Judith Merkle Riley · 609 pages
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“I could feel something cold stalking my heart. It was fear. They all begin this way, I thought, with pledges of love.”
― Judith Merkle Riley, quote from La Jeune Fille aux Oracles
“When faced with the illogical, one must expand the sphere of logic to include rules of logic for that which is not logic. This is the only possibility in a world that works according to the rules of rationality.”
― Judith Merkle Riley, quote from La Jeune Fille aux Oracles
“Oaths, in my opinion, infernal or not, ought to be short.”
― Judith Merkle Riley, quote from La Jeune Fille aux Oracles
“After all, he meant well. Foreigners never seem to understand how little attraction an island of damp fogs, cut off from civilization, and a provincial little court has for us Parisians, who inhabit the most cultivated, powerful monarchy in the world.”
― Judith Merkle Riley, quote from La Jeune Fille aux Oracles
“Daughter, your presence is a stay and consolation to me. Begin again in the Tenth Book; tell me, how does Aristotle define true happiness?” “Father, he tells us that true happiness is found in contemplation, whereas the common idea of happiness as pleasant amusements is fostered by the courts of tyrants.”
― Judith Merkle Riley, quote from La Jeune Fille aux Oracles
“Why the Romans, Father?” I asked him one afternoon. “Because, my child, they teach us how to bear suffering in a world of injustice where all faith is dead,” he answered.”
― Judith Merkle Riley, quote from La Jeune Fille aux Oracles
“Are you aware of the penalties reserved for freethinkers? I could send you to the block. Good.”
― Judith Merkle Riley, quote from La Jeune Fille aux Oracles
“I mistrust mountebanks—especially of the female variety.”
― Judith Merkle Riley, quote from La Jeune Fille aux Oracles
“She strolled between shelves, looking at titles, smiling as she met old friends - books she had read three times or five times or a dozen. Just a title, or an author's name, would be enough to summon up happy images. Strange creatures like phoenixes and psammeads, moving under smokey London daylight of a hundred years before, in company with groups of bemused children; starships and new worlds and the limitless vistas of interstellar night, outer space challenged but never conquered; princesses in silver and golden dresses, princes and heroes carrying swords like sharpened lines of light, monsters rising out of weedy tarns, wild creatures that talked and tricked one another...”
― Diane Duane, quote from So You Want to Be a Wizard
“Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred”
― quote from The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the United States
“There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.”
― Beryl Markham, quote from West with the Night
“Instead of worrying about taking, we should worry about giving. We can’t stop the take. But we can do a hell of a lot about the give.”
― Kiera Cass, quote from The Siren
“We are all bumbling along,side by side, week in, week out, our paths similar in some ways and different in others, all apparently running parallel. But parallel lines never meet.”
― Mary Lawson, quote from Crow Lake
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