“I thank God daily for the good fortune of my birth, for I am certain I would have made a miserable peasant.”
“Clairvoyant, Hornblower could foresee that in a year's time, the world would hardy remember the incident. In twenty years, it would be entirely forgotten. Yet those headless corpses up there in Muzillac; those shattered redcoats; those Frenchmen caught in the four-pounder's blast of canister -- they were as dead as if it had been a day in which history had been changed.”
“His self-respect was at its lowest ebb.”
“Harm began to come to Hornblower from that day forth, despite his obedience to orders and diligent study of his duties, and it stemmed from the arrival in the midshipmen’s berth of John Simpson as senior warrant officer.”
“July 4th, 1776,” mused Keene, reading Hornblower’s date of birth to himself.”
“This is how people behave when their dailiness is destroyed, when for a few moments they see, plain and unadorned, one of the great shaping forces of life. Calamity fixes them with her mesmeric eye, and they begin to scoop and paw at the rubble of their days, trying to pluck the memory of the quotidian - a toy, a book, a garment, even a photograph - from the garbage heaps of the irretrievable, of their overwhelming loss.”
“The idea of popular art, like that of a patriotic art, if not actually dangerous seemed to me ridiculous. If the intention was to make art accessible to the people by sacrificing refinements of form, on the ground that they are "all right for the idle rich" but not for anybody else, I had seen enough of fashionable society to know that it is there that one finds real illiteracy and not, let us say, among electricians.”
“Sie würden ihm helfen, ihn heilen. Arzneien und Ärzte. Eine Änderung der Einstellung.
Dann Frieden.
Seine Streitsüchtigkeit würde wie Unkraut aus ihm herausgejätet werden.”
“...what is written on paper affects history. But not life. Life is a different history.”
“Okay," I began. "You’re too old for me. You’re scary. It’s creepy that you were so all over my mom and now you’re all over me.”
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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