Brooke > Brooke's Quotes

“I let no chance go by untaken. I never hesitated to follow where my curiosity beckoned. I willingly went where there was danger in beauty and beauty in danger. I had experiences in plenty. Many were enjoyable, some were instructive, a few I would rather have missed. But I had them, and I have them still in memory. If, as soon as tomorrow, I go to my grave, it will be no black and silent hole. I can paint the darkness with vivid colors, and fill it with music both martial and languorous, with the flicker of swords and the flutter of kisses, with flavors and excitements and sensations, with the fragrance of a field of clover that has been warmed in the sun and then washed by a gentle rain, the sweetest-scented thing God ever put on this earth. Yes, I can enliven eternity. Others may have to endure it; I can enjoy it.”
― Gary Jennings, The Journeyer

“With a kind of wry envy, Hazel realized that Bigwig was actually looking forward to meeting the Efrafan assault. He knew he could fight and he meant to show it. He was not thinking of anything else. The hopelessness of their chances had no important place in his thoughts. Even the sound of the digging, clearer already, only set him thinking of the best way to sell his life as dearly as he could.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“There was something calming in the reticence of all those books, their willingness to wait years, decades even, for the right reader to come along and pull them from their appointed slots. Take your time, the books whispered to me in their dusty voices. We’re not going anywhere.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.”
― Daphne DuMaurier, Rebecca

“I've always had a weakness for lost causes once they're really lost.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“For now, the tension was subtle, a vibration, like the inaudible cry of overstressed steel.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“You wish you had not come. If there were not so many around, you would reach out your arms, with the prayer on your lips for it all to come back to you. It seems cruel, cruel, to give us such a vision; to let us dream and drift through heaven for six months, and then to take it out of our lives.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
― Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

“The word lingered in the air once I had uttered it, dancing before me, and because he received it silently, making no comment, the word magnified itself into something heinous and appalling, a forbidden word, unnatural to the tongue. And I could not call it back, it could never be unsaid.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“I wanted to go on sitting there, not talking, not listening to the others, keeping the moment precious for all time, because we were peaceful all of us, we were content and drowsy even as the bee who droned above our heads. In a little while it would be different, there would come tomorrow, and the next day and another year. And we would be changed perhaps, never sitting quite like this again. Some of us would go away, or suffer, or die, the future stretched away in front of us, unknown, unseen, not perhaps what we wanted, not what we planned. This moment was safe though, this could not be touched. Here we sat together, Maxim and I, hand-in-hand, and the past and the future mattered not at all. This was secure, this funny little fragment of time he would never remember, never think about again…For them it was just after lunch, quarter-past-three on a haphazard afternoon, like any hour, like any day. They did not want to hold it close, imprisoned and secure, as I did. They were not afraid.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“I was seized with a sudden desire to laugh, to cry, to do both, and I had a pain, too, at the pit of my stomach. I wished, for one wild moment, that none of this had happened, that I was alone somewhere, going for a walk, and whistling.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“We eat when we’re not hungry, drink when we’re not thirsty, buy what we don’t need, and throw away everything that’s useful. Don’t sell a man what he wants—sell him what he doesn’t want. Pretend he’s got eight feet and two stomachs and money to burn. That’s not illogical—it’s evil.”
― Paul Theroux, The Mosquito Coast

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“You're an interesting species. An interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.”
― Carl Sagan, Contact

“Throw a stick, and the servile dog wheezes and pants and stumbles to bring it to you. Do the same before a cat, and he will eye you with coolly polite and somewhat bored amusement. And just as inferior people prefer the inferior animal which scampers excitedly because someone else wants something, so do superior people respect the superior animal which lives its own life and knows that the puerile stick-throwings of alien bipeds are none of its business and beneath its notice. The dog barks and begs and tumbles to amuse you when you crack the whip. That pleases a meekness-loving peasant who relishes a stimulus to his self importance. The cat, on the other hand, charms you into playing for its benefit when it wishes to be amused; making you rush about the room with a paper on a string when it feels like exercise, but refusing all your attempts to make it play when it is not in the humour. That is personality and individuality and self-respect -- the calm mastery of a being whose life is its own and not yours -- and the superior person recognises and appreciates this because he too is a free soul whose position is assured, and whose only law is his own heritage and aesthetic sense.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Of all that I have possessed in my life, my memories are the only things remaining to me. Indeed, I believe that memories are the only real treasure any human can hope to hold always.”
― Gary Jennings, Aztec

“Love and time, those are the only two things in all the world and all of life that cannot be bought, but only spent.”
― Gary Jennings, Aztec

“The calendar and his glass and the solicitude of his juniors may tell a man that he is old, and he can see for himself that the world and all around him have aged, but secretly he knows that he is still a youth of eighteen or twenty. And what I have said of a man, I have said because a man is what I am. It must be even more true of a woman, to whom youth and beauty and vitality are so much more to be treasured and conserved.”
― Gary Jennings, The Journeyer

“My Chief Rabbit has told me to stay and defend this run, and until he says otherwise, I shall stay here. --Bigwig”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“Silflay hraka, u embleer rah!”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“Who wants to hear about brave deeds when he’s ashamed of his own, and who likes an open, honest tale from someone he’s deceiving?”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“Your storm, Thlayli-rah. Use it.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“I do not know what she was thinking, but I was remembering the years we have lived together, yet never together, and what a waste they have been--of each other, and of love, which is the most unpardonable waste there is. Love and time, those are the only two things in all the world and all of life that cannot be bought, but only spent.”
― Gary Jennings

“I've decided that the worst part of loneliness isn't being alone. It's being forgotten.”
― Tawni O'Dell, Fragile Beasts

“I wanted to end it now, like a bad TV show turned off in the middle.”
― Tawni O'Dell, Back Roads

“There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“My mother had always told her kids: if you're about to do something, and you want to know if it's a bad idea, imagine seeing it printed in the paper for all the world to see.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“She’s easy to like. I’ve never understood why that’s considered a compliment - that just anyone could like you.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl