Jefferey Deleonardo

“Are you sure this will work?” asked Princess Sophie as she was pulling the cart away from Lady Ariana’s cottage.
“If you believe, it will work,” said Lady Ariana.”
― Mike Martin, Princess Sophie and the Christmas Elixir

“Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis’s comments on them, and burned them.”
― A.S. Byatt , Possession

“Gossip is like thread wound over a spindle of truth, changing its shape.”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“Jeremy, I’ll say this once,’ he (Jonathan) began, ‘I’m not going to be drawn into any silly squabble you want to invent. I am not going to defend my recent behaviour in the village or anywhere else. I am not going to tell you my plans, I have had reasons for everything I’ve done and a great deal of thinking has gone into my recent very painful decisions…”
― Elizabeth Tebby Germaine, A MAN WHO SEEMED REAL: A story of love, lies, fear and kindness