Bertbarber > Bertbarber's Quotes

“I wondered why God created so many varieties of faiths in the world if He intended all of us to worship Him in the same fashion.”
― Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account

“What a good husband you are,' Nancy said afterward, 'always taking your wife's side rather than your mother's.' 'It's the side of reason I am on,' Teddy said. 'It just so happens that that's where you're always to be found and my mother rarely.”
― Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins

“The more Viola forgot her mother, the more she missed her.”
― Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins

“(“An eye for an eye,” Mac said at the squadron reunion. Until everyone was blind, Teddy wondered?)”
― Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins

“The purpose of Art is to convey the truth of a thing, not to be the truth itself.” SYLVIE BERESFORD TODD”
― Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins

“We fell to wrestling again. We rolled all over the floor, in each other's arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed: and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“I had always known in my heart that the experience would never leave me, that it was now woven into my very fibers, an inextricable part of my past, but I had hoped never to have to recollect it, consciously, and in full, ever again. Like an old wound, it gave off a faint twinge now and again, but less and less often, less and less painfully, as the years went on and my happiness, sanity and equilibrium were assured. Of late, it had been like the outermost ripple on a pool, merely the faint memory of a memory.”
― Susan Hill, The Woman in Black

“Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I’m nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Human nature favors the tribal. Tribalism engenders violence. It was ever thus and so it will ever be.”
― Kate Atkinson, Transcription

“The brooding landscape they were currently traversing, the lowering sky above their heads and the rugged terrain beneath their feet, were all conspiring to make her feel like an unfortunate Brontë sister, traipsing endlessly across the moors after unobtainable fulfillment. Perry himself was not entirely without Heathcliffian qualities—the absence of levity, the ruthless disregard for a girl’s comfort, the way he had of scrutinizing you as if you were a puzzle to be solved. Would he solve her? Perhaps she wasn’t complicated enough for him. (On the other hand, perhaps she was too complicated.)”
― Kate Atkinson, Transcription

“She fingered the strand of pearls at her neck. Inside each pearl was a little piece of grit. That was the true self of the pearl wasn't it? The beauty of the pearl was just the poor oyster trying to protect itself. From the grit. From the truth.”
― Kate Atkinson, Transcription

“XXIX

Traveler, there is no path.
The path is made by walking.

Traveller, the path is your tracks
And nothing more.
Traveller, there is no path
The path is made by walking.
By walking you make a path
And turning, you look back
At a way you will never tread again
Traveller, there is no road
Only wakes in the sea.”
― Antonio Machado, Border of a Dream: Selected Poems

“Their fights didn’t so much end as dissipate, like a drop of ink in a bowl of water, with a residual taint that lingered.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“I have lived a long time, and one thing I have come to see is that one is well served by a degree of both humility and charity when judging the inner workings of another person's heart”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“I now know that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“I know now that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“I didn't want her turned, against both her will and nature, into those diligent, sad women who are bent on a lifelong course of quiet servitude, forever in fear of showing, saying, or doing the wrong thing. Women who are admired by some in the West- here in France, for instance- turned into heroines for their hard lives, admired from a distance by those who couldn't bear even one day of walking in their shoes. Women who see their desires doused and their dreams renounced, and yet- and this is the worst of it- if you meet them, they smile and pretend they have no misgivings at all. As though they lead enviable lives. But you look closely and you see the helpless looks, the desperation, and how it belies all their show of good humor. I did not want this for my daughter.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don't have to say anything”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“I learned that the world didn't see the inside of you, that it didn't care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“There were days - she could remember this - when Henry would hold her hand as they walked home, middle-aged people, in their prime. Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it. But she had that memory now, of something healthy and pure.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“But after a certain point in a marriage, you stopped having a certain kind of fight, Olive thought, because when the years behind you were more than the years in front of you, things were different.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“Olive's private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as "big bursts" and "little bursts." Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee's, let's say, or the waitress at Dunkin' Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“She didn't like to be alone. Even more, she didn't like being with people.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“You couldn't make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“Each of his son's had been his favorite child.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“He put the blinker on, pulled out onto the avenue. "Well, that was nice," she said, sitting back. They had fun together these days, they really did. It was as if marriage had been a long, complicatd meal, and now there was this lovely dessert.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“What frightened her the most was the moment of those first notes, because that was when people really listened: She was changing the atmosphere in the room.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge