Peter > Peter's Quotes

“The owl goes not into the nest of the lark.”
― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame

“How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.”
― Dr. Seuss

“The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“There is a wisdom of the head, and... there is a wisdom of the heart.”
― Charles Dickens, Hard Times

“I am your number one fan.”
― Stephen King, Misery

“O God, make me good, but not yet.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate. Adventures do occur, but not punctually.”
― E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

“I know now-I think I probably already knew then- that all lives are exceptional.”
― José Eduardo Agualusa

“Now I lay me down to sleep my bomb proof cellar's good and deep but if I'm killed before I wake remember god it's for your sake amen.”
― Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun

“Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn't much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.”
― Richard Yates, Cold Spring Harbor

“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“Unheralded we came into this world. Unheralded we will go out. But while we are in this world, we do such deeds that even if this generation does not remember, the next generation cannot forget.”
― Vikas Swarup, Al Milyūnayr Al Mutasharrad =Slumdog Millionaire

“The one conclusion I have reached is that whiskey is a great leveler. You might be a hotshot advertising executive or a lowly foundry worker, but if you cannot hold your drink, you are just a drunkard.”
― Vikas Swarup, Q & A

“I wonder what it feels like to have no desires left because you have satisfied them all, smothered them with money even before they are born. Is an existence without desire very desirable? And is the poverty of desire better than rank poverty itself?”
― Vikas Swarup, Q & A

“She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“A heart is not judged by how much you love; but by how much you are loved by others”
― L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

“The zero-degree parallel of latitude is fixed by the laws of nature, while the zero-degree meridian of longitude shifts like the sands of time.”
― Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

“Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes they consume us completely.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“You can think clearly only with your clothes on.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Why is it that every so often history demands a bloodbath, a holocaust, an Armageddon? And why is it that every time the time before has taught us nothing?”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“That's the way it is: life includes a lot of empty space. We are one-tenth living tissue, nine-tenths water; life is one-tenth Here and Now, nine-tenths a history lesson. For most of the time the Here and Now is neither now nor here.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“He Looked and smelt like Autumn's very brother, his face being sunburnt to wheat-colour, his eyes blue as corn-flowers, his sleeves and leggings dyed with fruit-stains, his hands clammy with the sweet juice of apples, his hat sprinkled with pips, and everywhere about him the sweet atmosphere of cider which at its first return each season has such an indescribable fascination for those who have been born and bred among the orchards.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders