Obert Skye · 407 pages
Rating: (13.5K votes)
“Desperate times call for desperate measures. That's a saying, or a bit of advice, or a catchprase, or a string of words used to confuse people less intelligent than you. In any case, it means: Life is tough, so you'd better fight hard-or something like that.”
― Obert Skye, quote from Leven Thumps and the Whispered Secret
“Terry was beside himself. Not literally. This story would be that much more painful if there were two Terrys, able to stand next to each other and simultaneously curse Leven.”
― Obert Skye, quote from Leven Thumps and the Whispered Secret
“What's that darkness over there?" Leven asked.
"It's not good." Clover said.
"Then what is it?"
'Bad," Clover suggested, sounding as though he wasn't all that impressed with Leven's level of knowledge.
"I understand opposites," Leven said, frustrated.”
― Obert Skye, quote from Leven Thumps and the Whispered Secret
“Then, there are the places you would rather not go-a tax collectors' convention, a sewage treatment plant, or maybe the home of someone who keeps spiders as pets and insists on taking them out of their cages and making you hold them.”
― Obert Skye, quote from Leven Thumps and the Whispered Secret
“Men think about right and wrong, they have to debate it, discuss it, draw upon possibilities and statistics, laws and codes. Wolves have to know. They have to know in an instant, pure instinct, not thought, because they can never be wrong. If they're wrong, the ice they walk upon cracks, their lungs filled with cold water and crystals. If they're wrong, their brothers and sisters starve and their pups are shot as they run. If they're wrong, the rabid wolf comes back, and he always comes back, only this time they're sleeping, and they can't even put up a fight as he splits them apart.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Second Nature
“But this is how it is done: first just one ordinary barn, brightly whitewashed—and here they proceed to asphyxiate people. Later, four large buildings, accommodating twenty thousand at a time without any trouble. No hocus-pocus, no poison, no hypnosis. Only several men directing traffic to keep operations running smoothly, and the thousands flow along like water from an open tap. All this happens just beyond the anaemic trees of the dusty little wood. Ordinary trucks bring people, return, then bring some more. No hocus-pocus, no poison, no hypnosis.
Why is it that nobody cries out, nobody spits in their faces, nobody jumps at their throats? We doff our caps to the S.S. men returning from the little wood; if our name is called we obediently go with them to die, and—we do nothing. We starve, we are drenched by rain, we are torn from our families. What is this mystery? This strange power of one man over another? This insane passivity that cannot be overcome? Our only strength is our great number—the gas chambers cannot accommodate all of us.”
― Tadeusz Borowski, quote from This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
“But a sweater? I mean,that is so unromantic.It is the kind of thing I would get my dad — if he wasn't so in need of anger-management manuals,which is what I got for him for Christmas.”
― Meg Cabot, quote from Princess in Waiting
“Society can give its young men almost any job and they'll figure how to do it. They'll suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for it, but in the end, it will get done. That only means that society should be careful about what it asks for. ... Soldiers themselves are reluctant to evaluate the costs of war, but someone must. That evaluation, ongoing and unadulterated by politics, may be the one thing a country absolutely owes the soldiers who defend its borders.”
― Sebastian Junger, quote from War
“Shh,” Cobweb said with a well-time jab of the elbow, “we might be able to get some dignity out of this, if we play our cards right.”
― Lisa Mantchev, quote from So Silver Bright
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