Karolina > Karolina's Quotes

“You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.”
― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

“I sit watching the brown oceanic waves of dry country rising into the foothills and I weep monotonously, seasickly. Life is not like the dim ironic stories I like to read, it is like a daytime serial on television. The banality will make you weep as much as anything else.”
― Alice Munro

“Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?”
― Alice Munro

“What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.”
― Edith Wharton

“Women ought to be free - as free as we are,' he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Pass the damn ham, please.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“It’s never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn’t hurt you.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading.

The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust.”
― Alice Munro, Open Secrets

“If after I read a poem the world looks like that poem for 24 hours or so I'm sure it's a good one—and the same goes for paintings. ”
― Elizabeth Bishop

“She would live now, not read.”
― Alice Munro, Dear Life

“I was not really surprised by what he was saying. A lot of people felt that way. Especially men. There was a quantity of things that men hated. Or had no use for, as they said. And that was exactly right. They had no use for it, so they hated it. Maybe it was the same way I felt about algebra- I doubted very much that I would ever find any use for it. But I didn't go so far as to want it wiped off the face of the earth for that reason.”
― Alice Munro, Dear Life

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn't mean anything? What then?”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“What's your name,' Coraline asked the cat. 'Look, I'm Coraline. Okay?'
'Cats don't have names,' it said.
'No?' said Coraline.
'No,' said the cat. 'Now you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“Because,' she said, 'when you're scared but you still do it anyway, that's brave.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“We...we could be friends.'

We COULD be rare specimens of an exotic breed of dancing African elephants, but we're not. At least, I'M not.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“It is astonishing just how much of what we are can be tied to the beds we wake up in in the morning, and it is astonishing how fragile that can be.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“The cat wrinkled its nose and managed to look unimpressed. "Calling cats," it confided, "tends to be a rather overrated activity. Might as well call a whirlwind.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

“I can’t bear the smell of cigars, can you?” said Lady Partridge.

“Lionel hates it too,” murmured Rachel. As did Nick, to whom the dry lavatorial stench of cigars signified the inexplicable confidence of other men’s tastes and habits, and their readiness to impose them on their fellows.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

“Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel!”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“Perhaps watching someone you love suffer can teach you even more than suffering yourself can.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle