“The Crone tires quickly and reaches out for the velvet draperies, sits on the divan, breathing heavily. She's too ancient to have a name any longer. When she coughs you can hear the ages rattling inside her shrunken frame. No human names can cling to her any more- they slip from her dusty shriveled flesh like a young girl's whimsies.”
― Tom Piccirilli, quote from A Choir of Ill Children
“Ghosts will forever put in appearances, as they should. Our illusions have muscle and meaning. The past returns at midnight, in the heart of our dreams, and the rains and the willows forever remind us of the sacrifices we’ve offered and those we have yet to make.”
― Tom Piccirilli, quote from A Choir of Ill Children
“It will finish badly when she dries out, I suppose, and probably end with madness, but almost everything does.”
― Tom Piccirilli, quote from A Choir of Ill Children
“He was a realist with too much fervor and not enough reverie. He always remained pragmatic in a place that had too much use for superstition. That’s enough to ruin any man.”
― Tom Piccirilli, quote from A Choir of Ill Children
“It seems that the people who question me the most are the ones who’ve committed the most outlandish or atrocious acts.”
― Tom Piccirilli, quote from A Choir of Ill Children
“He doesn’t hate you, Thomas, he admires you. And we’re often frightened and jealous of what we admire.”
― Tom Piccirilli, quote from A Choir of Ill Children
“Evil, as considered in these cases, is a lack of choice.”
― Tom Piccirilli, quote from A Choir of Ill Children
“why she did not trade Dodi to anyone but me, and why I didn’t dig screw worms out of anybody”
― Tom Piccirilli, quote from A Choir of Ill Children
“The past can come back in a lot of different ways, chile. It don’t get old and wind up buried like people do. It can die and be reborn. Sins take on shape and peck at your face.”
― Tom Piccirilli, quote from A Choir of Ill Children
“LOVE IS ONLY LUST DRESSED UP FOR CHURCH.”
― Tom Piccirilli, quote from A Choir of Ill Children
“They walk the wire across the chasms of their own souls, looking down into the great depths as, step by step, they cross to the distant side. On occasion they’ve learned something by the time they get there, but not always, and usually not what they expect.”
― Tom Piccirilli, quote from A Choir of Ill Children
“man can banter with his friends and colleagues about whether God exists. But a father looks at his daughter and knows.”
― quote from Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters: 10 Secrets Every Father Should Know
“Have you ever plunged into the immensity of space and time by reading the geological treatises of Cuvier? Borne away on the wings of his genius, have you hovered over the illimitable abyss of the past as if a magician's hand were holding you aloft? As one penetrates from seam to seam, from stratum to stratum and discovers, under the quarries of Montmartre or in the schists of the Urals, those animals whose fossilized remains belong to antediluvian civilizations, the mind is startled to catch a vista of the milliards of years and the millions of peoples which the feeble memory of man and an indestructible divine tradition have forgotten and whose ashes heaped on the surface of our globe, form the two feet of earth which furnish us with bread and flowers. Is not Cuvier the greatest poet of our century? Certainly Lord Byron has expressed in words some aspects of spiritual turmoil; but our immortal natural historian has reconstructed worlds from bleached bones.”
― Honoré de Balzac, quote from The Wild Ass's Skin
“The pulsations of the arteries along my fingers pressing across hers, told her what was passing within me:
she look’d down—a silence of some moments followed.”
― Laurence Sterne, quote from A Sentimental Journey
“Like you? I go out of here every morning...bust my butt...cause I like you? It's my job. It's my responsibility!... Not cause I like you! Cause it's my duty to take care of you.
...liking your black ass wasn't part of the bargain.”
― August Wilson, quote from Fences
“I frowned at him. "You didn't let anyone write on you? How does that happen?
He gave me a disapproving look. "Seriously, Ellie?"
"Ah," I said. "You must have glared at them just like that. I'm the only one who's not afraid of you. Maybe I could draw over your tattoos so they glow and write BADASS on your forehead. All I've got is pink, though. Hope you don't mind.”
― Courtney Allison Moulton, quote from Shadows in the Silence
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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