“When I was young, I asked my priest how to get to heaven and still protect yourself from all the evil in the world. He told me what God told His children;'You are sheep among wolves, be wise as the serpent, yet innocent as doves.”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Gone, Baby, Gone
“You are sheep among wolves. Be wise as serpents, yet innocent as doves.”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Gone, Baby, Gone
“Those who did remember probably shrugged off the chill of her memory, turned their heads down to the sports page or up toward the approaching bus. The world is a terrible place, they thought. Bad things happen every day. My bus is late.”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Gone, Baby, Gone
“Choice, I've always believed, is all that separates us from animals.”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Gone, Baby, Gone
“Love like that? Hell, it seems so pure, it's damn near criminal.”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Gone, Baby, Gone
“When a child disappears, the space she’d occupied is immediately filled with dozens of people. And these people—relatives, friends, police officers, reporters from both TV and print—create a lot of energy and noise, a sense of communal intensity, of fierce and shared dedication to a task.
“But amid all that noise, nothing is louder than the silence of the missing child. It’s a silence that’s two and a half to three feet tall, and you feel it at your hip and hear it rising up from the floorboards, shouting to you from corners and crevices and the emotionless face of a doll left on the floor by the bed.
“It’s a silence that’s different from the one left at funerals and wakes. The silence of the dead carries with it a sense of finality; it’s a silence you know you must get used to. But the silence of a missing child is not something you want to get used to; you refuse to accept it, and so it screams at you.
“The silence of the dead says, Goodbye.
“The silence of the missing says, Find me.”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Gone, Baby, Gone
“As far as I could see, she didn't take any better care of her apparel than I did mine, but I owned shirts that looked like they'd been run through a car engine half an hour after I removed the price tags, and she had socks from high school that were still as white as palace linen. Women and their clothes often astounded me this way, but I figured it was one of those mysteries I'd never solve - like what really happened to Amelia Earhart or the bell that used to occupy our office.”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Gone, Baby, Gone
“and two men standing up top, weeping like children because they’d somehow never known the world could get this bad.”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Gone, Baby, Gone
“This is America . . . where every adult shall have the full and inalienable right to eat her young”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Gone, Baby, Gone
“Each day in this country, twenty-three hundred children are reported missing.”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Gone, Baby, Gone
“Without me, that girl will be gone. Gone-gone. You understand? Gone, baby, gone,' he sang.”
― Dennis Lehane, quote from Gone, Baby, Gone
“I'm starting to understand that fear is like cancer - you can beat it back, but if it returns, it can be worse than ever.”
― Darren Shan, quote from Slawter
“One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.”
― Bertrand Russell, quote from Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
“the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal,”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Call of Cthulhu
“When class started, I stood in the front of the room and shouted “Good morning, everyone!” like a born-again cheerleader on too much Red Bull. The students gave me curious looks. I was starting to scare myself, so I tried to dial it back. You”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Six Years
“Margery," I blurted out in a passion of frustration. "I don't know what to make of you!"
Nor I you, Mary. Frankly, I cannot begin to comprehend the motives of a person who dedicates a large portion of her life to the contemplation of a God in whom she only marginally believes."
I felt stunned, as if she had struck me in the diaphragm. She looked down at me, trying to measure the effect of her words.
Mary, you believe in the power that the idea of God has on the human mind. You believe in the way human beings talk about the unknowable, reach for the unattainable, pattern their imperfect lives and offer their paltry best up to the beingless being that created the universe and powers its continuation. What you balk as it believing the evidence of your eyes, that God can reach out and touch a single human life in a concrete way." She smiled a sad, sad smile. "You mustn't be so cold, Mary. If you are, all you will see is a cold God, cold friends, cold love. God is not cold-never cold. God sears with heat, not ice, the heat of a thousand suns, heat that inflames but does not consume. You need warmth, Mary-you, Mary, need it. You fear it, you flirt with it, you imagine that you can stand in its rays and retain your cold intellectual attitude towards it. You imagine that you can love with your brain. Mary, oh my dear Mary, you sit in the hall and listen to me like some wild beast staring at a campfire, unable to leave, fearful of losing your freedom if you come any closer. It won't consume you; I won't capture you. Love does not do either. It only brings life. Please, Mary, don't let yourself be tied up by the bonds of cold academia."
Her words, the power of her conviction, broke over me like a great wave, inundating me, robbing me of breath, and, as they receded in the room, they pulled hard at me to folllow. I struggled to keep my footing against the wash of Margery's vision, and only when it began to lose its strength, dissipated against the silence in the room, was I seized by a sudden terror at the nearness of my escape.”
― Laurie R. King, quote from A Monstrous Regiment of Women
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