Mary A > Mary's Quotes

“I see now that there is a great deal in what Aunt Almeria says. She considers that there are terrible pitfalls in Society."

Sir Richard shook his head sadly. "Alas, too true!"

"And vice," said Pen awfully. "Profligacy, and extravagance, you know."

"I know."

She picked up her knife and fork again. "It must be very exciting," she said enviously.”
― Georgette Heyer, The Corinthian

“On my first day in London I made an early start. Reaching the Public Record Office not much after ten, I soon secured the papers I needed for my research and settled in my place. I became, as is the way of the scholar, so deeply absorbed as to lose all consciousness of my surroundings or of the passage of time. When at last I came to myself, it was almost eleven and I was quite exhausted: I knew I could not prudently continue without refreshment.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“Julia's unhappy relationship with the Inland Revenue was due to her omission, during four years of modestly successful practice at the Bar, to pay any income tax. The truth is, I think, that she did not, in her heart of hearts, really believe in income tax. It was a subject which she had studied for examinations and on which she had thereafter advised a number of clients: she naturally did not suppose, in these circumstances, that it had anything to do with real life.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“I had already established, as you know, that it was logically impossible for Kenneth to be distressed by anything that might occur between Ned and myself; but Kenneth, being an artist, has perhaps not studied logic and is unaware of the impossibility.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“I would think it odd, he said, that he had never married. I did not, in fact, think it at all odd--the statistical chances against any woman being prepared to endure both the hairiness of his legs and the tedium of his conversation seemed to be negligible. I did not express this view, but said sympathetically that the military life must be difficult to combine with the domestic.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“If you're going to go and buy a load of stolen goods, you can't take a whole crowd of friends with you. The presence of third parties reduces the prospective seller to a clamlike condition.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“Indeed, it is a benevolent dispensation of Providence that those who express most dread of an unorthodox advance are usually those whom Nature has most effectively protected from any risk of one.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“I began to be very worried about Desdemona. We are given to understand that Othello's courtship of her consisted almost entirely of stories beginning "When I was stationed among the Anthropophagi—" or "I must tell you about a funny thing that happened during the siege of Rhodes." The dramatist Shakespeare would have us believe that she not only put up with this but actually enjoyed it: can that great connoisseur of the human heart really have thought this possible?”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“If you don’t love it, don’t eat it, and if you love it, savor it.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

“Honestly, unless you killed the chef or the farmer, there should be no guilt about your eating choices.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach

“Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel good. Remember that you don’t have to eat a perfect diet to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency, or gain weight from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters. Progress, not perfection, is what counts.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

“Just because someone makes an inappropriate comment does not make it true!”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

“Find ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve your emotional issues without using food. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, and anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won’t fix any of these feelings. It may comfort for the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you into a food hangover. But food won’t solve the problem. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger will only make you feel worse in the long run. You’ll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion, as well as the discomfort of overeating.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

“Having a healthy relationship with food means you are not morally superior or inferior based on your eating choices.”
― Evelyn Tribole, Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

“It was a constant source of irritation to him that the public men on his side were, on the whole, not conspicuously better than the public men on the other side.”
― George Eliot, Felix Holt: The Radical

“Mr. Johnson's character was not much more exceptional than his double chin.”
― George Eliot, Felix Holt: The Radical

“I have to determine for myself, and not for other men. I don’t blame them, or think I am better than they; their circumstances are different. I would never choose to withdraw myself from the labour and common burden of the world; but I do choose to withdraw myself from the push and the scramble for money and position. Any man is at liberty to call me a fool, and say that mankind are benefited by the push and the scramble in the long-run. But I care for the people who live now and will not be living when the long-run comes. As it is, I prefer going shares with the unlucky.”
― George Eliot, Felix Holt: The Radical

“Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain also about your own; if your knight could shuffle himself on to a new square by the sly; if your bishop, at your castling, could wheedle your pawns out of their places; and if your pawns, hating you because they are pawns, could make away from their appointed posts that you might get checkmate on a sudden. You might be the longest-headed of deductive reasoners, and yet you might be beaten by your own pawns. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with the game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for his instruments.”
― George Eliot, Felix Holt: The Radical

“January opened his mouth and then closed it. At the time -- in the days of his childhood, his slavery -- the endless, intricate dance of slave and master, of work and avoidance of work, had seemed to him the only manner in which life could be conducted. Looking back on it, he was still amazed that grown men and women should be astonished by their slaves' efforts to evade tasks that they themselves found too hard or too nasty, tasks demanded with no recompense but the simplest of food and the cheapest of shelter and clothing, with the constant threat of losing their families thrown in.”
― Barbara Hambly, Sold Down the River

“Slavery, January understood now as he never had before, made you fear change almost more than anything else.”
― Barbara Hambly, Sold Down the River

“Sometimes words don't say what we want them to. Maybe he thought you wouldn't take his words in the right spirit. Sometimes it's better to say nothing.'
In my own silence I thought of Niklas looking at me with his solemn blue eyes. Sometimes only through them had he let me know he loved me. 'You are right about that,' I told Clare.”
― Malcolm J. Bosse, Captives of Time

“Shrouded in his red cassock, he padded off to the bathroom lost in the silent ecstasy or wearing new socks.”
― Julia Stuart, The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise

“Valerie Jennings had clearly searched deep within her wardrobe for something suitably flattering, only to retrieve a frock of utter indifference to fashion. There had been an attempt to tame her hair, which seemed to have been abandoned, and the fuzzy results were clipped to the back of her head.

"You look nice," said Hebe Jones.”
― Julia Stuart, The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise

“The bearded pig immediately turned its head at the noise.
The moment Balthazar Jones saw its marvellous hirsute cheeks, his guilt at having made off with the animal instantly vanished.”
― Julia Stuart, The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise

“He put his hand on his forehead and scoured the French department of his memory for a word. He knew it was in there. He'd put it in almost fifty years before and hadn't had cause to remove it. But for the life of him he couldn't find it.”
― Colin Cotterill, The Coroner's Lunch

“There was nothing fake or added about him. He was all himself.”
― Colin Cotterill, The Coroner's Lunch

“Do you suppose it all means something?

That we're being left clues?

Perhaps.

Then, no offense, but I fear they've badly overestimated us.”
― Colin Cotterill, The Coroner's Lunch

“Dtui with her laundry-bin build was off the scale. There were no suitors queuing at her door. They wouldn’t have to dig deep to find her kindness and humour, but they didn’t even bring a spade.”
― Colin Cotterill, The Coroner's Lunch

“Encounters with the living always drained him more than those with the dead.”
― Colin Cotterill, The Coroner's Lunch

“The current philosophy was that Buddha was a communist.”
― Colin Cotterill, The Coroner's Lunch