“I'm a person of the mountains and the open paddocks and the big empty sky, that's me, and I knew if I spent too long away from all that I'd die; I don't know what of, I just knew I'd die.”
“Sometimes I think I'd rather be frightened than bored. At least when you're frightened you know you're alive.”
“Nothing reaches inside you and grabs you by the guts the way fear does.”
“My survival was up to me. I had nothing and I had no one. What I did have, I told myself, was my mind, my imagination, my memory, my feelings, my spirit. These were important and powerful things.”
“I didn't confess how wrecked I was. Let them keep thinking I was Superwoman if they wanted. I knew the truth.”
“Oh, Homer! You don't have to play dumb anymore! You're not at school now.”
“There's no room for anything else. You forget that you're tired or cold or hungry. You forget that banged-up knee and your aching tooth. You forget the past, and you forget that there's such a thing as a future.”
“I lay there with my mind running amuck, on the brink of madness. And somehow, gradually, early Sunday morning, I became calm. I can't think of any other word for it. I was thinking about the beach poem again, and I started to feel that I was being looked after, that everything was OK. It was strange: if there was ever a time in my life when I had the right to feel alone this was it. But I lost that sense of loneliness. I felt like there was a force in the room with me, not a person, but I had a sense that there was another world, another dimension, and it would be looking after me. It was like, "This isn't the only world, this is just one aspect of the whole thing, don't imagine this is all there is.”
“Sometimes I got worried that my memory was falling apart.”
“The dreams now were simply of staying alive.”
“We weren't creatures from another planet. We were creatures from Hell.”
“They weren't necessarily soldiers, but you didn't have to be soldiers to be affected by it all.”
“I was deeply impressed by the fact that my life could lose three days without my having any awareness of it. Maybe this was a preview of death: continuous visions and dreams and vague glimpses of reality. Only with death you never wake up: you keep having the weird images forever.”
“I guess you can't live at full-on intensity forever. Lying on the bed of my cell in the dark, trembling, waiting for the soldiers to come in and shoot me - you just can't keep doing that. There's something in the human spirit that won't let you live that way.”
“I refuse to think fear. I will think strong. I will think brave.”
“This is bigger than a fart in a bathtub, you know.”
“Oh Ellie, doesn’t it make your mouth water?"
"It makes me water all right," I said crudely. "But not from my mouth.”
“I thought that Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought so right up to the moment that I cut his throat.”
“You don't look strong enough to trouble nobody around here.... We grow our own troubles--it would be a novelty to have some we ain't already used to.”
“you find magic wherever you look. sit back and relax. all you need is a book”
“And Harry saw very clearly as he sat there under the hot sun how people who cared about him had stood in front of him one by one, his mother, his father, his godfather, and finally Dumbledore, all determined to protect him; but now that was over. He could not let anybody else stand between him and Voldemort; he must abandon forever the illusion he ought to have lost at the age of one, that the shelter of a parent’s arms meant that nothing could hurt him. There was no waking from this nightmare, no comforting whisper in the dark that he was safe really, that it was all in his imagination; the last and greatest of his protectors had died, and he was more alone than he had ever been.”
“The girl is infectious human waste, and she's confused and afraid to commit to the wrong thing and so she won't commit to anything.”
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