Sarah Turgeon > Sarah's Quotes

“There is nothing in the world so easy to explain as failure - it is, after all, what everybody does all the time.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“He gave her his heart. She took it and placed it quietly in the pocket of her gown. No one observed what she did.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“To sit and pass hour after hour in idle chatter with a roomful of strangers is to me the worst sort of torment.”
― Susanna Clarke

“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“In the beginning the Universe was created.
This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“I don’t hold a grudge. I cradle it. I coddle it. I feed it fine cuts of meat and send it to the best schools. I nurture my grudges, Rollins.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“I have a scholar's love of silence and solitude. To sit and pass hour after hour in idle chatter with a roomful of strangers is to me the worst sort of torment.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“Woods were ringed with a colour so soft, so subtle that it could scarcely be said to be a colour at all. It was more the idea of a colour - as if the trees were dreaming green dreams or thinking green thoughts.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“I have been quite put out of temper this morning and someone ought to die for it.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“He was a man who knew there were such things as jokes in the world or people would not write about them, but had never actually been introduced to one or shaken its hand.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“He had said that our lives are steered by uncertainties, many of which are disruptive or even daunting; but that if we persevere and remain generous of heart, we may be granted a moment of lucidity—a moment in which all that has happened to us suddenly comes into focus as a necessary course of events, even as we find ourselves on the threshold of the life we had been meant to lead all along.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“Fate would not have the reputation it has, if it simply did what it seemed it would do.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“For as it turns out, one can revisit the past quite pleasantly, as long as one does so expecting nearly every aspect of it to have changed.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“Alexander Rostov was neither scientist nor sage; but at the age of sixty-four he was wise enough to know that life does not proceed by leaps and bounds. It unfolds. At any given moment, it is the manifestation of a thousand transitions. Our faculties wax and wane, our experiences accumulate and our opinions evolve--if not glacially, then at least gradually. Such that the events of an average day are as likely to transform who we are as a pinch of pepper is to transform a stew.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“To what end, he wondered, had the Divine created the stars in heaven to fill a man with feelings of inspiration one day and insignificance the next?”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“From the earliest age, we must learn to say good-bye to friends and family. We see our parents and siblings off at the station; we visit cousins, attend schools, join the regiment; we marry, or travel abroad. It is part of the human experience that we are constantly gripping a good fellow by the shoulders and wishing him well, taking comfort from the notion that we will hear word of him soon enough. But experience is less likely to teach us how to bid our dearest possessions adieu. And if it were to? We wouldn’t welcome the education. For eventually, we come to hold our dearest possessions more closely than we hold our friends. We carry them from place to place, often at considerable expense and inconvenience; we dust and polish their surfaces and reprimand children for playing too roughly in their vicinity—all the while, allowing memories to invest them with greater and greater importance. This armoire, we are prone to recall, is the very one in which we hid as a boy; and it was these silver candelabra that lined our table on Christmas Eve; and it was with this handkerchief that she once dried her tears, et cetera, et cetera. Until we imagine that these carefully preserved possessions might give us genuine solace in the face of a lost companion.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“If they (ghosts) wander the halls of night, it is not from a grievance with or envy of the living. Rather, it is because they have no desire to see the living at all. Any more than snakes hope to see gardeners, or foxes the hounds. They wander about at midnight because at that hour they can generally do so without being harried by the sound and fury of earthly emotions. After all those years of striving and struggling, of hoping and praying, of shouldering expectations, stomaching opinions, navigating decorum, and making conversation, what they seek, quite simply, is a little peace and quiet.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Ford carried on counting quietly. This is about the most aggressive thing you can do to a computer, the equivalent of going up to a human being and saying "Blood...blood...blood...blood...”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“If they don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“It is of course perfectly natural to assume that everyone else is having a far more exciting time than you. Human beings, for instance, have a phrase that describes this phenomenon, ‘The other man’s grass is always greener.’
The Shaltanac race of Broopkidren 13 had a similar phrase, but since their planet is somewhat eccentric, botanically speaking, the best they could manage was, ‘The other Shaltanac's joopleberry shrub is always a more mauvy shade of pinky-russet.’ And so the expression soon fell into disuse, and the Shaltanacs had little option but to become terribly happy and contented with their lot, much to the surprise of everyone else in the Galaxy who had not realized that the best way not to be unhappy is not to have a word for it.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“If somebody thinks they're a hedgehog, presumably you just give 'em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The thing about growing up with Fred and George," said Ginny thoughtfully, "is that you sort of start thinking anything's possible if you've got enough nerve.”
― J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

“Honestly, if you were any slower, you’d be going backward.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets