Quotes from Fancies and Goodnights

John Collier ·  418 pages

Rating: (711 votes)


“Just behind his jaw bones a tiny movement was perceptible, like the movement of gills in a fish.”
― John Collier, quote from Fancies and Goodnights


“How happy I might be, if only she was less greedy, better tempered, not addicted to raking up old grudges, more affectionate, with slightly yellower hair, slimmer, and about twenty years younger! But what is the good of expecting such a woman to reform?”
― John Collier, quote from Fancies and Goodnights


“Their laughter was like the stridulation of the ghosts of grasshoppers.”
― John Collier, quote from Fancies and Goodnights


“Franklin Fletcher dreamed of luxury in the form of tiger-skins and beautiful women. He was prepared, at a pinch, to forgo the tiger-skins. Unfortunately the beautiful women seemed equally rare and inaccessible. At his office and at his boarding-house the girls were mere mice, or cattish, or kittenish, or had insufficiently read the advertisements.”
― John Collier, quote from Fancies and Goodnights


About the author

John Collier
Born place: in London, The United Kingdom
Born date May 3, 1901
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“I’ll give you this, Spartan. You sure can kiss. Feel free to lay one on me anytime you want to."
“Well, I do aim to please,” he drawled. “You should see what I can do with my hands. And other parts of my body.”
I rolled my eyes. “Seriously? You’ve been cut open like a fish, there’s a psycho-killer Reaper after us, and you’re still hitting me up for sex?”
Logan shrugged, but the devilish light didn’t fade from his gaze. “Hey, you can’t blame a guy for trying.”
― Jennifer Estep, quote from Kiss of Frost


“They will be judged, by the police and by everybody else. Serves them right, leaving their baby alone. She would think that, too, if it had happened to someone else. She knows how judgmental mothers are, how good it feels to sit in judgment of someone else.”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door


“It is in this sense that Nietzsche is driven, against many explicit resolutions to the contrary, to be a No-sayer. For what the décadents who surround him are doing is to say No where they should be saying Yes, where they should be Dionysian; and what is leading them to this life-denying perversity, mostly of course unconsciously, is that they subscribe to a set of values that puts the central features of *this* world at a discount. Where they find suffering, they immediately look for someone to blame, and end up hating themselves, or generalize that into a hatred of "human nature". They look for "peace of mind", using it as a blanket term and failing to see the diversity of states, some of them desirable and some of them the reverse, which that term covers. They confuse cause and effect, thinking that the connection between virtue and happiness is that the former leads to the latter, whereas in fact the reverse is the case. They have, in Nietzsche's cruelly accurate phrase, "the vulgar ambition to possess generous feelings" ("Expeditions of an Untimely Man, number 6). They confuse breeding fine men with taming them. Throughout the major part of Twilight this devastating list of our vulgarities continues.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ


“That's not the way he told it, Tarwater said. He said that when the schoolteacher was seven years old, he had good sense but later it dried up. His daddy was an ass and not fit to raise him and his mother was a whore. She ran away from here when she was eighteen years old.

It took her that long? the stranger said in an incredulous tone. My, she was kind of a ass herself.”
― Flannery O'Connor, quote from The Violent Bear It Away


“When he caught his breath, he regarded her with glowing, half-closed eyes. "If I'm very, very good, shei'tani, will you do that again when we're alone?”
― C.L. Wilson, quote from Lady of Light and Shadows


Interesting books

Red Riding Hood
(17.1K)
Red Riding Hood
by Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
The History Boys
(7K)
The History Boys
by Alan Bennett
Checkmate
(11.4K)
Checkmate
by Malorie Blackman
The Counterfeiters
(6.2K)
The Counterfeiters
by André Gide
A Density of Souls
(7.7K)
A Density of Souls
by Christopher Rice
England's Perfect Hero
(5.7K)
England's Perfect He...
by Suzanne Enoch

About BookQuoters

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.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.