“Her majesty is one verb short of a sentence.”
“I would so hate to be a first-person character! Always on your guard, always having people read your thoughts!”
“Growth purely for its own sake is the philosophy of cancer.”
“I'll tell you what love is" I said, "It is blind devotion, unquestioning self humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your heart and soul to the smiter.”
“You'll like it here; everyone is quite mad.”
“…Tell me, has anything odd happened to you recently?
What do you mean, odd?'
Unusual. Deviating from the customary. Something outside the usual parameters of normalcy. An occurrence of unprecedented weird.”
“How fishy on the fishiness scale? Ten is a stickleback and one is a whale shark."
"A whale isn't a fish, Thursday."
"A whale shark is--sort of."
"All right, it's as fishy as a crayfish."
"A crayfish isn't a fish."
"A starfish, then."
"Still not a fish."
"This is a very odd conversation, Thursday.”
“I could almost see common sense and denial fighting away at each other within her. In the end, denial won, as it so often does.”
“I was on HPD--Heathcliff Protection Duty--in Wuthering Heights for two years, and believe me, the ProCaths tried everything. I personally saved him from assassination eight times.”
“Lesson one in time travel, Thursday. First of all, we are all time travellers. The vast majority of us manage only one day per day.”
“What’s the opposite of déjà vu, when you see something that hasn’t happened yet?”
“I don’t know—avant verrais?”
“You nearly killed eight people!" I managed to gasp out loud.
"My count was closer to twelve," returned Havisham as she opened the door. "And anyhow, you can't nearly kill someone. Either they are dead or they are not.”
“Scientific thought - indeed, any mode of thought, whether it be religious or philosophical or anything else - is just like the fashions that we wear - only much longer lived. It's a little like a boy band.”
“My temper began to rise -- always a bad sign. I would probably end up doing something stupid.”
“Love is a wonderful thing, my dear, but it leaves you wide open for blackmail.”
“It wasn’t going to be hard…it was going to be impossible. It wouldn’t deter me. I'd done impossible things several times in the past, and the prospect didn’t scare me as much as it used to.”
“Marriage, like spinach and opera, was something I had never thought I would like.”
“The universe always moves from an ordered state to a disordered one; that a glass may fall to the ground and shatter yet you never see a broken glass reassemble itself and then jump back on the table.”
“I also read about Heathcliff's unexpected three-year career in Hollywood under the name Buck Stallion and his eventual return to the pages of Wuthering Heights.”
“I've got six months to sort out the hackers, get the Japanese knotweed under control and find an acceptable form of narcissus.”
“The course of true love rarely runs smooth.”
“So you're going to have to ask yourselves on simple question: Which one of us is speaking now?”
“I got mixed up with some oddness in my youth, and the long and short of it is that I can't shuffle off this mortal coil until I have read the ten most boring classics.”
“My father said it was a delightfully odd - and dangerously self-destructive - quirk of humans that we were far more interested in pointless trivia then in genuine news stories.”
“Truly competent Literary Detectives are as rare as truthful men, Mr. Tweed -- you can see her potential as clearly as I can. Frightened of someone stealing your thunder, perhaps?”
“Most of Mycroft's ideas were far too dangerous to even think about, much less let loose on a world unprepared for hyper-radical thought.”
“Mr McGregor’s a nasty piece of work, isn’t he? Quite the Darth Vader of children’s literature.”
“He said you were very dangerous."
"No more dangerous than anyone else who dares to speak the truth.”
“Are you married?
Yes, I mumbled, that is to say - no.
Come, come, said Havisham angrily. It is a simple enough question.
I was married, I answered.
Died?
No, I mumbled, that is to say - yes.
I'll try harder questions in future, announced Havisham, for you are obviously not adept at the easy ones.”
“who dwells in the past robs the present,”
“Diversity of opinions and circumstances increases the likelihood of ‘happy accidents.’ Serendipity comes from differences.”
“She won't know how to fulfill the duties of a noblewoman.'
'She is quite bright. And one could find no fault with her manners. She has received a gentle education. I am certain she will make an excellent countess.' Robert's expression softened. 'Her very nature will bring honor to our name.”
“You are not wrong," Laurence said. He had assumed as much himself, after all, in his Navy days: had thought the Corps full of wild, devil-may-care libertines, disregarding law and authority as far as they dared, barely kept in check-- to be used for their control over the beasts, and not respected.
"But if we have more liberty than we ought," Laurence said, after a moment, struggling through, "it is because they have not enough: the dragons. They have no stake in victory but our happiness; their daily bread and nation would give them just to have peace and quiet. We are given licence so long as we do what we ought not; so long as we use their affections to keep them obedient and quiet, to ends which serve them not at all-- or which harm."
"How else do you make them care?" Granby said. "If we left off, the French would only run right over us, and take our eggs themselves."
"They care in China," Laurence said, "and in Africa, and they care all the more, that their rational sense is not imposed on, and their hearts put into opposition with their minds. If they cannot be woken to a natural affection for their country, such as we feel, it is our fault, and not theirs.”
“Nothing limits intelligence more than ignorance; nothing fosters ignorance more than one’s own opinions; nothing strengthens opinions more than refusing to look at reality.”
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