Mose Latson > Mose's Quotes

“            It was stated by an Australian Army Officer, “Phuoc Tuy offers the perfect terrain for guerrilla warfare. It has a long coastline with complex areas of mangrove swamps, isolated ranges of very rugged mountains and a large area of uninhabited jungle containing all of the most loathsome combinations of thorny bamboos, poisonous snakes, insects, malaria, dense underbrush, swamps and rugged ground conditions that the most dedicated guerrilla warfare expert could ask for.”
― Michael G. Kramer, A Gracious Enemy

“Marco’s heart swelled with pride at his culture. Maybe it was the coquito, but his eyes teared at this beautiful Reyes celebration, heavenly food, lush green mountains, clean air, and his family’s delighted faces. He felt sorry for the stiff people at the Casino de Puerto Rico, pretending to be jíbaros and eating food half as delicious as this. Actually, no. He didn’t feel sorry for them. It was precisely what they deserved.”
― Margarita Barresi, A Delicate Marriage

“Life is complicated. If life was simple, wouldn’t that make us simpletons?”
― C. Toni Graham

“Our cousin Patrick Hacker McKaybees, died fighting by the side of the king.”
― Gabriel F.W. Koch, Steel Blood

“According to the evidence provided by the Wasp Trap files, the Fleet Street newspaper proprietor was introduced to, among other prominent Nazis, Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, in 1934. Speer was also Hitler’s closest military adviser just before the war. Evidence from a letter allegedly from Speer to the Fleet Street newspaper proprietor, thanking him for information about the Paris defences and the Free French army. A photograph of a letter allegedly from the Fleet Street proprietor, also included in these discovered files, advises Force Yellow – the German invading army – to avoid the Maginot line entirely and invade through neutral Belgium and the other Low Countries. There is no evidence that totally confirms these letters are genuine, or, indeed, from Speer or the Fleet Street newspaper proprietor.
“In June 1940, when the Nazis occupied Paris, the Fleet Street newspaper proprietor was back in London and became liaison executive between the secret services in Britain and agents in France. It is possibly no coincidence that the invading Nazi forces occupied a house in Avenue Foch, Paris, owned by the newspaper proprietor’s family. The house was then used for the entertainment of senior Nazi officers. The Wasp Trap files document that the Fleet Street newspaper proprietor had allegedly been credited with over thirty British agents and Free French operatives being captured, tortured and killed.”
― Hugo Woolley, The Wasp Trap

“To know when to be generous and when firm—that is wisdom.”
― Edith Wharton

“Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, MAESTRO
DI COLOR CHE SANNO. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“You might as well ask a man to eat molecules with a pair of chop-sticks, as to try to interest me, about the lesser carnivora, when I know of what is before me.”
― Bram Stoker

“What was most striking about the long course of human events, Truman had concluded from his reading of history, were its elements of continuity, including, above all, human nature, which had changed little if at all through time. “The only new thing in the world is the history you don’t know,” he would one day tell an interviewer.”
― David McCullough, Truman

“When you are an addict and you get caught, you always seem to be at your lowest point.”
― Andrew Mann, Such Unfortunates

“This evening I spied her in the back orchard. I decided to sacrifice one of my better old shirts and carried it out to her. The weather’s been warm of late. Buds on the apple trees are ready to burst. Usually by this time of the year, at that time of day, the back orchard is full of screaming children. Damut’s boys were the only two. They were on the terrace below her, running through the slanted sunlight, chasing each other around tree trunks. She stood above them, like a merlin watching rabbits play.”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“The snake you don’t kill today may kill you tomorrow.”
― J.K. Franko, Killing Johnny Miracle

“If I read this right, Gunther had not come to offer me congratulations. I will not give him the satisfaction of thinking me scared or insecure. I will fake calm, confident, and regal.” 
”
― Tricia Copeland, To Be a Fae Queen

“It’s all about the company you keep, isn’t it, Chief Inspector? Now Mr Trenton, who I know wouldn’t hurt a fly, has certain…preferences, if you know what I mean.’ He gave Merlin a meaningful look. ‘I don’t want to get anyone into trouble, of course.”
― Mark Ellis, Death of an Officer

“It was as if we played chess after denying me both bishops and knights.”
― Gabriel F.W. Koch, Death Leaves a Shadow

“The world is full of magic. You’ve just got to learn how to access it.”
― Max Nowaz, Get Rich or Get Lucky

“Contemporary trends of thought have imagined art to be a fountain, whereas it is a sponge. They have decided that art ought to gush forth, whereas it should absorb and become saturated. They think it can be broken down into means of depiction, whereas it is composed of organs of perception. Its proper task is to be always among the spectators and to look more purely, receptively and faithfully than all others.”
― Boris Pasternak

“It came from a piece of old wood that he found in the yard somewhere. That's what we all are, Jefferson, all of us on this earth, a piece of drifting wood, until we—each one of us, individually—decide to become something else. I am still that piece of drifting wood, and those out there are no better. But you can be better. Because we need you to be and want you to be.”
― Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying

“The evil is in humans, the Devil is not to blame”
― Bulgakov Mikhail, Master and Margarita

“He wants to say, because Anne is not a carnal being, she is a calculating being, with a cold slick brain at work behind her hungry black eyes. "I believe any woman who can say no to the King of England and keep on saying it, has the wit to say no to any number of men, including you, including Harry Percy, including anyone else she may choose to torment for her own sport while she is arranging her career in the way it suits her. So I think, yes, you've been made into a fool, but not quite in the way you thought.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“But what shall we say, when an individual discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on the same vast sheet of record. In such a case, it could only be the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul's history and fate.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“Every life is complicated, every mind a kingdom of unmapped mysteries.”
― Dean Koontz, Forever Odd