“I love you. I worry about you. I wonder whether I tell you enough how I love you and want you and need you and how I am diminished . . . when you are not with me and how I am multiplied when you are here.”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“If Man retained faith in God, he might also retain faith in Man.”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“ 'Legs are for men's pleasure, breasts are for babies'.' " - Lib McGovern”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“ 'I think you ought to go to New York or Chicago or San Francisco or any city with character and vitality. You should go to work. This place is no good for you, Randy. The air is like soup and the people are like noodles. You're vegetating. I don't want a vegetable. I want a man.' " - Lib McGovern”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“It was a surprise, and a delight, to see children devour books. Without ever knowing it, they were receiving an education.”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“Out of death, life; an immutable truth”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“The white flashed back into a red ball in the southeast. They all knew what it was. It was Orlando, or McCoy Base, or both. It was the power supply for Timucuan County.
Thus the lights went out, and in that moment civilization in Fort Repose retreated a hundred years.
So ended The Day.”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“It was strange, she thought, pedaling steadily, that it should require a holocaust to make her own life worth living.”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“A man who has been shaken by a two-ton blockbuster has a frame of reference. He can equate the impact of an H-bomb with his own experience, even though the H-bomb blast is a million times more powerful than the shock he endured. To someone who has never felt a bomb, bomb is only a word. An H-bomb's fireball is something you see on television. It is not something that incinerates you to a cinder in the thousandth part of a second. So the H-bomb is beyond the imagination of all but a few Americans, while the British, Germans, and Japanese can comprehend it, if vaguely. And only the Japanese have personal understanding of atomic heat and radiation.”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“Randy knew he wasn't an alcoholic because an alcoholic craved liquor. He never craved it. He just drank for pleasure and the most pleasurable of all drinks was the first one on a crisp winter morning. Besides, when you took it with coffee that made it part of breakfast, and therefore not so depraved.”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“I don’t want money. What the hell’s money good for? You can’t drive it and you can’t eat it and it won’t even fix a flat.”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“[He was disgusted] at the beasts who in callous cruelty had dragged down and maimed and destroyed the human dignity of this selfless man. Yet it was nothing new. It had been like this at some point in every civilization and on every continent. There were human jackals for every human disaster.”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“Small nations, when treated as equals, become the firmest of allies.” It”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“With the use of the hydrogen bomb, the Christian era was dead, and with it must die the tradition of the Good Samaritan. And yet Randy stopped...The incident was important only because it was self-revelatory. Randy knew he would have to play by the old rules. He could not shuck his code, or sneak out of his era.”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“He was tough as an antique ivory figurine, which has withstood the viscissitudes of centuries and can accept more.”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“There’s an old saying that anyone can make colonel on his own, but it takes a wife to make a general.”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“Now at this hour, when the cirrus clouds stretched like crimson ribbons high across the southwest sky, in such a hush that not even a playful eddy dared stir moss or palm fronds, the day died in calm and in beauty.”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“Whatever it is out there, is better equipped than you are. It can see better and hear better and smell better. All you’re got on it is brains. Your only chance of getting it is”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“If Man retained faith in God, he might also retain faith in Man. He remembered words which for four months he had not heard, read, or uttered, the most beautiful words in the language - faith and hope.”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“Our whole raison d’être was deterrent force. When you don’t deter them any longer, you lose.”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“But he is dying faster than he should. The better a man is at business, the worse in retirement.”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“You know how it is. When you’ve never been some place, you want to go.” Randy”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“He had a feel for it, the capacity to stir a headful of unrelated facts until they congealed into a pattern arrowing the future. Dutch”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“He knew he should not have spared time for tears, and would not, ever again.”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“none of this talk. A week or so later, thinking about Mark’s words, Randy had decided to go into”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“Randy felt relieved. He looked out over the river, contemplating his ignorance of women and the peace of evening.”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“Since The Day, he had lived in the imperative present, not daring to plan beyond the next meal or the next day. This bit of paper tacked on peeling white paint abruptly enlarged his perspective, as if, stumbling through a black tunnel, he saw, or thought he saw, a chink of light. If Man retained faith in God, he might also retain faith in Man.”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“When you examined the facts judicially, and asked which would provide the greatest good for the greatest number, there could be only one answer.”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“There is a new crisis in the Middle East. A report from Beirut, via Cairo, says that Syrian tanks of the most modern Russian design have crossed the Jordanian frontier. This is undoubtedly a threat to Israel. At the same time Damascus charges that Turkish troops are mobilizing….” Florence”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
“noticed that it was a clear and beautiful spring day, a better day than yesterday. The spores of kindness, as well as faith, survived in this acid soil. Randy”
― Pat Frank, quote from Alas, Babylon
Pat Frank
Born place: in Chicago, Illinois, The United States
Born date May 5, 1908
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“Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, halfway down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waves swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from To the Lighthouse
“And what thoughts or memories, would you guess, were passing through my mind on this extraordinary occasion? Was I thinking of the Sibyl's prophecy, of the omen of the wolf-cub, of Pollio's advice, or of Briseis's dream? Of my grandfather and liberty? Of my grandfather and liberty? Of my three Imperial predecessors, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, their lives and deaths? Of the great danger I was still in from the conspirators, and from the Senate, and from the Gaurds battalions at the Camp? Of Messalina and our unborn child? Of my grandmother Livia and my promise to deify her if I ever became Emperor? Of Postumus and Germanicus? Of Agrippina and Nero? Of Camilla? No, you would never guess what was passing through my mind. But I shall be frank and tell you what it was, though the confession is a shameful one. I was thinking, 'So, I'm Emperor, am I? What nonsense! But at least I'll be able to make people read my books now. Public recitals to large audiences. And good books too, thirty-five years' hard work in them. It wont be unfair. Pollio used to get attentive audiences by giving expensive dinners. He was a very sound historian, and the last of the Romans. My history of Carthage is full of amusing anecdotes. I'm sure that they'll enjoy it.”
― Robert Graves, quote from I, Claudius
“Of course he despised the world as a whole; every thoughtful man should; it is almost a test of refinement.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from A Room with a View
“Allow me to give my lord one last piece of counsel," the old man had said, "the same counsel I once gave my brother when we parted for the last time. He was three-and-thirty when the Great Council chose him to mount the Iron Throne. A man grown with sons of his own, yet in some ways still a boy. Egg had an innocence to him, a sweetness we all loved. Kill the boy within you, I told him the day I took ship for the Wall. It takes a man to rule. An Aegon, not an Egg. Kill the boy and let the man be born." The old man felt Jon's face. "You are half the age that Egg was, and your own burden is crueler one, I fear. You will have little joy of your command, but I think you have the strength in you to do the things that must be done. Kill the boy, Jon Snow. Winter is almost upon us. Kill the boy and let the man be born.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons
“Instead, pursue the things you love doing, and then do them so well that people can't take their eyes off you.”
― Maya Angelou, quote from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
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