“He had never thought of himself as much of a praying man, but as he sat in the car in the growing darkness and the minutes passed, he knew what it was to pray. It was to will goodness out of evil, hope out of despair, life out of death. It was to will dreams into existence and spectres into reality. It was to will an end to anguish and a beginning to joy.”
― Elizabeth George, quote from A Great Deliverance
“Il ne s'était jamais considéré comme un homme de prière, mais, assis dans la voiture au milieu de l'obscurité qui tombait et des minutes qui s'égrenaient, il comprit ce que le mot « prier » voulait dire. C'était vouloir que le mal se transforme en bien, le désespoir en espérance, que la mort devienne vie. C'était vouloir que les rêves existent et que les spectres deviennent réalité. C'était vouloir que finisse l'angoisse, vouloir que commence la joie.”
― Elizabeth George, quote from A Great Deliverance
“exophthalmic, with a little upturned nose that continually”
― Elizabeth George, quote from A Great Deliverance
“Nigel Parrish waited until they returned from the”
― Elizabeth George, quote from A Great Deliverance
“eh, there's trouble i' this world, and there's things as we can niver make out the rights on. And all we've got to do is to trusten - Master Marner, to do the right thing as fur as we know, and to trusten. For if us as knows so little can see a bit o' good and rights, we may be sure as there's a good and a rights bigger nor what we can know.”
― George Eliot, quote from Silas Marner
“He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him see the works.”
― Dashiell Hammett, quote from The Maltese Falcon
“i will admit there's a certain degree of giving a fuck that goes into not giving a fuck. by saying you don't care if the world falls apart, in some small way you're saying you want it to stay together, on your terms.”
― John Green, quote from Will Grayson, Will Grayson
“It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the natural grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. "That was all I wanted," he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. "That was all, for thirty years. That didn't seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years.”
― William Faulkner, quote from Light in August
“But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its
justification for existing, then there must also be something we can call a
sense of possibility.
Whoever has it does not say, for instance:
Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen;
but he invents:
Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen.
If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise.
[...]
Such possibilists are said to inhabit a more delicate medium, a hazy medium of mist, fantasy, daydreams, and the subjunctive mood.
Children who show this tendency are dealt with firmly and warned
that such persons are cranks, dreamers, weaklings, know-it-alls,
or troublemakers.
Such fools are also called idealists by those who wish to praise them.
But all this clearly applies only to their weak subspecies, those
who cannot comprehend reality or who, in their melancholic condition,
avoid it. These are people in whom the lack of a sense of reality
is a real deficiency.”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Man Without Qualities
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