell asleep.”
    Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

  • #21
    Viktor E. Frankl
    “Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (they were often of a delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature.”
    Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

  • #22
    Umberto Eco
    “Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.”
    Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

  • #23
    “You cannot!' Tatiana said sharply. 'If you order a gun there is only a single shot, and once delivered the doors are locked and will not open until it has been fired.”
    R.D. Ronald, The Zombie Room

  • #24
    A.R. Merrydew
    “Semilla’s Phlegm-O-Matic promptly made an observation. ‘Wow Semilla look at that shuttle.’
         ‘Keep your voice down Raymond we’re in danger,’ Semilla hissed.
         ‘Raymond?’ Burt said incredulously.
         ‘I had to give him a name, didn’t I?”
    A.R. Merrydew, Our Blue Orange

  • #25
    Edward        Williams
    “Had I left some children behind somewhere in the world?”
    Edward Williams, Framed & Hunted: A True Story of Occult Persecution

  • #26
    Emem Uko
    “It's the journey that matters, soak it in. Learn lessons out of it. Impact positively so that if you never get to your destination, at least you'd leave a legacy to be remembered.”
    Emem Uko

  • #27
    Harold Bloom
    “Gertrude Stein maintained that one wrote for oneself and for strangers, a superb recognition that I would extend into a parallel apothegm: one reads for oneself and for strangers. The Western Canon does not exist in order to augment preexisting societal elites. It is there to be read by you and by strangers, so that you and those you will never meet can encounter authentic aesthetic power and the authority of what Baudelaire (and Erich Auerbach after him) called “aesthetic dignity.” One of the ineluctable stigmata of the canonical is aesthetic dignity, which is not to be hired.”
    Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

  • #28
    Charlotte Perkins Gilman
    “A lifted world lifts women up,"
    the Socalist explained.
    You cannot lift the world at all
    While half of it is kept so small,"
    the Suffragist maintained.
    The world awoke, and tartly spoke:
    Your work is all the same;
    Work together or work apart,
    Work, each of you, with all your heart-
    Just get into the game!”
    Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  • #29
    Cornelia Funke
    “Yesterday. Was there a more merciless word?”
    Cornelia Funke, The Golden Yarn

  • #30
    Aravind Adiga
    “I gather you yellow-skinned men, despite your triumphs in sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, still don't have democracy. Some politician on the radio was saying that that's why we Indian are going to beat you: we may not have sewage, drinking water, and Olympic gold medals, but we do have democracy.
    If I were making a country, I'd get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy, then I'd go about giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I am just a murderer!”
    Aravind Adiga



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