Shreya > Shreya's Quotes

“I hate when I'm on a flight and I wake up with a water bottle next to me like oh great now I gotta be responsible for this water bottle”
― Kanye West

“With the knowledge of her aloneness came a rush of self-declaration: I will not be nothing.”
― Robin McKinley, Deerskin

“It was too important a matter, this talking to people, and listening to them, to do it lightly or often.”
― Robin McKinley, Deerskin

“…at four o’clock in the morning, when the world is full of magic, things may be safely said that may not be uttered at any other time, so long as the person who listens believes in the same kind of magic as the person who speaks.”
― Robin McKinley, Deerskin

“I have to remind myself to breathe -- almost to remind my heart to beat!”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“The king was pregnant.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“I wish to God,” said Gideon with mild exasperation, “that you’d talk—just once—in prose like other people.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

“I despised men who accepted their fate. I shaped mine twenty times and had it broken twenty times in my hands.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

“Repressively, Lymond himself answered. “I dislike being discussed as if I were a disease. Nobody ‘got’ me,” he said.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

“It was a tragic and annihilating war, in which intellect fought naked with intellect, and the blows fell not upon the mind but upon the soul.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

“Kate slid to her knees, pulling the child’s head to her breast, her mouth in its hair. “Pippa. Pippa, we’re awful fools. What Father means is that truly nothing we have ever done can harm us, and Mr. Crawford has mixed us up with someone else. But you know what unstable-looking parents you have. He doesn’t believe us, but he says he’ll believe you. It’s not very flattering,” said Kate, looking at her daughter with bright eyes, “but you seem to be the one in the family with an honest sort of face, and your father and I must just be thankful for it. Go over to him, darling. I’ll be behind you. And just speak,” she said with an edge like a razor. “Just speak as you would to the dog.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

“..when two friends discuss money, the third friend should invariably be asleep.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

“I made one mistake. Who doesn’t? But I despised men who accepted their fate. I shaped mine twenty times and had it broken twenty times in my hands. Of course it left me deformed and unserviceable, defective and dangerous to associate with.… But what in God’s name has happened to charity? … Self-interest guides me like the next man but not invariably; not all the time. I use compassion more than you do; I have loyalties and I keep by them; I serve honesty in a crooked way, but as best I can; and I don’t plague my debtors or even make them aware of their debt.… Why is it so impossible to trust me?”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

“Lucent and delicate, Drama entered, mincing like a cat.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

“Lymond considered this with every appearance of seriousness. “I see. Thus the baseness of my morals is redeemed by the stature of my manners? You admire consistency?”

“Yes, I do.”

“But prefer consistency in evil to consistency in good?”

“The choice is hypothetical.”

“Lord; is it? What an exciting past you must have.”

“I despise mediocrity,” stated the young man firmly.

“And you would also despise me if I practised evil but professed purity?”

“Yes. I should.”

“I see. What you are really saying, of course, is that you dislike hypocrisy, and people who can’t stand by their principles.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

“I don’t mind,” said Redhead recklessly, “what crimes I commit, as long as they’ve got a sensible purpose. Wanton injury and destruction, of course, are just juvenile.”

“Of course,” said the Master, digesting this remarkable statement. “Then let us be adult at all costs.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

“Henry of England had all the virtues and all the faults, and solved the contradiction by making scapegoats and sin-eaters of half his entourage.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

“You choose to play God, and the Deity points out that the post is already adequately filled.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

“I find it so helpful,” continued Lymond, “when some of my gentlemen have well-defined codes of conduct. It makes them more predictable.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

“Then you’ve had a good day of it, I suppose."

"Then you suppose wrong," said Lymond shortly. "I’ve had a damned carking afternoon. A Moslem would blame my Ifrit, a Buddhist explain the papingo was really my own great-grandmother, and a Christian, no doubt, call it the vengeance of the Lord. As a plain, inoffensive heathen, I call it bloody annoying.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

“Nevertheless, Sybilla was able to put her own accurate interpretation on Janet’s groan. “Religion or women?” asked Lady Culter expertly.

“Women!” It was a cry of despair. “Can you see Buccleuch turning a whisker about women! Not a bit of it. Moral Philosophy, that’s the trouble,” said Janet with gloomy relish. “They’ve taught poor Will moral philosophy and his father’s fit to boil.”
― Dorothy Dunnettunnett, The Game of Kings

“Richard doesn’t like me either,” said the fair one sorrowfully. “But that’s unmannerly rank for you. Do you like Richard?”

“I’m married to him!”

“That’s why I asked. You don’t believe in polyandry by any chance?”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

“Intentions, yours or anyone else’s, don’t matter; they never matter and never excuse: get that into your head.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

“Lymond is back.”
It was known soon after the Sea-Catte reached Scotland from Campvere with an illicit cargo and a man she should not have carried.
“Lymond is in Scotland.”
It was said by busy men preparing for war against England, with contempt, with disgust; with a side-slipping look at one of their number. “I hear the Lord Culter’s young brother is back.” Only sometimes a woman’s voice would say it with a different note, and then laugh a little.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

“A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. ”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“. . . clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando