Talbot Hook > Talbot's Quotes

“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“The sun is a thief: she lures the sea
and robs it. The moon is a thief:
he steals his silvery light from the sun.
The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“I am a strict vegetarian...The usual questions were fired at me about eggnogs and milkshakes being or not being acceptable to one of my persuasion. Shade said that with him it was the other way around: he must make a definite effort to partake of a vegetable. Beginning a salad, was to him like stepping into sea water on a chilly day, and he had always to brace himself in order to attack the fortress of an apple.”
― Vladmir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“The calendar says I had known him only a few months but there exist friendships which develop their own inner duration, their own eons of transparent time, independent of rotating, malicious music.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front--”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

“Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“I am more than a devil; I am a man. I can do the one thing which Satan himself cannot do— I can die.”
― Chesterton G. K. (Gilbert Keith), The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“I shall approach. Before taking off his hat, I shall take off my own. I shall say, "The Marquis de Saint Eustache, I believe." He will say, "The celebrated Mr. Syme, I presume." He will say in the most exquisite French, "How are you?" I shall reply in the most exquisite Cockney, "Oh, just the Syme."'

'Oh shut it...what are you really going to do?'

'But it was a lovely catechism! ...Do let me read it to you. It has only forty-three questions and answers, some of the Marquis's answers are wonderfully witty. I like to be just to my enemy.'

'But what's the good of it all?' asked Dr. Bull in exasperation.

'It leads up to the challenge...when the Marquis as given the forty-ninth reply, which runs--'

'Has it...occurred to you...that the Marquis may not say all the forty-three things you have put down for him?'

'How true that is! ...Sir, you have a intellect beyond the common.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“What are we going to do?" asked the Professor.
"At this moment," said Syme, with a scientific detachment, "I think we are going to smash into a lamppost.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“No man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.”
― G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

“I? What am I?" roared the President, and he rose slowly to an incredible height, like some enormous wave about to arch above them and break. "You want to know what I am, do you? Bull, you are a man of science. Grub in the roots of those trees and find out the truth about them. Syme, you are a poet. Stare at those morning clouds. But I tell you this, that you will have found out the truth of the last tree and the top-most cloud before the truth about me. You will understand the sea, and I shall be still a riddle; you shall know what the stars are, and not know what I am. Since the beginning of the world all men have hunted me like a wolf—kings and sages, and poets and lawgivers, all the churches, and all the philosophies. But I have never been caught yet, and the skies will fall in the time I turn to bay. I have given them a good run for their money, and I will now.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“For even the most dehumanized modern fantasies depend on some older and simpler figure; the adventures may be mad, but the adventurer must be sane.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“And did I pass?" The face of the old woman on my right was unreadable in the gathering dusk. On my left the younger woman said, "You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Peas baffled me. I could not understand why grown-ups would take things that tasted so good raw, and then put them in tins, and make them revolting.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“We don't do spells," she said. She sounded a little disappointed to admit it. "We'll do recipes sometimes. But no spells or cantrips. Gran doesn't hold with none of that. She says it's common.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“But there was a kitten on my pillow, and it was purring in my face and vibrating gently with every purr, and, very soon, I slept.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“You can't just boss bacteria around like that," said the younger Mrs. Hempstock. "They don't like it." "Stuff and silliness," said the old lady. "You leave wigglers alone and they'll be carrying on like anything. Show them who's boss and they can't do enough for you. You've tasted my cheese..”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“O how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or a cow. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all, but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning . . . or wise . . . and still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening.”
― Herman Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

“They slept profoundly, desperately, greedily, as though for the last time, as though they had been condemned to stay awake forever and had to drink in all the sleep in the world during these last hours. ”
― Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

“our friendship has no other purpose, no other reason, than to show you how utterly unlike me you are.”
― Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

“We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do.”
― Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

“The best reason for disbelieving in God is that he never gave us enough time in life to pursue enough knowledge to find sufficient truth.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.”
― Christopher Hitchens