Wendle > Wendle's Quotes

“For years I said Let me in, Love me, Approve me, Define me, Regulate me, Validate me, Support me. Now I say Move over.”
― Joanna Russ

“Some quotations," said Zellaby, "are greatly improved by lack of context.”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
― Stephen King

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Naturally, I never told him I thought he was a terrific whistler. I mean you don’t just go up to somebody and say, ‘You’re a terrific whistler.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Already he was a very different hobbit from the one that had run out without a pocket-handkerchief from Bag-End long ago. He had not had a pocket-handkerchief for ages.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be somebody else.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Truth was, if you were going to believe something, it was best to believe in stuff that made the world seem a more interesting place.”
― Christopher Brookmyre, Not the End of the World

“Just because you disagreed with the Poll Tax and detested Margaret Thatcher—"
"Detest is a little inappropriate," Parlabane said. "Maybe closer to say I spent the entire Eighties wishing I was pissing on her rotting corpse.”
― Christopher Brookmyre, Be My Enemy

“Have you got any soul?" a woman asks the next afternoon. That depends, I feel like saying; some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out; now I've got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it a bit more evenly, I want to tell her, get a better balance, but I can't seem to get it sorted. I can see she wouldn't be interested in my internal stock control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep the soul I have, right by the exit, just next to the blues.”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of the throat and I'd cry for a week.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I'd stop and look so hard I never forgot it. I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that's the way I knew things were all the time.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Returning his pen to its holder, he told us, 'I will have him gutted with that scythe. I will hang him by his own intestines.' At this piece of dramatic exposition, I could not hep but roll my eyes. A length of intestines would not carry the weight of a child, much less a full grown man.”
― Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers

“Do you know how much a hundred dollars is?' he asked. I said that I did not and he answered, 'It is a hundred dollars.”
― Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers

“... one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“I live alone (but catless, I'd like everybody to know)....”
― J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“An instant later, a silk hat materialised in the air beside me, considerably down and to the left, and my special, only technically unassigned cohort grinned up at me - for a moment, I rather thought he was going to slip his hand into mine.”
― J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“She was saying goodbye and she didn't even know it.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Of course, I'm being rude. I'm spoiling the ending, not only of the entire book, but of this particular piece of it. I have given you two events in advance, because I don't have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It's the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me. There are many things to think of. There is much story.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I ever simply estimate it.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“In years to come, he would be a giver of bread, not a stealer - proof again of the contradictory human being. So much good, so much evil. Just add water.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't even be worth reading.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.”
― William Golding, The Spire

“Father Adam!”
But the little man said nothing, did nothing. He stood still holding the letter, and there was not even a change of expression in his face; and this might be, thought Jocelin, because he has no face at all. He is the same all round like the top of a clothespeg. He spoke, laughing down at the baldness with its fringe of nondescript hair.
“I ask your pardon, Father Adam. One forgets you are there so easily!” And then, laughing aloud in joy and love— “I shall call you Father Anonymous!”
― William Golding, The Spire

“A fool tries to look different: a clever man looks the same and is different.”
― John Buchan, The 39 Steps