Nat > Nat's Quotes

“Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There's an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, His Last Bow

“Who's right and who's wrong? No one is. Just live for the day . . . tomorrow you die . . . I could have died an hour ago. And why worry when you've only got a second to live on the scale of eternity?”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Little notes, scrawled on half-sheets of paper, and letters, when he was away, page after page, intimate, their news. Her voice, echoing through the house, and down the garden, careless and familiar like the writing in the book.
And I had to call him Maxim.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. I worshipped you. I grew jealous of every one to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Who was it, then, when all was said and done, who was punishing him, killing him, taking his life, Pierre's life, with all his memories, yearnings, hopes and ideas? Who was doing this? And Pierre felt he knew the answer: no one was.
It was the way of things. A pattern of circumstances.
It was some kind of system that was killing him, killing Pierre, taking his life, taking everything away, destroying him.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but that you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.”
― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Christopher Roden; Tsukasa Kobayashi; Akane Higashiyama; Hiroshi Takata

“You do care a little for me, I know... but nothing to speak of, and you don't love me. I was yours once till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now... and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“I am no traveller, you are my world.”
― Daphne du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel

“My mind," he said, "rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four

“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

“Will you look into my eyes and tell me that you love me now?”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“Your life is not your own. Keep your hands off it.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

“They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days.
Not anymore, though.”
― Daphne du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel

“We were like two performers in a play, but we were divided, we were not acting with one another. We had to endure it alone, we had to put up this show, this miserable, sham performance for the sake of all these people I did not know and did not want to see again.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“Kings are the slaves of history.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Why does an apple fall when it is ripe? Is it brought down by the force of gravity? Is it because its stalk withers? Because it is dried by the sun, because it grows too heavy, or because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it? None of these is the cause.... Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own freewill is in the historical sense not free at all but is bound up with the whole course of history and preordained from all eternity.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“...Ambrose had woken to me just as some men wake to religion. He became obsessed, in the same fashion. But a man who gets religion can go into a monastery and pray all day before Our Lady on an altar. She is made of plaster anyway, and does not change. Women are not so, Philip. Their moods vary with the days and nights, sometimes even with the hours, just as a man’s can do. We are human, that is our failing.”
― Daphne du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel

“If at that point Napoleon had told them not to fight the Russians they would have killed them and gone on to fight the Russians, because by now it had become inevitable.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Where there is life, there is happiness.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Is it possible that this hand, this face, these eyes, all these treasures of womanly charm, so far from me now, is it possible they might one day be mine for ever, and I could know them as closely as I know myself?”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace