“I found my mind wandering at games; loved boxing and was good at it; and in summer, having chosen rowing instead of cricket, lay peacefully by the Stour, well upstream of the rhythmic creaking and the exhortation, reading Lily Christine and Gibbon and gossiping with kindred lotus-eaters under the willow-branches.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, quote from A Time of Gifts
“At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, quote from A Time of Gifts
“[Poetry] is a field where England can take on all challengers.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, quote from A Time of Gifts
“Often, half in a bay of the mountains and half on a headland, a small and nearly amphibian Schloss mouldered in the failing light among the geese and the elder-bushes and the apple trees. Dank walls rose between towers that were topped with cones of moulting shingle. Weeds throve in every cranny. Moss mottled the walls. Fissures branched like forked lightning across damp masonry which the rusting iron clamps tried to hold together, and buttresses of brick shored up the perilously leaning walls. The mountains, delaying sunrise and hastening dusk, must have halved again the short winter days. Those buildings looked too forlorn for habitation. But, in tiny, creeper-smothered windows, a faint light would show at dusk. Who lived in those stone-flagged rooms where the sun never came? Immured in those six-foot-thick walls, overgrown outside with the conquering ivy and within by genealogical trees all moulting with mildew? My thoughts flew at once to solitary figures…a windowed descendant of a lady-in-waiting at the court of Charlemagne, alone with the Sacred Heart and her beads, or a family of wax-pale barons, recklessly inbred; bachelors with walrus moustaches, bent double with rheumatism, shuddering from room to room and coughing among their lurchers, while their cleft palates called to each other down corridors that were all but pitch dark.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, quote from A Time of Gifts
“I fell asleep among the beer mugs and when I woke, I couldn’t think where I was.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, quote from A Time of Gifts
“The notion that I had walked twelve hundred miles since Rotterdam filled me with a legitimate feeling of something achieved. But why should the thought that nobody knew where I was, as though I were in flight from bloodhounds or from worshipping corybants bent on dismemberment, generate such a feeling of triumph? It always did.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, quote from A Time of Gifts
“My mother was filled with apprehension to begin with; we pored over the atlas, and, bit by bit as we pored, the comic possibilities began to unfold in absurd imaginary scenes until we were falling about with laughter; and by the time I caught the train to London next morning, she was infected with my excitement.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, quote from A Time of Gifts
“I found it impossible to tear myself away from my station and plunge into Hungary. I feel the same disability now; a momentary reluctance to lay hands on this particular fragment of the future; not out of fear, but because, within arm's reach and still intact, this future seemed, and still seems, so full of promised marvels.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, quote from A Time of Gifts
Patrick Leigh Fermor
Born place: in London, The United Kingdom
Born date February 11, 1915
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“The horrors of the Inquisition are nothing compared to the fates your mind can imagine for your loved ones.”
― Stephen King, quote from The Mist
“Say something Becks. Say anything"
"You," I said. "I remember you." I kept my eyes shut, and felt his hands drop. He didn't move back.
"What do you remember about me?" There was strong emotion behind his voice. Something he fought to control.
With my eyes closed, I could easily picture the other side of the century.
"I remember the way your hand could cover my entire shoulder. The way your lower lip stuck out when you were working out a problem in your head. And how you flick your ring finger with your thumb when you get impatient."
I opened my eyes, and the words no longer got stuck in my throat on their way out. They flowed. "And when something surprises you and you don't know what to say, you get a tiny wrinkle in between your eyebrows." I reached up to touch the divot, then hesitated and lowered my hand. "It showed on the day the coach told you you'd made first-string quarterback. And it's showing now."
For a moment the space between us held no tension, no questions, no accusations.
Finally he leaned back, a stunned expression on his face. "Where do we go from here?"
"Nowhere, really," I whispered. "It doesn't change anything."
Eyebrows still drawn together, he said, "We'll see." Then he turned and left.
I tucked this moment away.
In the dark, dank world of the Tunnels, I would call upon this memory. And there would be a flicker of candlelight. If only for a moment.”
― Brodi Ashton, quote from Everneath
“The Americans take a product that literally grows on trees and turn it into a valuable commodity. Without
them, cocaine and marijuana would be like oranges, and instead of making billions smuggling it, I’d be making pennies doing stoop labor in some California field, picking it.”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Power of the Dog
“Never only exists in you head. Anything is possible ..”
― Yvonne Woon, quote from Dead Beautiful
“Ive chosen my path - and right or wrong, it's the one I tread.”
― Joseph Delaney, quote from Curse of the Bane
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