“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
“After a while Mary said, “Zsadist?”
“Yeah?”
“What are those markings?”
His frowned and flicked his eyes over to her, thinking, as if she didn’t know? But then . . . well, she had been a human. Maybe she didn’t. “They’re slave bands. I was . . . a slave.”
“Did it hurt when they were put on you?”
“Yes.”
“Did the same person who cut your face give them to you?”
“No, my owner’s hellren did that. My owner . . . she put the bands on me. He was the one who cut my face.”
“How long were you a slave?”
“A hundred years.”
“How did you get free?”
“Phury. Phury got me out. That’s how he lost his leg.”
“Were you hurt while you were a slave?”
Z swallowed hard. “Yes.”
“Do you still think about it?”
“Yes.” He looked down at his hands, which suddenly were in pain for some reason. Oh, right. He’d made two
fists and was squeezing them so tightly his fingers were about to snap off at the knuckles.
“Does slavery still happen?”
“No. Wrath outlawed it. As a mating gift to me and Bella.”
“What kind of slave were you?”
Zsadist shut his eyes. Ah, yes, the question he didn’t want to answer. For a while it was all he could do to force himself to stay in the chair. But then, in a falsely level voice, he said,
“I was a blood slave. I was used by a female for blood.”
The quiet after he spoke bore down on him, a tangible weight.
“Zsadist? Can I put my hand on your back?”
His head did something that was evidently a nod, because Mary’s gentle palm came down lightly on his
shoulder blade. She moved it in a slow, easy circle.
“Those are the right answers,” she said. “All of them.”
He had to blink fast as the fire in the furnace’s window became blurry. “You think?” he said hoarsely.
“No. I know.”
― J.R. Ward, quote from Father Mine
“My house seems remarkably full of people," he observed. "Is it possible we were expected.”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from These Old Shades
“But of course he had never done more than hug Toby and kiss him on the cheek; he had twice had a peep at his penis at a college urinal. Here, in a tiny flat in unknown Willesden, he was talking to the mother of the man who called him not only a ‘damn good fuck’ but also a ‘hot little cocksucker’ with ‘a first-class degree in arse-licking’. Which clearly was way beyond hugging and peeping. Nick gazed at her in a trance of revelation and gratitude. And”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty
“Well I ain't Dr. Phil, but I'm smart," she said.
"And your shoes are cuter than his," I said, trying to sound at least semi-normal.
"Yeah they remind me of Dorothy's ruby slippers, only mine are wedges 'cause I'm more fashion conscious than she was.”
― P.C. Cast, quote from Hidden
“She would tuck Sam into her heart, a bright light for her to take out whenever things were darkest.
And then she would remember how it had felt to be loved, when the world held nothing but possibility. No matter what they did to her, they could never take that away.
She would not break.
And someday ... someday, even it took her until her last breath, she'd find out who had done this to her. To Sam.”
― Sarah J. Maas, quote from The Assassin and the Empire
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