“You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride.”
“Three months ago, if you asked me, I would have told you that if you really loved someone, you’d let them go. But now I look at you, and I dreamed about Maggie, and I see that I’ve been wrong. If you really love someone, Allie, I think you have to take them back.”
“This was something she would keep hidden within herself, maybe in place of the knot of pain and anger she had been carrying under her breastbone...a security blanket, an ace up her sleeve. She might never use it, but she would always feel its presence like a swelling secret stone, and that way when she let go of the rage, she would not feel nearly as empty.”
“Traveling is all very well and good as long as you knew there is a place or person you can call home”
“If you loved someone, really loved them, would you let them go?”
“I once heard someone on a bus say that this guy had gotten under her skin. And it struck me as a remarkable thought - that someone would affect you so deeply they'd always be a part of you.”
“If God wanted us to act on instinct, we wouldn't have the power of reason.”
“There's a lot of things you can't see if you aren't' looking.”
“There are some weapons you can't protect yourself against.”
“The way i see it, love is just a bigger, stickier form of trust.”
“How foolish it is to run away with a man who's already run away with someone else...”
“I'd like to say that this time I'd kill myself too..but I've never had that kind of courage.”
“You have everything," she said slowly, as if she were explaining the order of the world to a small child. "A family, a great job, a lot of people who look up to you. You've got a place to go home to." She smiled a little. "So go.”
“Why is it that only in the very beginnings of a relationship are you aware of the heat coming from inside a person, of the number of inches you would have to move for your shoulders to brush as if it were an accident?”
“He thought of the grammar of Gaelic, in which you did not say you were in love withsomeone, but that you “had love toward” her, as if itwere a physical thing you could present and hold—a bundle of tulips, a golden ring, a parcel of tenderness.”
“The first person you fell in love with stole your heart. The first person you made love with stole your soul. And if these were one and the same, you were damned.”
“When she had packed all the artifacts that made up their personal history into liquor store boxes, the house became strictly a feminine place. She stood with her hands on her hips, stoically accepting the absence of old Boston Celtics coasters and the tangle of fishing poles, the old dartboard from a Scots pub, the toolbox and downhill skis, the silky patterned ties which sat in the base of one box like a writing mass of snakes. Without these things, one tended to notice the bright eyelet curtains, the vase filled with yawning crocuses, a needlepoint pillow ... Overall, the house looked much like her apartment had eight years ago, before she had met him.”
“She knew how you went about falling in love; she did not know how you went about falling into trust.”
“Nothing emboldens sin so much as mercy”
“He was suffering from wanderlust, complicated by the tension of knowing that he was rooted to this town by something as simple as his name.”
“You can't buy a clean conscience.”
“Then you're the one."
Allie blinked at him. "The one what?"
"The one who loves more." ... "You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone always puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride.”
“What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise? —William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”
“It was tough to admit to yourself that someone else had more courage than you would in the same situation, or that it was possible to love someone in a way that you had not personally experienced.”
“Virtual reality is the willing suspension of disbelief,”
“town. In the back of his”
“Did you ever look down at yourself and realise that finally you had it all? Did you ever feel that everything was so right in your life you'd have nowhere to go but downhill?”
“A lie of omission was much simpler than admitting to yourself you were going against the wishes of the person you idolised.”
“—Los van a meter presos por escandalosos y pornográficos —estaba feliz y, abrazándonos a los dos, nos anunció—: La flaca Nancy me ha aceptado una invitación a los toros y hay que celebrarlo.”
“Everything one has a right to do is not best to be done.” This in essence was to be the Burke thesis: that principle does not have to be demonstrated when the demonstration is inexpedient.”
“I can kill with a single word. I can hurl a ball of fire into the midst of my enemies. I rule a squadron of skeletal warriors, who can destroy by touch alone. I can raise a wall of ice to protect those I serve. The invisible is discernible to my eyes. Ordinary magic spells crumble in my presence... But I bow in the presence of a master.
-- Lord Soth to Raistlin Majere”
“It was not necessarily what Ketchum might have said about the war in Iraq, or the never-ending mess in the Middle East, that particularly interested Danny or Six-Pack Pam. It was what Ketchum would have said about anything. It was the old logger's voice that Danny and Six-Pack wanted to hear.
Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them”
“The question I hoped to answer,was how much mechanics Aristotle had known, how much he had left for people such as Galileo and Newton to discover. Given that formulation, I rapidly discovered that Aristotle had known almost no mechanics at all... that conclusion was standard and it might in principle have been right. But I found it bothersome because, as I was reading him, Aristotle appeared not only ignorant of mechanics, but a dreadfully bad physical scientist as well. About motion, in particular, his writings seemed to me full of egregious errors, both of logic and of observation.”
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