Gilbert > Gilbert's Quotes

“You see, we black cats are the only thing between you and certain death.”
― Trevor Alan Foris, The Octunnumi Fosbit Files Prologue

“Too much truth confuses the facts. Too much honesty makes you sound insincere”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“I well knew the rules to follow with our training Dogs: Speak when you're spoken to. Keep out of the way. Obey all orders. Get killed on your own time.”
― Tamora Pierce, Terrier

“If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I'm beginning to understand something. I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time. It's because he wants to stay inside.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Whoever, at any time, has undertaken to build a new heaven has found the strength for it in his own hell...”
― Nietzsche

“She took a life because someone
humiliated her, hurt her image of herself as the Valkyrie, the
stainless warrior. Exposed her weakness, which was only love. So she
avenged herself. So easy to justify, I wrote to her. It's because you
felt like a victim you did it. If you were really strong, you could
have tolerated the humiliation.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“الآباء النبلاء تعاني سمعتهم الطيبة من أي فعل مشين قد يرتكبه الأبناء.”
― Euripides, Herakles

“Don't do it, Eleanor told the little girl; insist on your cup of stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone else you will never see your cup of stars again; don't do it; and the little girl glanced at her, and smiled a little subtle, dimpling, wholly comprehending smile, and shook her head stubbornly at the glass. Brave girl, Eleanor thought; wise, brave girl.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“Despite different cultures, middle-class youth all over the world seem to live their lives as if in a parallel universe. They get up in the morning, put on their Levi's and Nikes, grab their caps and backpacks, and Sony personal CD players and head for school.”
― Naomi Klein, No Logo

“He offered a crystal-clear notion of right and wrong, an unambiguous definition of good and evil. And although his perspective was absolutist and unyielding, it presented a kinder, gentler alternative to Calvinism, which had been the ecclesiastical status quo in the early years of the American republic.”
― Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

“Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.”
― H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

“The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it. At the crest of their popular strength, in July 1932, the National Socialists had attained but 37 per cent of the vote. But the 63 per cent of the German people who expressed their opposition to Hitler were much too divided and shortsighted to combine against a common danger which they must have known would overwhelm them unless they united, however temporarily, to stamp it out. The”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

“his discomfort seemed to soften her, for when he met her eyes again, they were kind.”
― Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter

“It's amazing the difference
A bit of sky can make.”
― Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“From the molten basements of the world, two hundred miles down, it comes. One crystal in a seam of others. Pure carbon, each atom linked to four equidistant neighbors, perfectly knit, octahedral, unsurpassed in hardness. Already it is old: unfathomably so. Incalculable eons tumble past. The earth shifts, shrugs, stretches. One year, one day, one hour, a great upflow of magma gathers a seam of crystals and drives it toward the surface, mile after burning mile; it cools inside a huge, smoking xenolith of kimberlite, and there it waits. Century after century. Rain, wind, cubic miles of ice. Bedrock becomes boulders, boulders become stones; the ice retreats, a lake forms, and galaxies of freshwater clams flap their million shells at the sun and close and die and the lake seeps away. Stands of prehistoric trees rise and fall and rise again in succession. Until another year, another day, another hour, when a storm claws one particular stone out of a canyon and sends it into a clattering flow of alluvium, where eventually it finds, one evening, the attention of a prince who knows what he is looking for.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Sure, doing business in the Congo is unconventional, but try to look at it from a strictly business point of view. The fees we pay to the government are no different from taxes paid in other countries. Everything we do is legal to the extent that there is any law in this country. If the regime says we pay for this licence, we pay for the licence. It just so happens the money might be paid in a big, black plastic bag delivered at night to a politician’s house.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

“When the old men kill themselves, the cities are dying.”
― Robert Ludlum, The Matlock Paper

“One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothing can beat teamwork.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“I told him I had another statement to make and then held up my middle finger and walked out.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“I think the only way to get through this life is laughing hard and constantly, mostly at myself.”
― Shannon Hale

“Neither your mother nor I have any imagination at all and we certainly didn't bring you up to have one”
― John Boyne, The Terrible Thing That Happened to Barnaby Brocket

“Little Engine That Could - "I think I can. I think I can. I think I can. I know I can.”
― Watty Piper, The Little Engine That Could

“There are two things that men should never weary of, goodness and humility; we get none too much of them in this rough world among cold, proud people.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped

“She would stay alive for another night. And then what? She was still lost in the woods in winter. She was still a murderer. And though she didn’t have fangs and talons right then, she was no longer normal. She heard too well, saw too well, smelled too well. When the sun touched her, she burst into flame. She had become a creature of darkness.”
― John Patrick Kennedy, Princess Dracula