Williams Oatney > Williams's Quotes

“There was no going back now. Rubber and metal could only take so much. The car could shatter and send its passengers into an elemental distillation of rock, flesh, blood, and ash. Alchemy, thought Mary, grimly. Too much bloody alchemy.”
― Susan Rowland, The Alchemy Fire Murder

“I walked past Malison, up Lower Main to Main and across the road. I didn’t need to look to know he was behind me. I entered Royal Wood, went a short way along a path and waited. It was cool and dim beneath the trees. When Malison entered the Wood, I continued eastward. 
I wanted to place his body in hallowed ground. He was born a Mearan. The least I could do was send him to Loric. The distance between us closed until he was on my heels. He chose to come, I told myself, as if that lessened the crime I planned. He chose what I have to offer.
We were almost to the cemetery before he asked where we were going. I answered with another question. “Do you like living in the High Lord’s kitchens?”
He, of course, replied, “No.”
“Well, we’re going to a better place.”
When we reached the edge of the Wood, I pushed aside a branch to see the Temple of Loric and Calec’s cottage. No smoke was coming from the chimney, and I assumed the old man was yet abed. His pony was grazing in the field of graves. The sun hid behind a bank of clouds.
Malison moved beside me. “It’s a graveyard.”
“Are you afraid of ghosts?” I asked.
“My father’s a ghost,” he whispered.
I asked if he wanted to learn how to throw a knife. He said, “Yes,” as I knew he would.  He untucked his shirt, withdrew the knife he had stolen and gave it to me. It was a thick-bladed, single-edged knife, better suited for dicing celery than slitting a young throat. But it would serve my purpose. That I also knew. I’d spent all night projecting how the morning would unfold and, except for indulging in the tea, it had happened as I had imagined. 
Damut kissed her son farewell. Malison followed me of his own free will. Without fear, he placed the instrument of his death into my hand. We were at the appointed place, at the appointed time. The stolen knife was warm from the heat of his body. I had only to use it. Yet I hesitated, and again prayed for Sythene to show me a different path.
“Aren’t you going to show me?” Malison prompted, as if to echo my prayer.”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“for one man to abound in wealth and pleasure when all about him are mourning and groaning, is to be a gaoler and not a king.”
― Thomas More, Utopia: Saint Thomas More Imagines an Ideal Society

“Sé que mi familia es así pero este silencio me pesa. Tengo la impresión de tener millones de cosas que decir que, en el fondo, no interesan a nadie. Me viene a la memoria lo que decían los supervivientes de los campos de la última guerra al volver a su hogar: las pesadillas no se cuentan. Los demás no imaginan este género de pesadillas. Se instala, entre ellos y nosotras, una especie de statu quo que parece decir: ‘Estás aquí, se acabó, no hablemos más de ello.”
― Betty Mahmoody, For the Love of a Child

“Harman was right: those pictures were worse. But, leaving aside the fact that photographs of death and nudity, however newsworthy, don't get much play in the press, the power of an image does not necessarily reside in what it depicts. A photograph of a mangled cadaver, or of a naked man trussed in torment, can shock and outrage, provoke protest and investigation, but it leaves little to the imagination. It may be rich in practical information while being devoid of any broader meaning. To the extent that it represents any circumstances or conditions beyond itself, it does so generically. Such photographs are repellent in large part because they have a terrible reductive sameness. Except from a forensic point of view, they are unambiguous, and have the quality of pornography. They are what they show, nothing more. They communicate no vision and, shorn of context, they offer little, if anything, to think about, no occasion for wonder. They have no value as symbols.

Of course, the dominant symbol of Western civilization is the figure of a nearly naked man being tortured to death⁠—or more simply, the torture implement itself, the cross. But our pictures of Christ's savage death are the product of religious imagination and idealization. In reality, with his battered flesh scabbed and bleeding and bloated and discolored beneath the pitiless Judean desert sun, he must have been ghastly to behold. Had there been cameras at Calvary, would twenty centuries of believers have been moved to hang photographs of the scene on their altarpieces and in their homes, or to wear an icon of a man being executed around their necks as as an emblem of peace and hope and human fellowship? Photography is too frank to allow for the notion of suffering as noble and ennobling...”
― Philip Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure

“For the rest the Navy is a third-rate career for third-rate people, offering a sort of skimpy security in return for twenty or thirty years of a polite penal servitude.”
― Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny

“Man needs bread and hyacinths: one to feed the body, and one to feed the soul.”
― Sharon Creech, Chasing Redbird

“Dreaming also has a negative connotation as well. Some people dream and stop there. They never do anything about making their dreams come true.”
― Dave Ramsey, EntreLeadership: 20 Years of Practical Business Wisdom from the Trenches

“I don't "lol". I tried it once but it just didn't agree with me.”
― R.D. Ronald

“Words can’t imprison Love.”
― Raz Mihal, Just Love Her

“L.G.B.T.Q.I.P.O.Z.A.A.C.V………….” ”
― Adam Scott Huerta, Motive Black

“From the African terrains, stirred of a mere whisk of dust, transcended into the midst of the Caribbean. Alighted upon a new land. Still, as a motionless night, graceful as an eagle in flight. Too unseen distance.”
― Sherman Kennon, Whisk Of Dust: Too Unseen Distance

“But when his accusers rose to speak they brought none of the charges I was expecting; they merely had several points of disagreement with him about their peculiar religion and about someone called Jesus, a dead man whom Paul alleged to be alive … Jonathan read on, fascinated by the story, there were so many interesting details. But then he paused – was it the true story it said it was?”
― Elizabeth Tebby Germaine, A MAN WHO SEEMED REAL: A story of love, lies, fear and kindness

“You can’t set fires, Anna. Never again. Promise.”
[Anna] aimed her defiance at Mary.
“And you? What’s your reason to hate me?”
Caroline spoke quietly. “We nearly died — in the fire in those mountains and at the house when Ravi had a gun pointed at us.” Her eyes were full of tears. “The fire you set at The Old Hospital could have killed me as well as Janet and Agnes.”
Anna muttered into the syrupy dregs of her tea. “Fire, you’re firing me?”
Mary grimaced. There had been too much fire.”
― Susan Rowland, The Alchemy Fire Murder

“Do you ever feel like bad things are going to happen, and you can’t stop them? You can’t do anything, you just have to wait?”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“But no, we cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Jim was sometimes asked what single thing he’d do to end homelessness. On one of those occasions, he cited large population studies about the tight connection between health and educational status. If he had the power, he said, he’d pay public school teachers $200,000 a year and maybe thirty years later homelessness would become a rarity. Maybe what he called “the faucet” would be turned off. More often, he spoke of a more general solution—“What we need is a new war on poverty.”
― Tracy Kidder, Rough Sleepers

“Mr. Fresh looked up. "The book says if we don't do our jobs everything could go dark, become like the Underworld. I don't know what the Underworld is like, Mr. Asher, but I've caught some of the road show from there a couple of times, and I'm not interested in finding out. How 'bout you?"

"Maybe it's Oakland," Charlie said.

"What's Oakland?"

"The Underworld."

"Oakland is not the Underworld!"

"The Tenderloin?" Charlie suggested.”
― Christopher Moore, A Dirty Job

“I was a tree in a story about a forest, the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree”
― Donald Miller

“ჩვენ ვასახელებთ დროს, როდესაც ვამბობთ: ყოველ საგანს თავისი დრო აქვს. ამით იგულისხმება: ყველაფერი, რაც ოდესმე არის, ანუ ყოველი არსებული მოდის და მიდის თავის დროზე და განაგრძობს აქყოფნას გარკვეული დროით, მისთვის განკუთვნილი დროის განმავლობაში. თითოეულ საგანს თავისი დრო აქვს”
― Martin Heidegger