“Alone. She realized how much she had missed the luxury of solitude, and knew that its occasional comfort would always be essential to her. The pleasure of being on one's own was not so much spiritual as sensuous, like wearing silk, or swimming without a bathing suit, or walking along a totally empty beach with the sun on your back. One was restored by solitude. Refreshed.”
― Rosamunde Pilcher, quote from Coming Home
“Other people's houses were always fascinating. As soon as you went through the door for the first time, you got the feel of the atmosphere, and so discovered something about the personalities of the people who lived there.”
― Rosamunde Pilcher, quote from Coming Home
“She yawned and stretched, and settled back again on her pillows and thought how perfect it would be if sleep could not only restore one but iron out all anxieties in the same process, so that one could wake with a totally clear and untroubled mind, as smooth and empty as a beach, washed and ironed by the outgoing tide.”
― Rosamunde Pilcher, quote from Coming Home
“Being financially secure is truly a life-enhancer; it sweetly oils the wheels of life. But remember: to talk of money, the excess of it or the lack of it, is vulgar to the extreme. One either boasts or whines, and neither makes for good conversation.”
― Rosamunde Pilcher, quote from Coming Home
“She supposed she missed him, but it was not easy to go on missing a person when life had been lived without him for so long, with the only contact his monthly letters, which were three weeks old when they arrived, and not very inspiring even then.”
― Rosamunde Pilcher, quote from Coming Home
“clangour of bells, no distant tinkle”
― Rosamunde Pilcher, quote from Coming Home
“Just remember that the most important thing is to be truthful to yourself. If you hang on to that, you won’t go far wrong.”
― Rosamunde Pilcher, quote from Coming Home
“She always answered the questions in a vague fashion, partly because she didn’t want to discuss the matter, and partly because she didn’t know exactly how she did feel. Only that she had known, always, that life would be like this, because this was how it was for every British India family, and the children absorbed and accepted the fact that, from an early age, long separations and partings would, eventually, be inevitable.”
― Rosamunde Pilcher, quote from Coming Home
“If the Light and the Dark were so absolute, why couldn’t they give her absolute answers? Why did everything have to be so confused?”
― Michelle Sagara West, quote from Into the Dark Lands
“parasites make up the majority of species on Earth. According to one estimate, parasites may outnumber free-living species four to one. In other words, the study of life is, for the most part, parasitology. The book in your”
― Carl Zimmer, quote from Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures
“The fundamental metaphor of National Socialism as it related to the world around it was the garden, not the wild forest. One of the most important Nazi ideologists, R.W. Darré, made clear the relationship between gardening and genocide: “He who leaves the plants in a garden to themselves will soon find to his surprise that the garden is overgrown by weeds and that even the basic character of the plants has changed. If therefore the garden is to remain the breeding ground for the plants, if, in other words, it is to lift itself above the harsh rule of natural forces, then the forming will of a gardener is necessary, a gardener who, by providing suitable conditions for growing, or by keeping harmful influences away, or by both together, carefully tends what needs tending and ruthlessly eliminates the weeds which would deprive the better plants of nutrition, air, light, and sun. . . . Thus we are facing the realization that questions of breeding are not trivial for political thought, but that they have to be at the center of all considerations, and that their answers must follow from the spiritual, from the ideological attitude of a people. We must even assert that a people can only reach spiritual and moral equilibrium if a well-conceived breeding plan stands at the very center of its culture.”
― Derrick Jensen, quote from The Culture of Make Believe
“Our memories are in part reconstructions. Whenever we retrieve a memory, the brain rewrites it a bit, updating the past according to our present concerns and understanding. At the cellular level, LeDoux explains, retrieving a memory means it will be “reconsolidated,” slightly altered chemically by a new protein synthesis that will help store it anew after being updated.40 Thus each time we bring a memory to mind, we adjust its very chemistry: the next time we retrieve it, that memory will come up as we last modified it. The specifics of the new consolidation depend on what we learn as we recall it. If we merely have a flare-up of the same fear, we deepen our fearfulness. But the high road can bring reason to the low. If at the time of the fear we tell ourselves something that eases its grip, then the same memory becomes reencoded with less power over us. Gradually, we can bring the once-feared memory to mind without feeling the rush of distress all over again. In such a case, says LeDoux, the cells in our amygdala reprogram so that we lose the original fear conditioning.41 One goal of therapy, then, can be seen as gradually altering the neurons for learned fear.”
― Daniel Goleman, quote from Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships
“A young man with an untrimmed beard and rebellious eyes looked like a conscientious objector to everything.”
― Ross Macdonald, quote from The Chill
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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